Canadian Press, et al. - Study finds Canada’s Arctic coastline eroding faster than anywhere else

Year by year, metre by metre, the Canadian Arctic is getting smaller.

A new international study has concluded that Canada's Arctic coastline is eroding, on average, faster than anywhere else in the circumpolar world. While they can't yet prove it, scientists suspect that gradual washing-away along thousands of kilometres of gravelly northern shoreline is speeding up. And that steady erosion is already having profound effects on northerners, the majority of whom live along the coast.

"Every single element of the North is going to be affected, right from the engineering side to how the Inuit interact with their environment," said Wayne Pollard, a McGill University geomorphologist who contributed to the massive, 10-country study that was released Sunday. The project, undertaken by a consortium of international research groups, is the first to be able to compare different rates of erosion as well as consider its impact on northern people.