Frank Pokiak remembers long days on the land, camped at traditional hunting grounds under June's 24-hour sun, secure in the knowledge sea ice would provide a safe highway back to his Tuktoyaktuk home. Those days are gone.

"We used to stay out quite a while, eh," recalls Pokiak, a longtime Inuvialuit hunter. "We go hunting geese and ducks along the coast and after the snow melts on the ground we still have access via the ocean. We don't really do that anymore. You can't stay out on the land as long. The ice is melting quicker."

Last month, Arctic sea ice covered 630,000 square kilometres less ocean than the 30-year average. Sea ice is shrinking about five per cent a decade. And the frozen ocean is not only smaller, it's thinner. David Barber, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Arctic System Science at the University of Manitoba, says sea ice has lost, on average, about 40 per cent of its total volume.

"We discovered this rotten ice in the summer of 2009," said Barber, who made the finding while on an icebreaker in the Beaufort Sea. "It was multi-year sea ice that had deteriorated so much that the meltponds had gone through and connected with the oceans. The ice had broken up into tiny pieces about the size of a Volkswagen and these bits and pieces had congealed with new ice that was forming, only a couple centimetres thick. The satellites thought they were looking at multi-year sea ice, but when we were driving a ship through it, it was this heavily rotted stuff that didn't slow us down at all." What's coming? Hard to say.