App helps Inuit hunters navigate thinning sea ice in Canadian Arctic

A new mobile phone app has been devised to help Inuit hunters in the Canadian north avoid an increasingly dangerous effect of climate change: unpredictable sea ice.

Developed under the guidance of the Arctic Eider Society, the app aims to draw on the catalogue of traditional knowledge that has helped Inuit thrive in an unforgiving region.

Named after the Inuktitut world for “sea ice”, Siku is intended to provide an all-in-one system of critical information for hunters out in the land.

Related: 'Sea, ice, snow ... it’s all changing': Inuit struggle with warming world

“We’re copying what our parents used to do, but in modern ways,” Lucassie Arragutainaq, manager of the Sanikiluaq hunters and trappers association in Nunavut, told the Canadian Press.

The app was devised to address the growing number of accidents in which hunters unexpectedly plunge through ice. Knowledge accrued over thousands of years has traditionally helped hunters read and test ice, but many have seen troubling changes to ice behaviour in recent years.

A growing body of evidence has found that Canada’s Arctic is warming at a rate much faster than the rest of the world.

By drawing on satellite data and user-submitted tagging, Siku’s developers hope to provide better and more up-to-date information to hunters.

In one example, the society’s executive director, Joel Heath, told how a hunter saw a narrow crack in sea ice. After he tagged it, satellite stats later showed that the crack soon morphed into a cleavage so large that hunters on the ocean side of the ice would have been been trapped.

“It shows how [a hunter] taking a few photos and tagging can mobilize Indigenous knowledge,” said Heath.

The app also has features that let hunters indicate where wildlife has been spotted – seals, narwhal, rabbits and polar bear – to direct others to bountiful hunting grounds.

Siku also includes a function to upload stories – a nod to the importance of storytelling as a repository of knowledge and information among communities.

The app was unveiled last week at the ArcticNet conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was previously a winner of Google’s 2017 Impact Challenge, bringing in $750,000 in development funding.