Arctic Ice Disappearing Fast
Ice defines the Arctic. It determines what exists, and how. It shapes the region’s culture and history. It’s highway, birthing ground and hunting platform. It’s what tourists clamour for, and artists strive to paint. It has helped to forge Canada’s identity as a cold, northern nation of strong, resourceful survivors.
It is disappearing.
In Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut territory, locals report the harbour was clear nearly a month early this year. At the wharf, an Inuit family, tying up after a four-day hunting trip, say they’d seen no seal. The animal needs ice, and the ice was long gone.
» Source: TheStar.com
Northern temperatures were 2.5C above normal this summer. The ice cap that floats on the polar ocean is now 14 per cent smaller than in 1978, and 20 per cent thinner than the four-decade average.
The Arctic will continue to deep freeze in winter. But scientists predict that by 2050 — possibly sooner — it will be ice-free all summer.
They blame global warming caused by emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from cars, power plants and other human activities. It’s having a bigger impact at the poles than anywhere else.
Canada’s Arctic is changing in any case. It’s primitive and pristine compared with the polar regions of Russia and Europe, but plans are afoot for mines, ports, roads and oil and gas developments. Technology and tourism are importing more of the outside world.
Global warming will speed all that, by making access easier. But scientists predict it will do far more: As the ice goes, the Arctic in its present form — its environment and way of life — will vanish.
Most Arctic residents want economic development, and many relish the prospect of a barbecue season.
“We’ve had a beautiful two months,” says Simon Awa, deputy environment minister for Nunavut, which covers the eastern half of Canada’s Arctic. He lives in Iqaluit, home to 9,000 of the territory’s 28,000 residents.
“It’s a lot warmer now; the summers are longer, which is very enjoyable.”
And like the rest of Earth, the North is never static. Millions of years ago, it was covered by tropical forest and ocean. In recent times, it has cycled through warm and cool spells. Plant and animal species came and went. Waves of people, too, swept over the land, then were swept away by others whose survival skills were more in sync with the shifting climate and landscape.
So, even without our greenhouse gases, change would come again to this little known and magical landscape. But it would be part of a natural process. It might get cooler, or warmer, and whatever happens would take centuries, or millennia.
We are heating the Arctic with unprecedented haste, and melting the ice. Increasingly unpredictable, it’s already a threat to animals and Inuit hunters.
The ultimate consequences for them, and the rest of the planet, are uncertain, but here’s what is expected:
Arctic species will go extinct.
The Inuit will lose their major current food source and, with it, much of their culture.
Sea level will rise dramatically.
Global warming will intensify, since open water absorbs far more of the sun’s heat than ice does. That means more of the mix of storms, drought, heating and chilling predicted around the globe.
One thing, though, is sure, says Peter Middleton, another naturalist on the Ioffe. No matter what humans do, no matter how big a mess we make, something will remain.
“It just might not be us.”
