Overview

SIKU is one of several IPY 2007-2008 projects aimed at documenting indigenous observations of environmental changes in the polar areas, with its specific focus on sea ice and the use of ice-covered habitats by the residents of the Arctic. Incidentally, the project's acronym SIKU is also the most common word for sea ice (siku) in all Eskimo/Inuit languages, from Chukotka to Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. As a collaborative international initiative, SIKU brings anthropologists, human geographers, sea ice and climate scientists, marine and ecosystem biologists from the U.S., Canada, Russia, Greenland, and France in partnership with almost two dozen indigenous communities in Alaska, Arctic Canada, the Russian Chukchi Peninsula, and Greenland.

Igor Krupnik is the SIKU International Project Lead based out of the Smithsonian Institution.