The two weeks of Nunavut Impact Review Board environmental hearings regarding the Mary River Mine ended on February 6. By February 6, peaceful protesters from Pond Inlet and Arctic Bay were blockading the airstrip and trucking road at Mary River Mine.{ They are concerned that expansion would result in an "increase the number of ore carriers that visit during the ice free season". The expansion would double output from 6 to 12 million tonnes a year and would include a railway. It would increase shipping through its port at Milne Inlet and impact a crucial habitat for narwhal in the Canadian Arctic. Elder and hunter Elijah Panipakoocho, who is a Pond Inlet's Mittimatalik Hunters and Trappers Organization board member, "participated in early wildlife research" undertaken before the mine opened in 2014. Panipakoocho said that they had tried to make the mining company "understand how the wildlife exist and how they would be affected, the caribou and the narwhal...We worked hard, based on the Inuit way and the southern way of doing things." He said that now the caribou are gone, and the seal that they used to hunt in Milne Inlet during the fall freeze-up are no longer abundant.