A Brief Journey onto the Sea Ice in Kinngait, Nunavut

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No one can really prepare you for just how cold it’s going to be out on the sea ice. In your mind, you’re cosy and warm, piled under layers of clothes, seated on the back of a snowmobile, taking in the view. In reality, you’re warm (although you’ll soon realise not quite enough), you’re trying to keep your face guard from falling down and exposing your cheeks to the cold, while you look blindly through snow goggles (your prescription glasses tucked neatly away in your bag for when you stop), as your friend jostles about in the qamutik, bouncing over hummocks and ridges in the ice.

The Kenojuak Community Centre and Print Shop, Kinngait, March 2025. Photo: Isabelle Gapp.

In March 2025, I made my third trip to Kinngait (Cape Dorset) at the south of Qikiqtaaluk (Baffin Island), Nunavut. This was the second visit made as part of a project I lead on visualising sea ice change in the community, funded by the British Academy. Working with Sarah Cooley, a hydrologist at Duke University, and in partnership with the West Baffin Co-operative and Kenojuak Cultural Centre and Print Shop (KCC) in Kinngait, we are co-investigating the ways in which art and science converge on sea ice and offer different methods for visualising change and experience. Our approach is local and place based. How is sea ice formation and change depicted and understood by artists and carvers in Kinngait? Home to the longest-running, Indigenous-led print studio in Canada, Kinngait is uniquely suited to understanding the long history of drawing, carving, and printing scenes of sea ice. While trained as an art historian, I was out there to do fieldwork. In part, to experience and make real what I’d only seen in the pictures, but to also collaborate with artists in the community to find ways to support and understand artist relationships to the ice.

Our trip onto the ice came about during the first week of my visit. While most of my time had been spent in the print studios speaking with artists and working alongside them, me at my laptop and them poring over paper, stone blocks, or a lithography press, I had hoped to get out onto the sea ice or siku, perhaps see the floe edge or sinaaq. Joemie Tapaungai, the Assistant Studio Manager, kindly arranged a guide, Iqaluk Toonoo, with a snowmobile. With a lifetime of experience hunting and travelling on the ice, Iqaluk picked us up, me from the KCC and Myrah from the Peter Pitseolak High School. Myrah Graham, the Northern Research Liaison for the Amundsen Science, was in town at the same time to connect with members of the community and share marine science. Learning about local perceptions of the marine environment, Myrah works with Inuit communities to increase partnerships in science, and together with the artists we are co-developing future relationships for engaging with the marine/sea ice world.

With me on the back of the snowmobile, Myrah hopped in the qamutik which Iqaluk had lined with a more-than thirty-year old caribou skin. We later learned this was his first successful hunt.

Iqaluk’s qamutik near the floe edge. Photo: Isabelle Gapp.

Bumping our way through the community, we headed down to the bay, deftly navigating through the hummocky ice that had gathered in layers upon the shore. The bay is heavily affected by the tides and winds. The ice is never fully static. We headed straight to the floe edge, only a short journey from town. Where in September last year we had stood by Aupaluttu Park on the beach and watched the waves crash on shore, now we passed this same beach, covered in snow, merging (almost) seamlessly with the ice. What for us was unfamiliar terrain, as anthropologist Claudio Aporta writes, “sea ice is a connective geographic entity, which forms every year, attaching itself to the shores, remaining as a distinctive topography for several months, and allowing Inuit to travel and hunt.”1 Iqaluk navigated the icy terrain in a way that was intuitive and familiar. The ice is an extension of the land; it is all nuna.

Itee Pootoogook, Floe Edge (2009), serigraph, 38 x 106.8 cm. Dorset Fine Arts.

I had, naively, expected the floe edge to form a hard line. Ice/water. I should have known better. Lured in by the abstract lines of Itee Pootoogook’s Floe Edge (2009), in my mind the floe edge was a clean meeting point between the shorefast sea ice (sea ice that clings to the land) and the open current of the Hudson Strait. When I flew in, a few days earlier, the skies were clear and the edge of the ice formed a lattice pattern on the water. In the days since, this had transformed into a slushy and jagged space of seemingly unnavigable ice. It was warm(er) as well, Iqaluk said. In fact, many in town had spoken about how it felt like Spring. (For reference, temperatures in town were around -21C not including wind chill).

The floe edge as seen from above. Photo: Isabelle Gapp.
Polar bear tracks in the snow. Photo: Isabelle Gapp.

At the ‘almost edge’ we were greeted by polar bear tracks. Huge polar bear tracks! Of course, I have no concept of what is large or small in the case of the often-solitary bears that skulk along the shoreline and increasingly venture into the community. Iqaluk said they must be about two days old, and that the bear was likely carried onto the ice by the incoming tide which had crushed onto the floe edge turning it into that jagged, slushy mess. The tracks followed a path around the ice edge, we in turn followed the tracks.

As we moved further along the shore, stop-starting the snowmobile to take in the view (with me switching between snow goggles and prescription sunglasses to actually see the view), Iqaluk used his harpoon to get the attention of walrus that had marked our arrival by disappearing back below the water. Using a harpoon, he sloshed the ice around and mimicked the noise of the walrus. He managed to get one to reappear. We watched it rear its head, its back arching as it dove back into the water, kicking its flippers up behind it. It was hard to focus on anything else in this moment, but the way the body of the walrus moved through the water recalled a lithograph made after a drawing by Kananginak Pootoogook that had enthralled me several days earlier.

Iqaluk getting the attention of a walrus just bobbing its head above the water’s surface. Photo: Isabelle Gapp.
Kananginak Pootoogook (Printmaker: Qavavau Manumie), Walrus in Pressure Ice (1989), stonecut and stencil, 62 x 77 cm. Dorset Fine Arts.

Further along, Iqaluk stopped for a cigarette break near Nanuqtuq (or Polar Bear) mountain, where the ice was piled up in shards and lemming tracks ran along its edge. Later, Myrah and I would recognise the name of this mountain in a drawing made by the artist Nicotye Samayualie.

Rough ice on the shoreline. Photo: Isabelle Gapp.
Myrah looking out to sea. Photo: Isabelle Gapp.

Following the liminal frozen shoreline, Iqaluk drove to the top of a different hill, looking out in the direction of where the Hudson Bay Company steamship and icebreaker the RMS Nascopie sank in 1957, and which was the subject of my first visit to Kinngait in February 2023.2

Under the weight of its many passengers, the snowmobile struggled to get up the rocky slope. We all climbed off, the qamutik was detached and reattached at the top. As Iqaluk, kindly refusing our help (of what little help we could be), manoeuvred the snowmobile up the hill, we stopped to take in the view. As an art historian who writes about landscape painting, I try to avoid cliches, but when you look out across the peaks and ridges of ice-encrusted snow and rock, the science-fiction nerd in me cannot help but conceive of it as otherworldly. Perhaps, this is what the surface of another planet looks like?

Ridges in the ice. Photo: Isabelle Gapp.

At the top of this hill stood a century-old inukshuk (or cairn) with several other smaller ones clustered around it. Iqaluk spoke of how these signalled the direction hunters had spotted marine mammals. Snow crunched but did not break beneath my feet. A large tidal ice crack was in the process of separating one large ice floe from the rest, the tide pulling it apart.

An inukshuk on the hill. Photo: Isabelle Gapp.
A tidal crack in the ice. Photo: Isabelle Gapp.

It was at the top of the hill, that we stopped and had a long chat with Iqaluk who talked about his experiences as a hunter and his involvement with scientific monitoring projects. He works both as polar bear watch for the community and does some work for the SmartICE survey. A photo taken by Iqaluk in May 2022 was a weekly Ice Watch winner. He knows the ice. We were more than fortunate to have him as our guide and share in this experience with him.

As he sipped coffee, he told us a story about how he and a friend were once lost for a week and how they eventually managed to get to the shore, pointing to the spit of land just across the ice from us. They started a fire using small plants and lichen. At my feet, small patches of red lichen speckled the exposed rock in amongst patches of snow.

He told us stories that we knew all too well but that I had only read about. The sea ice is thinning, the floe edge is closer to town, and the “edge” is becoming more and more unstable. For Iqaluk and many others in the community these changes mean real-world change.

Down the slope and around the hill, small icebergs and pancake ice had become trapped in a layer of sea ice surrounding the shore. It looked to me, more like a crumpled piece of wax-proof paper that you’ve just tried to lay flat. The Kinngait Sea Ice Glossary, a valuable resource compiled by Gita Ljubicic in collaboration with community members, provides much more nuanced Inuktitut terminologies for the various manifestations of ice. Shades of turquoise and green disappeared into the depths of the water, contrasting with the uneven, water-marked surface of the ice beyond. This is the spot, where at low tide, Joemie and Iqaluk harvest kelp. And it was at this spot, that my hands started to freeze and Myrah’s feet started to feel numb.

Icebergs and pancake ice; where kelp is harvested. Photo: Isabelle Gapp.

The journey back to town, saw me bouncing my way home in the qamutik while Myrah confidently navigated the snowmobile. With my hands no longer freezing (now wearing a pair of Iqaluk’s sealskin mittens), we sped back across the ice, travelling past our own snowmobile tracks from earlier, towards the hills that make up this island.

….

As I write this, it is summer in Aberdeenshire and I am preparing for my visit to Kinngait next month. There won’t be any sea ice then, or at least there shouldn’t be. While historically the sea ice season occupied most of the year, with only a few months of respite, nowadays sea ice typically forms in Kinngait in November or December (it was mid-December last year) and breaks up fully (often interpreted as when all ice leaves the bay) in May to June. In the time since I left Kinngait in March, the sea ice has melted, the days have grown longer, beluga have entered the bay, mussels and clams are being harvested, and the small tundra wildflowers have started to blossom.

Join us in Aberdeen in February 2026 for a Multidisciplinary Arctic Sea Ice Research Workshop.
Call for participation open until September 15. Find out more here.

Acknowledgements: Thank you to the following people for their time and support in making this trip onto the ice happen, and for the many conversations since: Iqaluk Toonoo, Joemie Tapaungai, Myrah Graham, William Huffman, Audrey Hurd, and Martha Samayualie. This research was supported by a British Academy Knowledge Frontiers International Interdisciplinary Research Project awarded for From the Floe Edge: Visualising Local Sea Ice Change in Kinngait, Nunavut. Nunavut Scientific Research License, 02 025 25N-M.

Notes

[1] Claudio Aporta, “Shifting perspectives on shifting ice: documenting and representing Inuit use of the sea ice,” The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien 55, no.1 (2011): 7.

[2] Isabelle Gapp, “All Aboard the Nascopie: Image-Making, Colonial Modernity, and Coastal Memory in the Eastern Canadian Arctic.” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes 58, no.2 (2024).doi:10.3138/jcs-2023-0023

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Isabelle Gapp

Isabelle Gapp is an Assistant Professor and Interdisciplinary Fellow in the Department of Art History at the University of Aberdeen. She is also Co-Director for The Centre for the North. Her research and teaching considers the intersections between nineteenth and twentieth century landscape painting, environmental history, and climate change across the Circumpolar North.

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