Discovery Channel's "Human Planet" series showed an incredible act preformed by Canada's Inuit people in an episode titled "Arctic". The people of Kangiqsujuaq, near the Hudson Strait, go to incredible lengths to add variety to their diet of seal meat, seal meat and more seal meat. This group of people are able to collect mussels from under the sea ice during extreme low tides which happen only twice a year, during the Spring and Fall equinox. During this time, the sea ice drops by 40 feet which opens fissures in the ice and exposes the seabed. Then, with nothing more than a bucket and a lantern, a group crawls down below the ice and collects as many mussels as they possibly can before the escape hole closes and the sea returns. "We all know stories of mussel hunters who didn't make it out in time. If you can't get out, you die," Mary Qumaaluk told the Human Planet team.
This tradition goes back generations, but the Kangiqujuaq people say it is getting harder and harder to find places safe enough to go beneath the ice, which freezes later and melts earlier than it did even a few decades ago.
This tradition goes back generations, but the Kangiqujuaq people say it is getting harder and harder to find places safe enough to go beneath the ice, which freezes later and melts earlier than it did even a few decades ago.
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