CARIBOU SKELETON | Oil and The Caribou | 2006 | 59x74 inches

Nearly a thousand caribou from the Teshekpuk Lake herd came over to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, making a two hundred and forty miles journey during the winter of 2006. Robert Thompson, my Inupiat friend from Kaktovik stated that this never happened before, and he speculated that perhaps the tundra froze and the caribou came looking for food. The tundra also froze around Kaktovik resulting in death of several hundred animals that winter. I photographed the skeleton of such an animal the following summer. Arctic is experiencing rain during autumn and winter months, a severe climate change phenomenon. This rain is causing ice crust on the tundra. International scientific community states that ice crust formation resulting from freeze-thaw events, affects most Arctic land animals by encapsulating their food plants in ice, severely limiting forage availability and sometimes killing plants1. Caribou/reindeer, musk ox, lemmings are all affected, and dramatic population crashes resulting from ice crusting due to freeze-thaw events have been reported and their frequency appears to have increased over recent decades.