http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=472049
The Independent
11 December 2003
North Pole's
Ice Cap Is Thawing Fast
It is one of mankind's
final frontiers, a place of extreme cold
and extraordinary beauty. But the North Pole's icecap is thawing
fast. And many of us will live to see it disappear altogether.
By Steve Connor
The frozen north is
under threat. The land of ice and snow,
of the Aurora borealis light shows and a jovial white-haired
chap in a red outfit with white trim, is melting so fast that
scientists predict a completely ice-free North Pole by the
end of this century. That hasn't happened since the warm
"interglacial' period before the last Ice Age - 30,000 years
ago.
The dramatic change
is already being felt by the region's
dwindling population of 22,000 polar bears, whose springtime
hunting grounds are literally melting away. They and the
seals on which they feed can no longer rely on the vast
frozen landscape that is crucial for their survival.
Then there are the
indigenous Arctic peoples, loosely and
incorrectly called Eskimo (the name means "raw-meat eater"
and is considered pejorative by many native Inuit), whose
way of life is also becoming untenable - groups such as
the Saami, Aleut, Athabascan, Eyak and Metis, each with
their own culture and traditions honed by generations of
ancestors who learnt to exist in a climate so cold that
it can instantly freeze human breath.
Five years ago, the
native people in Alaska began to voice
their concerns about changes to their Arctic homeland.
In a Greenpeace report called Answers from the Ice Edge,
they gave worrying personal testimonies about the retreat
of the sea ice. "For some odd reason the ugruks [bearded
seals]
that we hunt are further out there," said Gibson Moto, an
Inupiat from the Alaskan village of Deering.
Benjamin Neakok, who
lives in the northern Alaskan outpost
of Point Lay, had his own concerns. "It makes it hard to
hunt in fall time when the ice starts forming," he said.
"It's kind of dangerous to be out. It's not really sturdy.
And after it freezes there's always some open spots.
Sometimes it doesn't freeze up until January."
These comments illustrate
what the Arctic really is.
The land of ice and snow is in fact a huge basin of
floating sea-ice bordered by Greenland, Canada, Alaska,
Siberia and Scandinavia. Sea ice exists all year round,
but it thickens during the intensely cold Arctic winters,
and melts away again during the long summer days of
24-hour sunlight.
But a warmer climate
means that the summer melting
period is getting longer - by about an extra five
days every decade. As a result, the amount of sea ice
left at the end of each summer has fallen significantly
over the past 50 years. Using computer models, scientists
at the Met Office predict the appearance of a totally
ice-free North Pole by as soon as the summer of 2080,
the fastest period of Arctic melting on record.
The polar bears and
seals are not the only wildlife
facing extinction. The Arctic is home to a unique range
of marine animals, such as the narwhal with its long,
unicorn-like tooth, the whiskered walrus and the white
beluga whale. More than 150 species of fish are known
to live in the Arctic Ocean, as do many rare birds
such as auks and ivory gulls. Nobody can predict what
an ice-free sea will do to them.
Signs that something
was happening to the North Pole
appeared in the late 1980s. The huge, nuclear-powered
Russian ice-breaker, the Arctika, became the first
surface ship to reach the geographic North Pole during
a voyage in the summer of 1987. Now, it is common for
tourists to sail to the North Pole through the thin
summer ice.
Once, the Arctic was
almost the sole preserve of the
military. Its strategic position, straddling the top
of the world between the two nuclear superpowers,
meant that the region was a playground in which the
cold warriors acted out their war games. The American
nuclear-powered submarine USS Nautilus made the first
under-ice journey to the North Pole in 1958. Russia,
too, made secret forays, and Britain followed suit
in 1971 with a voyage by HMS Dreadnought, the country's
first nuclear-powered sub.
Unlike the old diesel-powered
subs, which had to surface
regularly to recharge their batteries, nuclear-powered
vessels can stay underwater for much longer periods,
making it possible to travel many thousands of miles
beneath the thick sea ice. Occasionally, when the ice
was thin enough, these submarines would surface,
as Dreadnought did in 1971 near the geographic pole.
Such stopovers boosted the morale of the crew, who
could walk around or play football on top of the icecap.
The thickness of the
polar ice was a critically important
piece of information for the submarine captains. The
Americans handed the task of calculating it to an
"ice pilot", a naval officer with a knowledge of
how to interpret the data from the submarine's
upward-pointing sonar instruments. On British
submarines, the task was carried out by a civilian
scientist from the Scott Polar Research Institute
in Cambridge. Peter Wadhams of the Dunstaffnage
Marine Laboratory in Oban, who is also professor
of ocean physics at Cambridge University, has
probably carried out more Arctic submarine trips
than any civilian scientist.
Wadhams, who grew up
near the docks in Tilbury, Essex,
had always yearned to go to sea. After graduation,
he signed up for a scientific expedition that took
him around the entire coastline of North and South
America - the first ever circumnavigation of the Americas.
The subject of his doctorate was the Arctic sea ice,
a relatively unknown subject in the 1970s. Thirty years
ago, the talk was not of global warming, but global
cooling. "There was a somewhat irrational fear that
the world was heading for another Ice Age," Wadhams
recalls. Another Ice Age is indeed on the cards,
but probably not for another 10,000 years or so.
This concern meant
that sea ice came into vogue
in the late 1960s. Iceland had experienced three
consecutive years of being ice-bound. It feared
that its ports would become as paralysed in winter
as those used by Russia's Northern Fleet, based
in the high Arctic port of Murmansk. Such was the
fear of a new Ice Age that Iceland held an international
conference on sea ice in 1971 - the last year, as
it turned out, that its ports were to freeze up.
Wadhams had chosen
his specialism wisely. There was
still much to learn about the nature of the Arctic's
sea ice, the precise physics of its formation and the
role it played in the wider climate of the region,
and indeed the world. But what began to emerge from
the submarine data was to overshadow other scientific
findings. By the 1990s, it was apparent that the
Arctic ice was getting thinner. Two teams of scientists
had come to almost identical conclusions about the
state of the polar icecap.
The Americans analysed
data from submarine trips made
between 1958-76 and 1993-1997, and found that the sea
ice had thinned by 42 per cent. The British found a
similar degree of thinning - 43 per cent - when they
compared sonar data gathered in 1976 and 1996. The
latest estimates suggest that the Arctic sea-ice
has reduced from an average thickness of four metres
to about 2.7 metres over the past 30 years. Satellite
pictures of the surface area of the ice confirmed
an overall shrinking of ice cover of about 4 per
cent per decade.
What's most worrying
about the data gathered over
the past few decades is that the process appears
to be entirely one-way. The Arctic is now warming up
at a rate eight times faster than at any time over
the past century, according to Mark Serreze, a satellite
analyst at the University of Colorado. Summer this year
was as bad as that of 2002, which itself set a record
for high temperatures. Summers are not only longer;
they are warmer, with temperatures rising by about
1.2C each decade. "In other words, we have not seen
a recovery; what we are seeing reinforces that general
trend," says Serreze.
What does all this
mean for the North Pole, the indigenous
people of the Arctic and its wildlife? Wadhams says there
will be winners and losers. Among the benefits will be
the opening of the northern sea route to all-year shipping,
shortening the shipping distance between Japan and Europe
by thousands of miles and providing a huge boost to the
economy of Russia, which will control the sea lanes.
Another possible benefit
is the melting of the ice
in the Barents Sea, probably the coolest, purest and
richest sea in the world. With little or no all-year
ice cover, marine life will benefit from an increase
in sunlight and phytoplankton, triggering the growth
of even richer fishing grounds for cod and other
commercial species.
But Wadhams points
to a darker side. He says that
about 7 per cent of the Earth's surface is covered
by sea ice, much of it in the Arctic. Without sea ice,
the planet would be a very different place. "The
ice-covered seas represent the cold end of the enormous
heat engine that enables the Earth to have temperatures
suitable for human life over most of its surface,"
he explains.
The greatest fear is
that the melting of the Arctic
could disturb the ocean currents that flow like conveyor
belts carrying heat from one part of the globe to another.
For Britain, the most important current is the Gulf
Stream, which brings heat from the Caribbean and ensures
relatively mild winters. Without this, Britain would
suffer the same bitterly cold winters as Newfoundland,
which is at the same latitude but does not benefit from
the Gulf Stream.
What worries scientists
is that the engine driving the
global conveyor belt might shut down. For instance,
when sea ice forms it rejects salt, causing salinity
in the surrounding water to rise. This cold, dense water
sinks to the seabed, allowing warmer, less salty water
to move in at the surface, driving the overall movement
of the conveyor belt. If sea ice fails to form the
process could end - and indeed it is already showing
signs of slowing down.
Wadhams says he has
recorded the disappearance of one
important geographical feature that has played a critical
role in this process. The Odden ice tongue was a huge
spit of ice that formed off eastern Greenland each winter.
The ice produced by the annual growth of the tongue was
important to the ocean's circulation - yet it has
disappeared. "There probably won't ever be a recovery
of the Odden ice tongue in the Greenland Sea. It was
last seen in 1997," Wadhams says.
So the Arctic has changed
in a single generation, and
will continue to change for the foreseeable future.
One day this century the ice at the North Pole in summer
will disappear entirely - and its disappearance could
mark the beginning of a far more serious change for the
rest of the world.
###
