http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0731-04.htm
Published on Thursday,
July 31, 2003 by the Knight Ridder Newspapers
Alaskan Warming is Disturbing Preview
of What's to Come, Scientists Say
by Seth Borenstein
[ See
photograph of calves of ice from original article... ]
CAPTION #1:
"Global warming has caused the Columbia Glacier to retreat
7 miles in the last 20 years, leaving calves of ice in
Prince William Sound. Seth Borenstein, KRT."
[ See
photograph of open water where there should be a glacier from
original article... ]
CAPTION #2:
"In 1986 the federal government built an $8 million visitors
center here next to the Portage Glacier. The glacier is
no longer visible from the visitors center. Seth Borenstein, KRT"
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Alaska is melting.
Glaciers are receding. Permafrost is thawing. Roads are collapsing.
Forests are dying. Villages are being forced to move, and animals
are being forced to seek new habitats.
What's happening in
Alaska is a preview of what people farther
south can expect, said Robert Corell, a former top National
Science Foundation scientist who heads research for the Arctic
Climate Impact Assessment team.
"If
you want to see what will be happening in the rest of the
world 25 years from now, just look at what's happening in the
Arctic," Corell said.
Alaska and the Arctic
are warming up fast, top international
scientists will tell senior officials from eight Arctic
countries at a conference in Iceland next week. They will
disclose early, disturbing findings from a massive study
of polar climate change.
In Alaska, year-round
average temperatures have risen
by 5 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1960s, and average
winter temperatures soared 8 degrees in that period,
according to the federal government. The entire world
is expected to warm by 2.5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit
by 2100, predict scientists at the International Panel
on Climate Change.
2002 was the hottest
year in Alaskan history, and this
past winter was the second warmest on record, according
to the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.,
which found that Alaskan temperatures began to rise
dramatically in 1976. This July, Anchorage recorded
its second highest temperature ever as tourists got
suntans.
Deborah Williams, the
executive director of the Alaska
Conservation Foundation, used to take visitors from the
Lower 48 to the famous Portage Glacier just outside
Anchorage, where the $8 million Begich-Boggs visitor
center opened in 1986. By 1993, the Portage glacier
had receded so much that it no longer could be seen
from the visitors' center. Williams still takes visitors
to the site, seeing the glacier's retreat as a warning.
"Alaska is the
melting tip of the iceberg, the panting
canary," said Williams, who was the chief Interior
Department official for Alaska during the Clinton
administration.
Portage is "a
glacier that's almost out of water;
it's thinned dramatically," said U.S. Geological
Survey geologist Bruce Molnia, the author of the
book "Glaciers of Alaska." About 98 percent
of
Alaska's glaciers are retreating or stagnant,
he said.
Alaskan glaciers add
13.2 trillion gallons of
melted water to the seas each year - the equivalent
of more than 13 million Olympic-sized swimming pools,
University of Alaska in Fairbanks scientists concluded
after a decade of studying glaciers with airborne
lasers. The rate of glacier run-off has doubled over
just a few decades, they found. Alaska's melting
glaciers are the No. 1 reason the oceans are rising,
Molnia said.
Another frozen staple
of Alaska's northernmost lands
- permafrost - is also thawing and "is probably the
biggest problem on land," said Gunter Weller, director
of the Center for Global Change and Arctic System
Research at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.
Permafrost is land
that stays frozen year-round.
Villages rely on the hard permafrost to prevent
beach erosion from violent ocean storms. Two Alaskan
native villages, Shishmaref and Kivalina, must relocate
because melting permafrost has caused beach erosion,
leaving the towns vulnerable to severe storms.
About 600 people
live in 150 homes in Shishmaref,
a centuries-old village on a barrier island just
south of the Arctic Circle. On the island's northern
edge, erosion is so severe that the village voted
to move two years ago, but villagers haven't been
able to find a new site or money to finance the
massive undertaking, said Percy Nayokpuk, president
of the Shishmaref Native Corporation.
"It's
a matter of safety," Nayokpuk said. "We're on
this small low island. One bad storm could possibly
wipe out the village. There is nowhere to run."
Melting permafrost
also means trouble for the oil industry.
Oil companies build pipelines and roads on it to support
drilling on the North Shore. To minimize damage to Arctic
tundra, oil companies explore for oil on Alaska's North
Slope only when roads are frozen with a foot of ice and
six inches of snow. The ice-road season has dropped from
200 days a year in 1970 to 103 days in 2002, according
to Alaska state documents.
"It is unlikely
the oil industry can implement successful
exploration and development plans with a winter work season
consistently less than 120 days," an Alaska Department of
Natural Resources budget document said in March.
While global warming
is hurting oil drilling, it's the
increased burning of fossil fuels such as oil that causes
global warming. In June, the Department of Energy announced
that it would spend $270,000 to help Alaska rewrite
its rules about how thick ice roads should be.
Permafrost lies under
166 Alaskan towns and 1,700 miles
of Alaskan highways. Melting is causing whole chunks of
the Alaska Highway to come apart, state officials said
at a January global-warming conference.
Permafrost is melting
"under forests as well as under
buildings and roads," said atmospheric scientist Michael
MacCracken, who headed federal climate-change studies
in the 1990s.
So far, the greatest
effect on forests has come from
the spruce-bark beetle, according to Glenn Juday,
a professor of forest ecology at the University of
Alaska at Fairbanks. The beetle, which kills spruce
trees, has long lived in Alaska's forests, but normally
takes two years to grow and reproduce; cold spells
cut their numbers.
With global warming,
however, the beetles now are damaging
as many trees each year as they used to ruin in two,
Juday said. More than 4 million acres of spruce - Alaska's
predominant tree - have been killed, especially on the
Kenai Peninsula.
"It's the largest
episode of insect-caused tree mortality
ever recorded in North America," Juday said.
The spruce-bark beetle
isn't alone. Other tree-killing
invaders made welcome by warmer weather include the
larch soft fly, the aspen leaf miner and the birch
leaf roller, Juday said.
As Alaska's climate
gets warmer and drier, Juday's
studies indicate, black and white spruces, which
make up 80 percent of the state's main forests,
won't survive. By the turn of the next century,
Alaska's forests will resemble the Aspen-treed
grasslands along the northern edge of the Great Plains
in North Dakota and Montana, Juday said.
Some scientific reports
also blame global warming
for plummeting herring and salmon populations,
Williams said. In the Yukon River, a warm-water parasite
has infected salmon and herring, a key food source for
marine mammals such as the stellar sea lion.
Warm waters have made
Alaska's Bristol Bay salmon
runs occur earlier than normal, making it harder
for the salmon to survive, said Alaska Department
of Fish and Game biologist Slim Morstad.
In addition, warm-weather
wildlife, such as moose
and beaver, are heading unusually far north, while
species that require frigid weather "don't have
anywhere to move to," said scientist MacCracken.
Marine mammals such as walruses, ring seals and
polar bears may soon see their numbers shrink along
with the Arctic ice, Weller said.
Copyright 2003 Knight-Ridder
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