Behind the Story: 'Unsettled' Merges Science, Culture as Canada Inuit Confront Climate Change

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A few winters ago, fisherman and Inuit elder Joey Angnatok reached out to independent journalist Jenn Thornhill Verma. The Canadian reporter, a Pulitzer Center grantee and a 2024 Ocean Reporting Network Fellow, had already done some reporting about the impacts of climate change in Nunatsiavut, an area of Canada’s Newfoundland and Labrador province and home to Inuit communities. 

Thornhill Verma recalled to me the moment she knew that the people depending on sea ice in Canada’s Far North were facing a crisis. “The ice is forming, but not like it should,” Angnatok told her.

What followed were months of preparation, reporting trips, and editorial productions geared toward showing Canadians the intricacies of seasonal sea ice formation and how changes in weather patterns were putting an entire people and culture at risk.

Nunatsiavut has traditionally experienced yearly weather patterns that made travel on the ice possible, enabling local Inuit populations to trade, hunt, and access basic services. But in recent years the period in which the ice is safe to travel has shrunk. 

Reporting for The Globe and Mail and supported by a Pulitzer Center ocean grant, grantee journalists Thornhill Verma and Johnny C.Y. Lam traveled by air and snowmobile to learn how the people in Nunatsiavut are adapting to the changes.

The result was a two-part series that featured the scientific and cultural adaptations to a changing climate. In addition, the team at The Globe and Mail produced a digital version of a sea ice glossary in the local Inuit language, featuring recordings from elders. The stories and Lam’s photography immerse readers into the lives of Inuit at the front lines of climate change.

In February, I connected with Thornhill Verma, Lam, and Melissa Tait, a visual journalist at The Globe and Mail who worked on the digital presentation of the story. As we flipped through a slideshow of Lam's photos, we talked about the reporting process, building relationships with sources, and harnessing the power of photography. 

We also touched on the storytelling process and marveled at the groundbreaking data visualization produced by The Globe and Mail Graphics Editor Murat Yükselir. By the end, they told me about some of the impact this story is having on Canadians, and what comes next.

Since our conversation, the team won gold at the Canadian Association of Journalists' awards for environmental and climate change reporting. The project has also been nominated for a Canadian Journalism Foundation Climate Solutions Reporting Award and Canada’s National Media Awards.

Watch our conversation:

Selected highlights:

• Jenn Thornhill Verma: "What I would say differentiates it—because there has been a lot of reporting on sea ice weakening, for example—I think what we tried to do was to relay the problem in a way that was locally and culturally relevant. And so as I was pointing out earlier, you know, when we did share the problem in that 2022 reporting—as opposed to this past December 2024—[we were] using satellite imagery, and it did show the scope of the problem, but it didn't contextualize it in a way that was meaningful for people who live in Nunatsiavut."
• Thornhill Verma: "It was the first time I'd ever had to budget for having snowmobiles."
• Johnny C.Y. Lam: "And in this photo you see there's a couple pieces of ice in Joe's hand, and that came completely by chance. That he just really wanted to take us out of the field as he was doing his research in measuring sea ice as well as collecting water samples, and as he was putting his arm into the ice and trying to dig a hole so we can lower the ice shark into the ground, the pieces of ice like shards of ice kind of flying around onto the surface. 
  "And then when I saw them and I asked Joey, ‘Joey, why is that ice brown?’"
  "‘Oh, that's because there are planktons inside.’ And there it was, the moment the light bulb went off. This is the photograph that we've been talking about." 
• Thornhill Verma: "I think there's a lot of examples of climate change stories that don't use the humans involved. The people involved, the communities involved, you see environmental devastation, but you know this being an adaptation story, we absolutely wanted to be able to share people, the people doing the work that impacted." 
• Melissa Tait: "The fact that they [SmartICE, Sea Ice Monitoring and Information Services] have created this glossary—because there is a reason that they have that many words for snow or ice—just augmented ways to speak about it, because every single day of their life is determining what type of ice is safe to travel on or where to hunt, or how to judge the ocean, everything." 
• Thornhill Verma: "What really drove the writing and storytelling was introducing new voices. So we meet Elder Ron Webb and what he's doing on the ice. And then we meet Joey Angnatok leading the all-Inuk team that is bridging the broken ice when the cargo ship breaks the ice every month, going to the Boise Bay nickel mine. You know, we meet mother and child, T.J. and Aaju, talking about, you know, it's not just that the roadways are interrupted but we can't wear our traditional clothing. And that was really different and I think the difference is that, just like in the portraits where you see the people who are doing this work and impacted, it's also their voices that made the narrative progress."
• Lam: "This is something that through a photograph is really, really hard to justify the experience that I've had and what I felt when I was there. Because we were standing around, in the end, about 15 feet from the ice breaker, and as it travels towards us, you can feel the ice beneath our feet shaking. And this ship was so giant. It's literally the size of a, probably, you know, a 10-story condo or eight-story condo passing in front of you. So in the same photograph you can share the experience with viewers." 
• Thornhill Verma: "You know the Nunatsiavut 6-seasonal calendar has never been published. That took a lot of going back and forth, establishing trust, thinking about ways in which we could show the sea ice season data in conjunction with the seasonal calendar. Working with Environment Canada, you know, they too had never portrayed the data in this particular way." 
• Thornhill Verma: "With data visualizations like this, we were going back and forth with the Nunatsiavut community. Not for validation per se. In a case like this, to be able to say, you know, 'Is this a way of relaying the problem?'"
• Lam: "So when the glossary finally got published in December, I sent him a link and about an hour later, he texted back to me and said ‘I can't believe this is real. What I have done is I printed 51 pages and enlarged them fairly large on paper, and then I posted them everywhere in my house, and I want to learn how to pronounce every single one of these words in Inuktitut properly and learn about the definition of what they are.’ And that for me was a tremendous impact from a very grassroot level, from somebody from the community himself who had said that they wanted to learn about this."