“The environmental impact of the melting Arctic
has been dramatic. Polar bears are becoming an
endangered species, fish never before found in the
Arctic are migrating to its warming waters, and
thawing tundra is being replaced with temperate forests.
Greenland is experiencing a farming boom, as once-
barren soil now yields broccoli, hay, and potatoes…If
the Arctic is the barometer by which to measure
the Earth’s health, these symptoms point
to a very sick planet indeed.”
Foreign Affairs Magazine, March/April 2008
In the summer of 2006, the local council in Kuujjuaq bought ten air conditioners when temperatures hit 31 degrees Celsius.
EARLIER
GLOBAL WARMING
Of course, this is not the first time the planet has warmed up; in the relatively recent past, parts of Greenland were covered in forests. The Greenland forest included pine trees, yews, and aspens, and insects to go with them. Beetles, flies, moths, and butterflies all called the forest home. This in a country that now is mostly covered by a sheet of ice more than two kilometres thick.
A group of international scientists think the ancient forest existed between 450,000 and 800,000 years ago, perhaps as recently as 130,000 years ago, a blink of the eye in geological terms.
And, they say average temperatures in summer would have been warmer than 10 degrees, with winters no colder than -17.
Experts say this research suggests the southern Greenland ice cap is more stable than previously thought. But, if this ice sheet does melt, it would be devastating for sea coasts: water levels would probably rise one to two metres as a result. In a 2007 Globe and Mail report, Dr. Martin Sharp, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta who worked on the Greenland research, said those levels would not have been “a big deal 400,000 years ago when the human population was essentially non-existent. (But now) you’ve got 104 million people living within a metre of sea level.”
ANCIENT
ICE-FREE ARCTIC
Scientists say research suggests that the last time there was an ice-free Arctic was about 55 million years ago. Massive amounts of greenhouse gases were released into the atmosphere then, which they think must have caused global warming.
After analyzing the sediments on the floor of the Arctic Ocean, an international team of researchers concluded the region was extremely warm, unusually wet, and free of ice at the time.
The period was known as the palaeocene-eocene thermal maximum (PETM), and surface temperatures in some parts of the world were about four to eight degrees Celsius higher than now.
It was a global crisis that made the sea more acidic as it absorbed carbon dioxide, and wiped out much marine life. It also left most of the planet sweltering, with extreme flooding, fierce storms, and frequent cyclones in some areas. It all happened about 10 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs. Estimates of how long it lasted range from 80,000 to about 150,000 years.
Scientists aren’t sure what caused the warming, which occurred over a relatively rapid geological period of 100,000 years. But, they think it may have been due either to the release of vast deposits of carbon-containing methane stored on the sea floor, or the massive release of carbon dioxide from volcanic eruptions.
Many see this extreme period of global warming as an example of what the future could hold. There’s lots of interest among scientists in the PETM because of its similarity to the accelerated warming we’re seeing today.
As well, one researcher says the massive amount of carbon that was released into the atmosphere then is comparable to the estimated amount that humans will produce during the next 500 years by burning fossil fuels. This would appear to be very bad news for us. Not to be too gloomy though, projections about future warming are based on computer models, and scientists admit they really don’t know how well the
Global Warming and the Arctic
The Arctic ice is melting. It has been for several years, but the process is accelerating with temperatures rising far faster in the Arctic than anywhere else on Earth
The New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) says average temperatures in the Arctic region are rising twice as fast as they are elsewhere in the world.
Arctic ice is getting thinner, melting, and rupturing. NRDC points to the largest single block of ice in the Arctic, the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, as an example: it had been around for 3,000 years before it started cracking in 2000. Within two years it had split all the way through and then started breaking into smaller pieces.
Destruction of Wildlife
These climate changes are having a devastating impact on the region’s ecosystem, causing a severe population decline among polar bears, for example. The iconic animal has been declared an endangered species by the Manitoba government.
Global warming is causing the region’s ice to melt earlier and form later, leaving the bears with less time to hunt for seals.
Some colonies of bears have shown signs of malnutrition, and biologists say there could be a more severe drop in their population within the next few decades. According to one estimate, if the weight-loss trend continues, most females in the population will be below the minimum weight needed to reproduce by 2012.
In September 2007, the U.S. Geological Survey predicted that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears will die off by 2050, including the entire population in Alaska, as a result of thinning sea ice.
The Geological Survey further forecast that the bears would be able to survive to the end of the century only in northern Canada and northwestern Greenland.
The agency thinks that in the next 50 years polar bears will lose 42 percent of the Arctic range they need to hunt and breed during the summer.
Vanishing Sea Ice
The sea ice is disappearing at about the rate of 70,000 square kilometres a year; that’s an area about the size of Lake Superior. At that rate, scientists predicted in 2007 that the Arctic will be ice-free by 2050, which would affect not only the Inuit and polar bears, but shipping and offshore oil and mineral development as well.
Experts also warn the thaw could become a self-sustaining acceleration: as the ice melts, the ocean draws in more heat from the sun, which then melts the ice even more quickly. Some have suggested that the North Pole could be free or nearly free of summer ice as soon as 2020.
So much ice melted in the summer of 2007 that the Northwest Passage across the top of Canada became the most navigable it had been since monitoring began. The information came from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Denver.
According to the Center, the Arctic has lost about a third of its ice since satellite measurements started three decades ago. And, the rate of loss has accelerated sharply since 2002.
David Barber, director of the Centre for Earth Observation Science at the University of Manitoba, has been studying Arctic ice for more than 25 years. Dr. Barber has come up with similar figures in his research.
In a Globe and Mail article, he said by mid-September 2007, the year-round ice that covers much of the Arctic Ocean was 39 percent smaller than its annual average from 1979 to 2000.
Arctic Melt Causes Problems elsewhere
Changes in the Arctic also will have far-reaching effects in parts of the world where the traditionally frozen north is given little thought.
As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) explains, melting ice (glaciers and other land-based sheets) also means rising sea levels. That could force hundreds of millions of people in low-lying, largely poor nations, from their homes.
The National Resources Defence Council says island nations such as the Maldives in the Indian Ocean are particularly vulnerable: more than half the nation’s populated islands lie less than two metres above sea level. That also applies to some major cities such as Shanghai, China and Lagos, Nigeria.
In 2007, the IPCC warned that sea levels could rise between 45.7 centimetres to 148.6 centimetres by 2100. This will make coastal populations vulnerable to flooding and more intense hurricanes and typhoons.
That level would inundate some Atlantic coastal regions, causing erosion, beach migration, and coastal dune destabilization, along with the flooding. That’s not good news for much of the coasts of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick, as well as parts of the Beaufort Sea coast. Small areas of Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, and British Columbia are also at risk.
In the U.S. thousands of kilometres of land along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts would be hard hit. The most affected states would include Louisiana, Texas, Florida, and North Carolina.
The five nations with the largest total population living in endangered coastal areas are all in Asia: China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Indonesia.
Between 1994 and 2004, about one-third of the world’s 1,562 flood disasters occurred in Asia; half of the total 120,000 people killed by floods were living in that region, the IPCC study said. In addition, more than 200,000 people were killed by the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004.
Experts are concerned that the current melting of Arctic ice might be unstoppable. This might be true even with future reductions to greenhouse gas emissions: that could raise ocean levels by more than six metres and see most (80 percent) of the world’s cities disappear into the sea.
Changing Global Weather Patterns
Scientists warn that a warmer Arctic will affect weather patterns around the world. This will have devastating effects on agriculture: warmer winters would destroy winter wheat crops and higher summer temperatures would dry up valuable farmland.
The melting of ice masses in the Arctic also will add fresh water to the salty oceans. This could change global ocean circulation patterns, turning some moderate climates frosty (in Europe for example).
Arctic tundra also stores vast amounts of carbon, which could be released into the atmosphere during a thaw, further enhancing the greenhouse effect and global warming.
None of this is news. The Pew Center on Global Climate Change says scientists have believed for years that the Arctic would probably be one of the first regions to be affected by global warming. And, they’ve been proven right with evidence that parts of the region have warmed four to five times more than the planet as a whole since the 1950s.
Plenty of Studies
There’s no shortage of people studying the top and bottom of the Earth.
The Fourth International Polar Year (IPY) program was launched in Paris in March 2007. The multimillion-dollar research project involves thousands of scientists from more than 60 countries, studying both polar regions for two seasons. They’ll be recording information on everything from glaciers and ocean currents, to reindeer, polar bears, and Arctic human health and social well-being.
The first polar year was more than a century ago, in 1882. Then, 11 countries set up research stations around the Arctic to collect and share scientific data. Similarly, after the current IPY finishes in March 2009, several meetings are expected to be held around the world to share the findings.
There’s no doubt now that some dramatic changes are taking place. In August 2005, a massive ice shelf collapsed into the sea off the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 kilometres south of the North Pole.
The force created when the mass of ice broke away – estimated to be the size of 11,000 football fields, or 66 square kilometres – was so powerful that earthquake monitors 250 kilometres away registered tremors from it. Scientists believe global climate change is a major contributing factor in what they said was the largest event of its kind in three decades.
Fourteen months later, in October 2006, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, released its new State of the Arctic report.
According to the study, warming continues in the Arctic with a drop in the amount of sea ice, an increase in shrubs growing on the tundra, and rising concerns about the Greenland ice sheet. The report also recorded an increase in northward movement of warmer water through the Bering Strait between 2001 and 2004.
With the aim of assessing climate change in the Arctic, the study was compiled by researchers from the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Poland, Norway, Sweden, and Russia.
At the same time, another biologist from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario discovered that Arctic ponds on Ellesmere Island were drying up. Those that are left have a higher salt content due to evaporation.
Professor John Smol and his co-worker Marianne Douglas, a University of Alberta earth and atmospheric sciences professor, have been monitoring the ponds for 24 years. In a Globe and Mail report they explained that the fresh water ponds are fragile ecosystems: their disappearance could have profound negative effects on the plants, organisms, and habitat, such as breeding seabirds, that depend on them as a source of fresh water.
Millions of the ponds appear between July and September in the Arctic. Prof. Smol likened the ponds to the miner’s canary: “Typically what happens in the Arctic is an early warning of what’s going to be happening in other places soon. What happens there affects us all.”
With Arctic climate change, the Inuit have had to come up with new words in Inuktitut for “sunburn” and “bumblebees.”
From 1970 to 2000, average temperatures in the Arctic increased 3.5 degrees, versus a global increase of 0.7 degrees, according to the Centre for Earth Observation Science at the University of Manitoba.
The Arctic covers more than one sixth of the Earth’s land mass; it has a population of about four million people, including more than 30 different Indigenous peoples and dozens of languages.
In March 2006, a sea ice specialist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, said the Arctic sea ice cover as of September 2005 was at its lowest extent since satellite monitoring began in 1979, and probably the lowest in 100 years.
The Ayles Ice Shelf, which is 15 kilometres long and five kilometres wide, has been drifting in the ocean since it broke off the northern edge of Ellesmere Island in 2005. It was the largest break-off event in the last 25 years. In the last century, about 90 percent of ice shelves have broken off and floated away, significantly changing the map of the Arctic.