In his third dispatch from Greenland, Stephen Pax Leonard reports on the changes facing the Inughuit people, as mining of the country's vast untapped mineral wealth looks set to overwhelm their traditions

The old Inuktun word for February is hiqinnaaq – the time when the sun reappears. In this part of Greenland, the sun rises above the horizon again on 17 February, finally bringing to an end the kapirdaq (the dark period) which lasts for three and a half months.

There has been much discussion in Greenland and elsewhere about the first sunrise this year in Ilulissat, down the coast. For the first time in living memory, the sun rose above the horizon two days early – a phenomenon that has baffled Greenlanders and scientists.

Currently, some believe that the most plausible explanation is, as you might expect, global warming. It is thought that the Greenland ice sheet and the glaciers surrounding the town are melting so rapidly that it is now possible to see a lower part of the horizon that was previously hidden by the ice. Recent data shows that the ice sheet melted at a record rate in 2010. If the entire body of ice were one day to melt, global sea levels would rise by more than seven metres, putting many major cities around the world under water.

Both November and December were unusually mild in this part of Greenland with the temperature often at least 10 degrees warmer than the 1961-1990 historical average for the region. On a number of days throughout the Christmas period, it was colder in parts of the UK than it was here.

The sea ice is still quite thin in places, which has meant that starving polar bears are now coming close to the town, looking for food at the rubbish dump only a quarter of a mile from my home. Unless you want to be the subject of much gossip, it is now not advised to leave the settlement on foot without a rifle.

As with so much in the Arctic, the climate is a paradox: you wait for months for the sun to come back and when it does it is the coldest part of the year. February, March and April can be significantly colder than the dark months.

Before I came to the High Arctic, I was told about an orange tinge on the horizon that would provide some light in the darkest months. With the odd exception of a smidge of transient light, the occasional spangled sky with shooting stars or the glow cast by Venus sitting like a light bulb in the western horizon, it has been predominantly overcast and the darkness has been monochromatic and at times intoxicating.

I have been using this dark period to work intensively with the elders, documenting what I can of the local language and culture. One elderly informant told me on our first meeting and in a matter-of-fact manner: "In the old days, there was not much need for language."

They lived in an experiential world where language was used to communicate basic facts and intentions, but she insists that nothing was ever discussed and that abstraction was alien. Whispering implausible palindromes over black coffee in my hut, she tells me that her strongest recollection of her childhood is the silence. Hunters would have been away for days or weeks at a time, living a short, semi-nomadic life and having relatively little contact with their children. Until the early 1950s, life expectancy for Greenlanders was no more than 35 and to this day a child's six-month birthday is still cause for a major celebration in the town. According to my informants, it was only with the subsequent introduction of the radio and schooling that people learned to discuss and debate things.

There was, however, a strong tradition of storytelling and indigenous beliefs would have been passed down through this. Writing down this body of material in the unwritten local language is highly problematic. Many of the younger people do not have the same phonemic inventory as the older generations and the initial question might be which language is it that you wish to commit to writing, before you even begin to tackle the question of how you write sounds which impressionistically are not dissimilar to the sound of the garrulous wind blowing down the chimney of my oil heater.

In certain key areas, such as the weather and family, Inuktun terminology is particularly rich. There are no more than half a dozen families in Qaanaaq and the kinship ties in this small, highly networked community are enforced, and you might say even exaggerated, through the use of a micro-system of kinship terms whereby first cousins of the opposite sex refer to each other as "younger brother, older sister" etc, and male second cousins once removed are called "paternal or maternal uncles".

Rockwell Kent, the American artist and writer who spent some time in Greenland, describes this country in his 1930 book, N by E, as "closed" and thinks the objective of Danish colonisation was to preserve a country for the enjoyment of its own people.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the status and position of Greenland in our consciousness is surely about to change significantly. The self-rule government is bent on exploiting the country's largely untapped mineral wealth and using this revenue as a basis for a strong economy, enabling the Greenlanders to gain independence from Denmark. Greenland is currently dependent on an annual subsidy from Denmark worth nearly $600m, but the intention is to gradually phase it out.

The drilling for oil off the west coast of Greenland and the potential environmental hazards were much discussed last summer, but now large-scale mining projects dotted around the rocky coastline are being considered for iron, gold, nickel, platinum and diamonds, to name but a few. With a relatively uneducated and tiny workforce, it is inevitable that Greenland will require thousands of foreign workers to explore and mine these resources – a prospect that concerns many people here in the north because they think their previously "closed" country, with a population of just over 50,000, will be rapidly overwhelmed by people from different cultures.

Iron deposits have been found in Inglefield Land, which is only 70 miles north of Qaanaaq. Some speculate as to whether in years to come a mine will be in operation there run by a multinational, employing foreign workers and shipping the iron to China via the soon-to-be-open Arctic shipping routes. Such potential developments are years away and may never materialise, but it is difficult to see how any such project could benefit the traditional hunters whose precarious livelihoods are dependent on the wildlife that inhabits this pristine Arctic environment.

Here, in this polar wilderness, the clarity of the light in the summer is such that distances are almost impossible to judge. You can see for more than 100 miles. In late summer, Herbert Island appeared to me almost within my grasp and I had to check the map several times before I could believe it was almost 20 miles away and thus ditch the plan to row out there.

Even now, in January, it is still not possible to travel on the sea ice by dog-sled all the way to the island. With local hunters, I have been out to the edge of the creaking ice which currently lies about 15 miles from Qaanaaq, a cluster of yellow lights huddled together in the east. Hunters tell me that until the 1990s the sea ice at this time of year continued for another 20 miles or so in that direction. In 1978, it was so cold that the sea ice was here all year round.

These polar Eskimos have travelled and hunted on the ice for hundreds of years. Climate change over the past 20 years alone has put the future of this traditional way of life in doubt and, given the speed of change, it is not so surprising to hear that some people think the next 20 years may seal its fate entirely.

Stephen Pax Leonard is an anthropological linguist at the Scott Polar Research Institute and a research fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. His research is funded by the British Academy and the World Oral Literature Project in Cambridge.