The sun is out of position over the Arctic

[Empty Glass]

Not really, but to the Inuit who live in the Arctic, it is.

This became known to me a few days ago, when by chance I happened to come across a screening of the film Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change at the National Museum of the American Indian. It documents the state of the Inuit people in the midst of global warming and presents many of their views on camera. When the film was over, the filmmakers held a Q&A session and ended up discussing how all of the elders that they met said that the Earth had shifted on its axis, and that the sun was rising in a different location relative to the horizon than it had for ages before. This puzzled the filmmakers, as they had never heard of such news from scientists. The fact that all the Inuit that they met across the Arctic said this regardless of their distances between each other confused them more.

It's not included in the film, but what's really going on (as the filmmakers explained) is something called the novaya zemlya effect. I can't explain it perfectly myself, but the gist is that the warming atmosphere over the Arctic is changing the refraction of sunlight there. So...everything that's causing temperatures to rise around the world is also changing the perceived position of the stars, the sun, and the angles from which sunlight strikes the Arctic surface. For the Inuit, it's a change in the skies unlike anything seen anywhere else.

I had never heard of this until that day, but my mind was absolutely blown, and the audience at the screening seemed audibly dumbstruck as well. Even as I walked around the rest of the museum, the only thing I could think of was what the filmmakers had summed up: "the sun is out of position over the Arctic..."

BTW there's other noteworthy points mentioned in the movie. In general it speaks of the need to have Inuit knowledge utilized by the rest of the scientific community at large. Anyone who wants to watch it should be able to see it in the first link above.