This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
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story → publish → collaboration
Decades ago, one of the world’s largest subpopulations of nesting eider ducks spent its summers on tiny Mitivik Island, near the mouth of Hudson Bay.
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one → nest → Bay
But as concern grew, in the 1990s, over their steep decline globally, the Canadian government set up a rudimentary research station near the island in the hopes of forestalling a collapse.
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government → grow → collapse
The modest investment paid enormous dividends over the next 30 years as Inuit partners from nearby Southampton Island, who hunt common and king eiders for food and feathers, worked with scientists from all over the world to solve the mystery of where the birds spent their winters and the causes of, and remedy for, their initial decline.
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birds → pay → winters
In the field for months at a time, researchers also gained critical insights into how climate change, disease, diminishing sea ice, and polar bears were affecting bird populations.
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change → gain → populations
As remarkably successful as the pioneering research station was, though, Canada’s Environment and Climate Change department quietly shut it down in 2024.
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department → shut → 2024
By then, the number of nesting eiders had crashed again, from a high of 8,000 pairs to just a few hundred.
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number → nest → hundred
Today, federal research continues in only three of the 14 migratory bird sanctuaries in the Arctic.
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research → continue → Arctic
Hundreds of other wildlife research endeavors in the circumpolar world, including in Greenland and the US, have also been shuttered in recent years.
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Hundreds → include → years
Like many other agencies and programs operated by Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Canadian Wildlife Service has suffered from the high cost of conducting research in the Arctic, the increasing likelihood of polar bear encounters as sea ice recedes, and a series of crushing funding cuts.
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ice → operate → cuts
In the most recent blow, the Canadian government in 2025 committed to reducing the Environment and Climate Change workforce by 10 percent.
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government → commit → percent
In the past, funding to monitor wildlife in the Arctic often had to be justified by its relevance to oil and gas development and how roads, pipelines, and oil wells would affect animals such as migrating caribou, according to Larry Hinzman, an expert in Arctic change at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
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roads → monitor → Alaska
But as the search for Arctic oil and gas began to ramp down in the late 2000s, due to low natural gas prices and breakthroughs in fracking for oil and gas that spurred new production in the south, climate change became a priority.
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change → begin → south
The current circumpolar decline in funding, Hinzman said, is not just about rising costs.
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Hinzman → say → costs
It stems from governments shifting priorities once again, this time from climate change to national security issues and the search for rare minerals.
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governments → stem → minerals
According to the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, geopolitical tensions are also undermining the work of the Arctic Council, an international forum comprising the eight Arctic countries that plays a key role in monitoring environmental changes in the region.
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that → accord → region
While support for research in the Arctic wanes, Canada is investing $405 million to advance the construction of a new highway to the Arctic coast to facilitate resource development and connect remote communities, part of a $40 billion plan to assert sovereignty over its Arctic territory.
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Canada → wan → territory
Research in Alaska has been particularly hard hit by the suspension of hundreds of climate-based collaborations with Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, and by the closure last year of the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States after the National Science Foundation eliminated its operating grants.
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Foundation → hit → grants
Between 2021 and 2024, the number of US research publications on climate change in Greenland fell by 32 percent.
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number → fall → percent
And in July, the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, the territory’s leading environmental research center, temporarily halted any new collaboration with US partners when President Donald Trump threatened to take over the island.
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Trump → halt → island
“There have always been ebbs and flows in the support for environmental monitoring in the Arctic,” said Hinzman.
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Hinzman → say → Arctic
“But what we are seeing now is unprecedented.
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seeing → see → what
It’s heartbreaking because we need to know more than ever how to respond to a warming Arctic that is affecting almost every facet of life.
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that → ’ → life
The decline in Arctic research comes at a time when at least 96 Arctic and sub-Arctic mammal and bird species may be responding to warmer winters, earlier spring snowmelt, and profound landscape changes by migrating earlier in the year and traveling farther afield, sometimes in new directions.
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species → come → directions
But dozens of studies have shown that these journeys don’t always lead to more food.
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journeys → show → food
And they often expose birds to additional parasites and pathogens and put them at greater risk of predation.
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they → expose → predation
The new migrations also happen at a time when critical stopover sites—like the Salton Sea, in California—are being badly degraded by drought and development.
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sites → happen → drought
Polar bears and eiders are among the many animals that appear to be struggling with rapidly warming northern marine environments, from the Baltic to the Canadian Arctic Ocean to the eastern seaboard, stretching from Newfoundland to Maine.
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that → appear → Maine
But without researchers in the field, it’s difficult to predict how or whether these species may adapt.
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species → ’ → field
The situation was far different when eiders began their mysterious worldwide decline in the 1990s.
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eiders → begin → 1990s
Then, researchers working in Mitivik, in the East Bay Migratory Bird Sanctuary, which would later be named the Qaqsauqtuuq Migratory Bird Sanctuary, implanted satellite transmitters into the abdomens of eiders and learned where they were overwintering.
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they → work → eiders
The findings led to tighter regulations on eider hunting in Canada and Greenland that dramatically boosted eider numbers.
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that → lead → numbers
That is, until they crashed again due to disease and polar bear predation.
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they → crash → disease
In 2005, Grant Gilchrist, the founder of the research station, and his colleagues identified an outbreak of avian cholera—which is rare in the Arctic and likely linked to global warming—that would kill as many as 3,000 nesting females in 2006 and about half the population over the eight seasons it spread through the nesting colony.
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it → identify → colony
Gilchrist was also on hand to witness how receding sea ice, brought on by climate change, forced polar bears onto land just when the eiders were sitting on their eggs.
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eiders → witness → eggs
“The bears were like grazing cows leisurely moving through a pasture, stopping to feed [on eggs] whenever they were hungry,” he said.
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he → graze → eggs
And herring gulls, which can’t force an eider off its nest, learned to eat the eggs that the bears had missed while the eiders were away.
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eiders → force → that
Canadian Wildlife Service scientist Jennifer Provencher and her colleagues discovered that even though the eiders nesting in Mitivik hosted larger-than-expected communities of gastrointestinal worms and flukes, which benefit from warming temperatures, the parasites reduced the ducks’ exposure to contaminants such as mercury and lead.
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parasites → discover → mercury
The parasites appear to absorb and clear contaminants from eider tissues.
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parasites → appear → tissues
This is significant because mercury and lead, which are leaching from melting permafrost in many parts of the Arctic, can result in reproductive failure in ducks, and they can be harmful to humans who rely on ducks for food.
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who → leach → food
…and 21 more, not listed.
The Aporia
