Aftermath of occupation

Natural History, May, 2004 by Stephan Reebs

Scattered across the Canadian High Arctic are the remains of small groups of dwellings, sunken partway into the ground and built out of whale bones. Nearby, generally, stands a freshwater pond, along with piles of decomposing bones from whales and other animals hunted by the residents. The sites are the abandoned villages of Thule Inuit whalers who emigrated from Alaska about a thousand years ago, and whose presence, activity, and refuse left an enduring mark in the region have well before the arrival of Europeans.

Marianne S.V. Douglas, a paleoecologist at the University of Toronto, and a team of colleagues studied sediments from a quartermile-long pond in one Thule village, inhabited from the early thirteenth century through the end of the sixteenth. They discovered that during the whalers' occupation, moss and an associated diatom proliferated, replacing the bottom-dwelling diatom Fragilaria pinnata as the pond's dominant flora.

Douglas and her associates also found concentrations of nitrogen-15, an isotope characteristic of marine life, to be higher than in similar ponds. The investigators thus think nutrients from the processed whale carcasses must have fertilized the pond. Even today, as lingering whale bones continue to leach phosphorus into the pond, its chemistry remains quite different from that of ponds not situated near historical settlements. ("Prehistoric Inuit whalers affected Arctic freshwater ecosystems," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101:1613-17, February 10, 2004)