Arctic thaw
Climate change is playing havoc with rare species and a proud way of life
'Eskimo? I must tell you. We are not Eskimos," says Percy Nusunginya, 63, president of the Inupiat tribal council in Barrow, Alaska, northernmost city in North America and home to 4,600 souls, mostly indigenous Alaskan natives, on a dusty gravel strand between vast tundra and the Arctic Ocean. "We are hyperboreans," the weather-beaten whaling captain says proudly over breakfast in tiny Osaka Restaurant. Nusunginya leans slowly forward with a small smile: "It's from the Greek. Hyperborean."
He has his etymology right, perhaps more than he realizes. Dictionaries show hyperborean as the general designation for high Arctic denizens. But the word has even greater resonance for today's environmentalists and scientists. In Greek myth, the Hyperboreans live in a warm, perpetually sunlit polar land beyond the north wind. That notion--of warmth in a polar land--is today becoming uncomfortably close to the truth.
Warmer winters. The Arctic's winter temperature is up 3 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century, twice as much as that of the rest of the Earth, and it is accelerating, Robert Corell, a senior fellow of the American Meteorological Society, told Congress earlier this year. Barrow hit an all-time high of 70 degrees when U.S. News visited the city in high summer. The Arctic regions of North America, Greenland, Europe, and much of Russia are all becoming demonstrably warmer.
Do these changes mean the Arctic as we know it is doomed? A team of 300 scientists led by Corell and representatives of native peoples in eight Arctic nations will try to answer that question in a 1,600-page Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report. A summary will be released next week. This comprehensive look at the Arctic's present and future, four years in the making, describes staggering losses: of permafrost, tundra--15 percent of Arctic tundra has vanished since the 1970s--and sea ice in summer, as well as the further waning of glaciers. The report warns of a grave depletion of signature species, including the caribou, walrus, and polar bear. The main culprit behind these changes: fossil fuels and greenhouse gases, in the view of the report's experts, who add that even the Kyoto pact to control emissions will not significantly slow the warming in the short run.
Good for shipping. In Fairbanks, Gunter Weller, recently retired from the University of Alaska--and the eight-nation report project's executive secretary--told U.S. News that the central Arctic could warm yet an additional 15 to 20 degrees by the end of this century, probably enough for a nearly ice-free summer polar ocean. "That would be good for shipping," he says, "but without ice, how can polar bears, walruses, seals, and so much else of the ecosystem survive?"
This year in Barrow, no ice drifted within sight of shore for days on end, a rarity even in summer. Strange flowers bloom in the tundra, and the permafrost that used to melt down about 6 inches in summer now retreats a foot or more. Once rare thunderstorms fueled by thermal updrafts sweep regularly across the summer sky.
"I grew up in Alaska and never went swimming in the ocean. It was too cold," says Anchorage author Charles Wohlforth, whose recent book The Whale and the Supercomputer richly chronicles the region's climate change from the perspectives of both native whale hunters and scientists. "This summer the kids and my wife and I went swimming in Prince William Sound. I got the same weird feeling that the [Inupiat] elders, who saw the change coming first, told me about."
Ask the native elders or others in Barrow, and they will confirm Wohlforth's observation. And now there are stark data to bolster years of anecdotal evidence. Last summer was Alaska's hottest ever, a pall of thick haze and rampaging fires that by late July reached all the way to America's East Coast. While blazes in Arizona and California made headlines, some 83 percent of the entire U.S. burn area was in Alaska, with nearly 6.4 million acres of the state's central and southeastern regions up in flames--not surprisingly, the state's worst burn season ever.
To complicate matters, the insects came fast and furious. Multiplying at unprecedented rates in the warmer weather, various leaf miners, bark beetles, sawflies, and other pests infested well over a million acres during the growing season, says state entomologist Roger Burnside.
University of Alaska forest ecologist Glenn Juday is convinced that the one-two punch of fires and bugs is a sign of climate change. He leads a visitor through the crackling-dry underbrush in a stand of spruce, birch, and poplar trees in the Bonanza Creek Experimental Forest and points out how moss, usually damp, crackles with each step. The air smells of roasted timber.
Defining moment. Canada's Inuit people are just as worried about the changes as their Eskimo relatives in Alaska. "I believe that we find ourselves at the very cusp of a defining moment in the history of the planet," Sheila Watt-Cloutier of Canada's far-north Nunavut Territory told a U.S. Senate hearing last month. She is chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, representing 155,000 indigenous peoples in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Russia. She grew up traveling by dog sled in northern Quebec and now fears that warming will destroy her ancient culture.
In Barrow, the weather regime has locals talking. Fishers are astounded by hundreds of salmon they are netting from nearby lagoons. Since fish do not spawn here and historically are rare this far north, relatives from south of the Bering Strait had to teach Barrow natives how to dry salmon on racks for curing. Porpoises were spotted offshore, another novelty.
A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office says 184 native Alaskan villages are threatened by severe flooding and erosion due in part to warming. Destruction of four seacoast villages is feared. One, Shishmaref, is on a rapidly disappearing coastal island in the Bering Sea. Its 562 people have voted to move to a new site a dozen miles across a lagoon.
Out in the Arctic Ocean itself, signs of change are everywhere. At the invitation of the National Science Foundation, U.S. News flew aboard a bright red U.S. Coast Guard helicopter to the 420-foot icebreaker Healy several dozen miles off Barrow for a five-day glimpse at scientific efforts to measure the profound changes underway in the region's marine ecosystem. A few patches of rapidly melting ice were no match for the ship's thick hull. The surface waters were much warmer than normal, running in the mid-40s rather than the more usual near-freezing temperatures.
Activity on deck and in laboratories below is continuous, with individual scientists often working 18-hour days. Dredges, nets, water samplers, seines, and instruments go in and out of the sea constantly to chart how nutrients cycle through a trench in the ocean floor called the Barrow Canyon that dissects the shallow continental shelf and runs into the abyssal deeps farther north.
"The dinner bell is ringing, that's for sure," says one of the 40-plus scientists on board, oceanographer Lou Codispoti of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. With more sunlight and a powerful current of warm Pacific water flowing into the region, the waters burst with microscopic life. Algae blooms are spreading north. Plankton species appear to be undergoing rapid changes, with southern types moving in rapidly.
Codispoti said one water sample had the highest oxygen content he'd ever heard of anywhere. The nutrient richness feeds clouds of flea-size copepods, the base of the animal food chain. "These things are basically sacks of fat," says Carin Ashjian of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution as she pointed to magnified images on a video screen in the ship's main lab.
The bounty in the increasingly open, ice-free sea may be why salmon are thronging Barrow's lagoons and may augur a full invasion of Pacific fish in regions that have had relatively few fish before, says Jackie Grebmeier of the University of Tennessee, organizer of the icebreaker-borne study.
Predators. The Arctic norm has been a "benthic ecosystem," with most of the action on the bottom, where crustaceans, mollusks, and marine worms abound. They in turn are the prime food source for walruses, many seals, and gray whales. New midwater predators could reduce the food reaching the bottom, making life tough for the Arctic's marine mammals.
More worrisome, says microbiologist Grebmeier, is that a future Arctic without a lid of ice near shore could shift ocean plants into deep water, further starving marine life in the shallows. Walruses and seals that use the ice as a foraging base and sanctuary for their young would find themselves unable to reach the bottom. And if the walruses and seals wane, so will the polar bears that eat them.
As for the bowhead whales, no one knows how their patterns may shift. To Nusunginya, the peril is clear. "If we don't adapt to this climate change, we may be at the end. We live off the land. For us the ice is an extension of the land." But Barrow's hunters are nothing if not resourceful and technically savvy. Most are optimistic that, just as they quickly embraced Yankee whale guns in the last century, they can devise new ways to find bowheads wherever they are. Nusunginya says, "Whatever it takes, boats with more range or bigger engines, we'll find them. We have no choice. It is in our blood."
Temperature Variations from 1951-to-1980 Average
(in Fahrenheit)
History shows that Arctic air-temperature variations exceed those of the globe as a whole. Computer models show that coming decades will bring even more dramatic warming. Floating sea ice is visibly shrinking already, and many researchers predict a mostly ice-free Arctic Ocean every summer by midcentury.
[chart labels]
1900; Global average; 1950; Warmer Arctic avg.; Cooler Arctic avg.; Since 1970, Arctic sea ice is 40 percent thinner; 2000
-3.0
-2.0
-1.0
0
1.0
2.0
3.0
Sources: Goddard Institute for Space Studies, National Snow and Ice Data Center
Rob Cady--USN&WR
Arctic Ocean map
[Map labels]:
Current ice extent
Average ice extent (1979-2000)
UNITED STATES
CANADA
RUSSIA
GREENLAND
Barrow
ALASKA
Arctic Circle
Sources: Goddard Institute for Space Studies, National Snow and Ice Data Center
Rob Cady--USN&WR
This story appears in the November 8, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.