Cockney, 51, along with a handful of other residents left on this wind- and wave-battered arm jutting northward from town, are waiting for local officials to start a relocation process that will see the homes loaded onto skids and hauled over the ice to more stable ground.

But time is running out. A few years ago, the hamlet dumped a bunch of boulders along the shore behind her house to try to stop the erosion. It was not enough.

“They just sunk,” said Cockney. “They’re a little farther out into the ocean side and you can’t see them anymore.”

For Tuktoyaktuk mayor Merven Gruben, the erosion on the west coast isn’t new. For years he’s been ringing alarm bells about how climate change is affecting the North, he says.

“I’ve said we were the canary in the coal mine,” said Gruben. “That canary has been dead a long time already.”

Gruben says he hopes a new consultant’s report on erosion affecting the hamlet will help motivate the federal government to part with more funding to address the problem.

“People live on permafrost. It’s basically one big freakin’ ice cube,” he said, noting the most drastic changes he’s seen have been over the last 10 to 15 years.

Already officials have had to move half a dozen homes due to erosion, while another four, including Cockney’s, are in the queue. Gruben has seen what can happen if the town waits too long.

“We’re losing a lot of coastline. Ice just continually melting,” he said. “We had a curling rink at one time in our town and that’s gone into the ocean.”

Dustin Whalen, a coastal geologist with Natural Resources Canada, says Tuktoyaktuk is being hit with a climate-change double-whammy in the form of thawing permafrost, on which the hamlet is built, and more intense wave action due to disappearing sea ice.

“There’s less sea ice, there’s more open water, there’s more erosion,” he said.

Multi-year sea ice in the Beaufort Sea during the summer declined at a rate of approximately seven per cent per decade between 1968 and 2016, according to Canada’s Changing Climate Report. In addition, sea levels around Tuktoyaktuk are projected to rise more than 60 cm by 2100 under a scenario of high greenhouse gas emissions.

Of increasing concern, said Whalen, is Tuktoyaktuk Island, a thin stretch of land about 250 metres from shore that naturally protects the mainland. It is currently eroding at a rate of 2.1 metres per year, he said.

Whalen and colleagues predict that if current climate trends continue, the vulnerable middle of the island will submerge first, effectively cutting the island in half, by the year 2050.

“Then all of a sudden the harbour becomes this huge open water exposed to the open ocean, the impact of waves,” he said. “It’s trouble.”

While the threats posed by thawing permafrost and erosion certainly concern Gruben, he is almost defiant in his outlook.

“Us Inuvialuit people are very adaptable and we go with change,” he said. “We have lots of room to move. We’re by far not sinking into the ocean, that’s for damn sure. We’re always going to be there.”