Here are the facts I found surprising enough to highlight in my copy of Arctic Dreams:
Most animals live lives in biological keeping with the earth’s twenty-four-hour period of rotation. They have neither the stamina nor the flexibility, apparently, to adapt to the variable periods of light they encounter in the Arctic’s nightless summer and dayless winter.
Instead of many species, each with relatively few individuals in it, we find relatively few species, each with many individuals- large herds of caribou, for example, or vast swarms of mosquitoes […] The size of the population of changes, dramatically.
Of the roughly 3200 species of mammal we could possibly have encountered on the way north, we would find only 23 or so living beyond the tree line in this cold, light-poor desert […] Of the boundless species of insect, only about 600 are to be found in the Arctic. Of perhaps 30,000 species of fish, fewer than 50 have found a way to live here.
Eskimo clothing required daily attention – sewing, softening, and drying – because it was somewhat fragile. It was lighter and warmer, however, than any clothing Western explorers brought with them to the Arctic, and after several fatal lessons, expedition leaders began to insist on Eskimo clothing for everyone. In some respects it remains superior for general use to modern Western expeditionary clothing.
Many scientists comment in their papers and books and in private conversation about the character of their Eskimo companions. They admire their humble intelligence, their honesty, and their humor. They find it invigorating to be in the presence of people who, when they speak, make so few generalized or abstract statements, who focus instead on the practical, the specific, the concrete.
The coastline of the Canadian Archipelago was extensively redrawn during and immediately after World War II, as a result of military reconnaissance, and the last large islands in the south were discovered, in Foxe Basin west of Baffin Island (including Air Force Island, approximately 500 miles square).
Nehaveigur 