- 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
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=472049
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