This is The Guardian.

When I got into journalism, I thought I would be riding in helicopters all the time.

I just like this fantasy of I would be in the field.

And I can tell you up until now, there's been very few helicopters

in my life. Leland Checo is a reporter for The Guardian based in Toronto. His dreams of James Bond's

style travel finally came to pass when he was invited to visit Kiki Karek, otherwise known as

Herschel Island, which sits just off the northwest of mainland Canada.

This is a very remote island. It is only accessible for maybe four months of the year, if you're

lucky. And even to get to the place where the helicopter was taking off, that's two days worth

of travel from Toronto just because you're taking increasingly smaller planes to smaller towns.

Once he eventually made it on to his helicopter, Leyland was treated to some spectacular views.

You have this kind of jagged, rugged landscape to your left and it kind of leads up to mountains.

And on your right, you just have ocean. And the helicopter pilot and I saw beluga whales.

We saw moose, we saw grizzly bears, muskocks.

This region, along with the rest of the Arctic, is home to some incredible scenery and ecology.

But it's rapidly transforming.

In 2024, the world went over the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold of warming for the first time,

but temperatures in the Arctic have been rising four times as fast.

One kind of revealing aspect of this trip when it happened was it was in August,

and I live in Toronto and it was probably 22, 23 degrees. It was humid. You know, I was looking forward to maybe

getting a bit further north and escaping the heat. When I landed in Anuvik in August, it was 36 degrees

Celsius. This is why Leyland had made his epic journey to Kikhtaruk. The heat is thawing the ground,

...