sourceAlaska 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.
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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.
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So far, the greatest effect on forests[from melting permafrost] 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.
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The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment is "[a]n international project of the Arctic Council and the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC), to evaluate and synthesize knowledge on climate variability, climate change, and increased ultraviolet radiation and their consequences.
The Arctic Council is a high-level intergovernmental forum. The members are Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, the Russian Federation, Sweden, and the United States of America."
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Or we can build huge dykes. ut that would ruin Amsterdam because you cant do that for holland..
