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The front lines of climate change

by John Tracy
Monday, Feb. 11, 2008

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- It might be hard to believe at this time of year but the Arctic continues to warm and the impacts of that warming can no longer be denied.    

From melting permafrost to melting sea ice Alaska is on the front lines of the climate change debate. For many it's nothing new.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the Alaska Forum on the Environment. Hundreds of Alaskans are gathering throughout the week at some 80 seminars at the Egan Civic & Convention Center.      

An update on how climate change is affecting Alaska was delivered Monday. Scientists revealed that the state may soon become less isolated than it has ever been.     

For the next week, scientists, village leaders and Alaskans from all corners of the state will meet to learn more about the impact of global climate change on life in the Arctic. Scientists will then try to turn data into language average Alaskans can relate to.       

University of Washington climatologist Dr. Ignatius Rigor says wind patterns and warmer weather continue to expose more of the Arctic Ocean in the summer.

In 2005 a record amount of Arctic ice disappeared. Last summer the ice shrank by another 23 percent, an area the size of California and Texas combined.      

Rigor says the worst isn't over. The ice here is younger and thinner than ever before, he says.

"So if the average age of sea ice is 3 years right now, we're looking at 10, 20 years from now before see conditions we saw in the '80s again and it's hard to see that happening right now," Rigor said.

By now the polar bear has become the symbol of global climate change in the Arctic. The bears, it seems, are just the tip of the melting iceberg.

Nobody knows more about Alaska's polar bears than Dr. Steve Amstrup, who has studied them with the U.S. Geological Survey for years.

Amstrup says there's a 65 percent probability that Alaska's bears will disappear within the next 45 years, forced to retreat to new hunting grounds.

"Our hypothesis is that at some point, as the ice recedes farther and farther, that eventually the bears are going to decide that it's not worth the trip to come all the way to Alaska or all the way to the north slope of Russia," Amstrup said. "They'll try to find a home in the area of the Canadian Archipelago or around Greenland."

As the Arctic sea ice retreats Alaska could also become more than the air crossroads of the world. An open Arctic Ocean in summer and even thin winter ice could mean new shipping lanes between Asia and Europe, cutting off more than 40 percent of the travel distance.

New opportunities for commerce in turn mean new responsibilities for the Coast Guard, which may find itself policing a shipping super highway through the Bering Strait.

"We've already done forward deployments to Nome last summer, we'll be doing them again," said Coast Guard Adm. A.E. Brooks. "We're gonna need foreign deployments to Barrow, depending upon ship traffic along the North Slope. A lot of this is going to be driven by how many commercial ships are there and how much work is there for us to do."

The impact of increased shipping coupled with oil developments on polar bear populations remains largely unknown.

Dr. Amstrup says that onshore oil development has had no measurable impact on polar bear populations. The industry is hoping to explore and operate offshore in the bear's primary habitat.     

Amstrup says if operations are conducted in summer at the time the sea ice is gone there could be no disruption, because the bears won't be there. But in the winter it could have a greater impact.    

But he says so far as these operations making the melting worse he says from the projections that die has already been cast, and the additional activity would have little to no impact on the trend.     

If the models are correct there should be plenty of work to do. There was a sense of urgency amongst many participants at the forum, principally due to the loss of sea ice, which is 30 to 50 years ahead to projections.

Dr. Rigor says back in the 1980s the average age of the sea ice was ten years old. Even though this winter is definitely a cold one the ice is melting at lower temperatures than it has in the past, which is one reason he expects even less sea ice next summer.

Contact News Director John Tracy at jtracy@ktuu.com