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North Pole ice may completely melt away this summer

For the first time in modern history, the North Pole may be iceless this summer. Scientists say it’s an even bet that sea ice in the region will completely disappear in the next few months, perhaps as soon as August.

Ice at the North Pole quickly and significantly melted away last year, and that may be causing further melting this summer. Scientists say the disappearance of long-term and thicker ice formed over the years has disappeared. Now, most of the ice that’s left is seasonal ice, which melts away much more quickly during warm weather.

“This year there is a lot of young ice. There’s always some, but this year there’s a lot,” Andy Mahoney, a researcher at the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center, told CTV.ca.

Satellite observations indicate the ice remaining at the poles is melting faster than last year’s rate, which was already a record year for Arctic ice loss. Scientists say whether or not the ice melts completely, this year’s northern melt is yet another example of the impact that global warming is having on the planet’s environment.

“There were some people who were saying last year was a rogue year. If the same thing happens again a lot more people are going to be persuaded about the consequences of global warming,” Mahoney said.

“A lot of people think it’s a very small change in temperature. This shows that the change in sea ice is quite a dramatic consequence.”

As the ice melts, interest in the region is intensifying. Canada and other nations that border the Arctic — including Russia and the U.S. — are scrambling to lay claims to vast parts of the area, which may someday allow new resource development and shipping lanes.

“If the North Pole melts, then you don’t have to worry about the Northwest Passage. It will still be significant, but going on top of the globe would be politically easier,” Mahoney said.

A UN panel is supposed to decide on control of the Arctic by 2020. Last year, Canada’s Conservative government announced plans to acquire up to eight Arctic patrol ships and to build an army base in Resolute Bay and a naval station in Nanisivik.

Under the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, Arctic countries have 10 years after ratification to prove their claims under the largely uncharted polar ice pack. All countries with claims to the Arctic have ratified the treaty, with the exception of the United States.

(Source: http://www.ctv.ca)

Talks Al Gore: New thinking on the climate crisis

In Al Gore’s brand-new slideshow (premiering exclusively on TED.com), he presents evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than scientists were recently predicting, and challenges us to act with a sense of “generational mission” — the kind of feeling that brought forth the civil rights movement — to set it right. Gore’s stirring presentation is followed by a brief Q&A in which he is asked for his verdict on the current political candidates’ climate policies and on what role he himself might play in future.

The 11th Hour – Solutions to the environmental crisis

It is time for grassroots awakening. It is time that we pressure our politicians and stop having such a blind fate in them. We know they are controlled by large corporations. We can all make a difference, together. Sometimes, just sitting down and reflect upon our attitude, can quickly lead to solutions.

It is important not to let fear drive our lives, but to concentrate our energy on the solutions.

(See: http://wip.warnerbros.com/11thhour/)
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Huge Dust Plumes From China Cause Changes in Climate

One tainted export from China can’t be avoided in North America — air.

An outpouring of dust layered with man-made sulfates, smog, industrial fumes, carbon grit and nitrates is crossing the Pacific Ocean on prevailing winds from booming Asian economies in plumes so vast they alter the climate. These rivers of polluted air can be wider than the Amazon and deeper than the Grand Canyon.

“There are times when it covers the entire Pacific Ocean basin like a ribbon bent back and forth,” said atmospheric physicist V. Ramanathan at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.

On some days, almost a third of the air over Los Angeles and San Francisco can be traced directly to Asia. With it comes up to three-quarters of the black carbon particulate pollution that reaches the West Coast, Dr. Ramanathan and his colleagues recently reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

This transcontinental pollution is part of a growing global traffic in dust and aerosol particles made worse by drought and deforestation, said Steven Cliff, who studies the problem at the University of California at Davis.

Aerosols — airborne microscopic particles — are produced naturally every time a breeze catches sea salt from ocean spray, or a volcano erupts, or a forest burns, or a windstorm kicks up dust, for example. They also are released in exhaust fumes, factory vapors and coal-fired power plant emissions.

Over the Pacific itself, the plumes are seeding ocean clouds and spawning fiercer thunderstorms, researchers at Texas A&M University reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in March.

The influence of these plumes on climate is complex because they can have both a cooling and a warming effect, the scientists said. Scientists are convinced these plumes contain so many cooling sulfate particles that they may be masking half of the effect of global warming. The plumes may block more than 10% of the sunlight over the Pacific.

But while the sulfates they carry lower temperatures by reflecting sunlight, the soot they contain absorbs solar heat, thus warming the planet.

Asia is the world’s largest source of aerosols, man-made and natural. Every spring and summer, storms whip up silt from the Gobi desert of Mongolia and the hardpan of the Taklamakan desert of western China, where, for centuries, dust has shaped a way of life. From the dunes of Dunhuang, where vendors hawk gauze face masks alongside braided leather camel whips, to the oasis of Kashgar at the feet of the Tian Shan Mountains 1,500 miles to the west, there is no escaping it.

The Taklamakan is a natural engine of evaporation and erosion. Rare among the world’s continental basins, no river that enters the Taklamakan ever reaches the sea. Fed by melting highland glaciers and gorged with silt, these freshwater torrents all vanish in the arid desert heat, like so many Silk Road caravans.

Only the dust escapes.

In an instant, billows of grit can envelope the landscape in a mist so fine that it never completely settles. Moving east, the dust sweeps up pollutants from heavily industrialized regions that turn the yellow plumes a bruised brown. In Beijing, where authorities estimate a million tons of this dust settles every year, the level of microscopic aerosols is seven times the public-health standard set by the World Health Organization.

Once aloft, the plumes can circle the world in three weeks. “In a very real and immediate sense, you can look at a dust event you are breathing in China and look at this same dust as it tracks across the Pacific and reaches the United States,” said climate analyst Jeff Stith at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. “It is a remarkable mix of natural and man-made particles.”

This spring, Dr. Ramanathan and Dr. Stith led an international research team in a $1 million National Science Foundation project to track systematically the plumes across the Pacific. NASA satellites have monitored the clouds from orbit for several years, but this was the first effort to analyze them in detail.

For six weeks, the researchers cruised the Pacific aboard a specially instrumented Gulfstream V jet to sample these exotic airstreams. Their findings, to be released this year, involved NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and nine U.S. universities, as well as the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan, Seoul National University in Korea, and Lanzhou University and Peking University in China.

The team detected a new high-altitude plume every three or four days. Each one was up to 300 miles wide and six miles deep, a vaporous layer cake of pollutants. The higher the plumes, the longer they lasted, the faster they traveled and the more pronounced their effect, the researchers said.

Until now, the pollution choking so many communities in Asia may have tempered the pace of global warming. As China and other countries eliminate their sulfate emissions, however, world temperatures may heat up even faster than predicted.

(Source: http://online.wsj.com)

North Pole swim fights global warming

Canadian Press
July 16, 2007 at 11:31 AM EDT

TORONTO — A British swimmer who says he wants to wake politicians around the world up to the threat of climate change has successfully completed a kilometre-long swim in the freezing water of the North Pole.

Lewis Gordon Pugh swam Sunday for 18 minutes and 50 seconds in temperatures of –1.8 degrees in just a Speedo, cap and goggles.

“I am obviously ecstatic to have succeeded, but this swim is a triumph and a tragedy,” the 37-year-old British lawyer said after coming out of the water.

“A triumph that I could swim in such ferocious conditions but a tragedy that it’s possible to swim at the North Pole.”

Mr. Pugh said he hoped that his swim will make world leaders take climate change seriously.

“The decisions which they make over the next few years will determine the biodiversity of our world,” he said.

“I want my children, and their children, to know that polar bears are still living in the Arctic – these creatures are on the front line up here.”

Swimming has given him a unique perspective on climate change, Mr. Pugh said on his website.

“I have witnessed retreating glaciers, decreasing sea ice, coral bleaching, severe droughts and the migration of animals to colder climates.”

“It’s as a result of these experiences that I am determined to do my bit to raise awareness about the fragility of our environment and to encourage everyone to take action.”

Training for the challenge in northern Norway, Mr. Pugh said last month that he would place the flags of 10 countries at 100-metre intervals in the snow alongside his path through the water, representing the homes of the people on his team. The fifth flag would be Canada’s.

“Canada is so important to me. Your government has sort of lurched away from the environment a little bit. It’s a dream to try to get my message in to Canada,” Mr. Pugh said in June.

Calling it the hardest swim of his life, he said afterward that the water was black when he jumped in.

“It was like jumping into a dark black hole. It was frightening. The pain was immediate and felt like my body was on fire,” said Mr. Pugh, who is an ambassador for the World Wildlife Fund UK.

“I was in excruciating pain from beginning to end, and I nearly quit on a few occasions.”

Colin Butfield of WWF UK called the challenge “a bittersweet victory, as this swim has only been possible because of climate change.”

Mr. Pugh is known for his epic swims in waters from the Antarctic to the Indian Ocean.

(Source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com)

GLOBAL WARMING IS EVAPORATING ARCTIC PONDS: NEW STUDY

High Arctic ponds – the most common source of surface water in many polar regions – are now beginning to evaporate due to recent climate warming, say two of Canada’s leading environmental scientists.

Queen’s biology professor John Smol, Canada Research Chair in Environmental Change, and Marianne Douglas (professor of eEarth and aAtmospheric sSciences and director of the Canadian Circumpolar Institute at the University of Alberta) will publish their startling conclusions this week in the on-line edition of the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“The final ecological threshold for an aquatic ecosystem is loss of water,” says Dr. Smol. “These sites have now crossed that threshold.”

Since 1983, Drs. Smol and Douglas have been regularly sampling the water quality and biota of about 40 ponds on Cape Herschel, east-central Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian High Arctic. Polar ecosystems such as these are very sensitive to the effects of climatic and other environmental changes, they note in their paper. “In many respects, they are like the ‘miner’s canaries’ of the planet, showing the first signs of warming.”

But this new discovery by the Canadian researchers has surprised even them. In the 1990s they were alarmed when they began to recognize a trend of declining water levels and changes in water chemistry. When they arrived to begin another field season in July of 2006 (the warmest year on record for that portion of the Arctic), some of the ponds were dry, and others had dramatically reduced water levels.

“This study shows the value of long-term monitoring programs,” says Dr. Douglas. “Had we just arrived at Cape Herschel last year, we would have surmised that these were naturally temporary ponds. But we know instead that this was not the case – these had been permanent water bodies for millennia.”

As well as monitoring the ponds for 24 years, the researchers have also reconstructed ecological trends over the past several thousand years in some of the ponds, using paleoecological techniques. In a controversial 1994 paper published in the journal Science, they showed that the ponds existed for millennia, but that, beginning in the 19th century, they underwent marked ecological changes, consistent with warming.

“We had a bit of a rough ride with that paper for a few years, but now there is almost universal scientific consensus concerning our 1994 conclusions,” says Dr. Douglas. In 2005, she and Dr. Smol, along with 24 co-authors, used similar techniques to document widespread ecological changes, consistent with warming, across the circumpolar Arctic.

However, the ecological changes recorded in the 1994 study pale in comparison to those noted in the current paper, where some sites had completely dried up by July.

While some subarctic lakes have recently disappeared because the permafrost that formed a largely waterproof barrier has melted, this is not the case here, say Drs. Smol and Douglas. Instead, the high Arctic ponds are evaporating due to warming. By measuring changes in water quality over their 24-year sampling window, they have shown that the concentration of salts has been steadily increasing.

Using the analogy of a pot of soup simmering on a stove, Dr. Smol explains: ”If you take the lid off, it is similar to what we are observing in these ponds. The soup will slowly decrease in volume and it will get saltier and saltier as the water evaporates, leaving the salts behind.” The same process is happening with the Cape Herschel ponds, he continues. Water levels are declining and the remaining water is more concentrated with evaporation due to warming.

Another disturbing finding was the drying-up of neighbouring wetlands. In the 1980s, portions of their study region were also characterized by water-saturated wetlands, where the team would need to don hip waders to sample the surface pools of water persisting throughout the summer. However, in 2006, the wetlands had dried to such an extent that they could easily be ignited with a lighter. “The ecological consequences of shifting wetlands such as these from carbon sink to potential carbon sources are frightening,” they say.

Ponds, the dominant source of surface waters in many Arctic regions, are “hot spots” of biodiversity, as well as habitat for many birds, insects, and other organisms, the researchers point out. The resulting ecological changes will likely cascade throughout the ecosystem.

“In the past, researchers like us have sometimes been accused of being alarmist when we discussed climate warming,” says Dr. Smol, winner of the 2004 NSERC Herzberg Gold Medal as Canada’s top scientist or engineer. “We now think we have been overly optimistic – the speed and magnitude of environmental changes are worse than even we imagined!”

The research was funded primarily by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Polar Continental Shelf Project.

(Source: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/MediaAlerts/2007/2007070325354.html)

Arctic ocean history is deciphered by ocean-drilling research team

Sediment cores retrieved from the Arctic’s deep-sea floor by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program’s Arctic Coring Expedition (ACEX) have provided long-absent data to scientists who report new findings in the June 21 issue of Nature.

A team of ACEX researchers report that the Arctic Ocean changed from a landlocked body of water (a ‘lake stage’) through a poorly oxygenated ‘estuarine sea’ phase to a fully oxygenated ocean at 17.5 million years ago during the latter part of the early Miocene era.

The authors attribute the change in Arctic conditions to the evolution of the Fram Strait into a wider, deeper passageway that allowed an inflow of saline North Atlantic water into the Arctic Ocean. Scientists believe that the deep-water connection between the northern Atlantic and Arctic Oceans is a key driver of global ocean circulation patterns and global climate change.

In 2004, the offshore ACEX research team cored a 428-meter thick sediment sequence from the crest of the Lomonosov ridge in the central Arctic Ocean, near the North Pole. These sediments provide the first geological validation of the Cenezoic paleoenvironmental history of the Arctic Ocean. Current evidence of the onset of the ventilated circulation system is preserved in the chemical and physical properties and the micropaleontology of the recovered seafloor sediments.

Co-chief scientist Jan Backman, Stockholm University, comments on the significance of the new findings, saying, “If we can learn what has happened in the geological past, we can begin to use that knowledge to look into the future. Scientists engaged in climate change studies are advancing an important area of knowledge about the planet we live on.”

Source: Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Management International

(Source: http://www.physorg.com/news101566538.html)