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For Keith Morrison, the consequences of this fall’s extraordinarily warm weather across the North all came down to an urgent call for help.

The fire chief for the Arctic community of Cambridge Bay in Nunavut was at home the evening of Oct. 6 when he got word that a couple had fallen through the ice near a river mouth.

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“It was pitch black,” Morrison recalled.

“The only light was from the machines themselves. He was standing on his snow machine and she was on the komatik (sled), deep enough that most of their bodies would have been in the water.

“I took out rope. One of their grandsons grabbed the rope and jumped in to get the lady out. Shortly after, we found a boat and they used that to get her husband.

“It was a close thing.”

It shouldn’t have been a thing at all. That stretch of ice is normally safe by this time of year, but this autumn has not been normal.

“What differentiated this year was we saw a widespread warmer temperature anomaly across the board in the Arctic,” said Environment Canada meteorologist Eric Dykes.