Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
Oil-soaked sand along Gulf Coast raises memories of Exxon Valdez
A handful of oily sand grabbed from a Louisiana wetland brought back some strong memories for Earl Kingik. As a traditional hunter and whaler in Alaska’s Arctic, it reminded him of the Exxon Valdez spill. As he and other tribal leaders toured the U.S. Gulf Coast for signs of the BP oil spill, they worried that what’s happening now in Louisiana could happen if offshore drilling proceeds off the Alaskan coast.
“There’s no way to clean up an oil spill in the Arctic,” said Kingik, an Inupiat tribal member from Point Hope, Alaska. Compared to Louisiana, where the waters are relatively calm and cleanup equipment and experts are nearby, the Arctic Ocean is a hostile place for oil and gas exploration. The Arctic leaders made their pilgrimage to the Gulf Coast as part of a campaign to block planned exploratory drilling by Shell Oil in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas.
“What I saw was devastating out there,” Martha Falk, the tribal council treasurer of the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope in Alaska, said after the Gulf Coast tour by seaplane, boat and on foot. If the same thing occurred off Alaska, she said, “We would have to wait days and days and days for (cleanup) equipment to reach our area.”
The planned start of Alaska offshore drilling in July coincides with the spring hunt of the bowhead whale, a central event in the Inupiat culture, Falk said.
“The natural smell of the ocean was non-existent” along the Gulf Coast, said Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, an Inupiat from Nuiqsut, a tiny Alaskan village near the Beaufort Sea. She was brought close to tears as she recalled the faces of the Gulf residents she saw on the tour. “It is a strong burden that I’ll carry with me the rest of my life.”
The Arctic native people headed for Washington DC after their Gulf Coast tour to plead their case with members of Congress and Obama administration officials. The three members of the Alaskan congressional delegation generally favor offshore drilling as a way to ensure jobs and the continued operation of the Trans-Alaska pipeline. As a former mayor of her village, Rosemary Ahtuangaruak admits it’s a tough balancing act to juggle the oil industry’s potential impact on tribal culture with the creation of jobs for tribe members.
Environmental activists and members of Congress wrote to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar urging him to suspend Shell’s drilling plans in the Arctic Ocean, which includes the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. Salazar and others have said no new drilling will be approved until May 28, when a report on the BP spill is due.
Arctic expedition reaches the ice
U.S. and Russian scientists exploring the Arctic ocean finally reached ice on Monday, about 435 miles (700 km) northwest of Barrow, Alaska.
On a year when the Arctic sea ice has receded in the summer to its third-smallest on record, researchers on the RUSALCA expedition got the opportunity to study the water, sea life and the ocean floor at a location where there is rarely open water.
The mission’s science chief, Terry Whitledge, said it he did not expect explore such a northerly location without an icebreaker.
The team took core samples from the seabed, more than 600 metres (1,968 feet) down from the surface.
“We think that is our biggest scientific gain,” Whitledge, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said by satellite phone from the bridge of the research vessel Professor Khromov.
The scientists are on a six-week expedition through the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea, coordinated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Russian Academy of Sciences, to gauge the impact of climate change on the region.
The weather has been mostly moderate for the time of year, but one recent Russian cold front made work on the ship tough by icing up the deck and freezing up some gear used to lower equipment into the ocean, Whitledge said.
Tasty find for Russian researchers in Alaska
You have to be creative when you’re a Russian scientist, bad weather is preventing your research ship from picking you up for your expedition and you’ve got time to kill in Nome, Alaska.
Such was the case for a group waiting to begin a joint mission with U.S. researchers in the Bering Sea in late August.
But a side trip into the rolling, lichen-covered hills around Nome, the one-time gold rush town on the Alaskan coast, proved to be more than worth their while for the prize they stumbled upon — mushrooms.
A hillside was spotted with the large, red-topped variety Russians crave in soup or fried with onions and potatoes. Thrilled, the team fanned out to gather armfuls of the fungi.
The scientists are part of the RUSALCA expedition, brought together by the Russian Academy of Sciences and U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They will spend the next month and a half studying the impact of climate change on the water, air and organisms in the body of water between the two countries.
But today is about mushrooms, and there’s no concern whatsoever about anyone mistakenly plucking a poisonous one. “Russians know what these mushrooms look like,” said Elizaveta Ershova, a zooplankton specialist.
The plan is to give them to the chefs on the research ship Professor Khromov, after it finally enters port to load people and gear, to whip up a dinner with the delicacy.
Large red topped mushrooms in British Columbia, adjacent to Alaska are highly poisonous. We call them Amanitas, also called Fly Agaric.
Seas rise — vast amounts of ice melt for every 1 mm gain
It takes the equivalent of a massive chunk of ice of 390 cubic kms (150 cubic miles) to raise world sea levels by one millimetre, according to David Carlson, director of the International Programme Office of the International Polar Year.
As an example, he says that works out as a lump 39 kms long, 10 wide and 1 km thick. Or I reckon it could be a blockbuster ice cube with sides 7.3 kms long — that would smother most of a large city such as Paris (top left — you can see the Eiffel Tower in the middle).
David’s numbers give an idea of the scale of the thaw under way — seas have been rising at about 3 millimetres a year in recent years in a trend that almost all climate scientists blame on global warming caused by human activities. That’s equivalent to a rate of 30 cms a century.
And it’s also a lot faster than a rise of 1.8 mm a year from the 1960s, according to the U.N. Climate Panel. The thaw is one of the spurs to action under plans for a new U.N. treaty to fight global warming due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December.
Some scientists reckon seas could rise by one metre this century. Most of the rise projected by 2100, however, is likely because water expands as it gets warmer, rather than because of a thaw of glaciers or of ice sheets smothering Greenland or Antarctica.
One bit of good news on the ice front is that it looks as if sea ice in the Arctic will not shrink to a new record low this summer, after 2007 marked the smallest since satellite records began in the 1970s (and probably a lot longer than that).
Ice shrinks to its annual low in September before freezing out again: so far the ice is still far bigger than in 2007 at the same time although it is also far smaller than the 1979-2000 average, according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center. And ice floating on the sea doesn’t really contribute to raising sea levels — it’s effectively part of the water already.
Why do you continue to refer to the term “Global Warming” when NASA and several CREDIBLE scientists have proven the earth has cooled each of at least the last nine years? This is irresponsible journalism at best and outright bias in reporting at worst. Mother Earth worshipers have changed the term to “Climate Change” because they can no longer call it “Global Warming”. But isn’t that just another word for “weather”? Oh, how the politically correct have taken over. Also, it is VERY clear science that even grade schoolers know, that melting ice does not increase water levels. Do the simple science experiment yourself with a glass or bowl of water and some ice cubes. Also, where is the mention that the ice in antartica is actually INCREASING? The only things the scientists have to “predict” the future are overly complex computer models. Who says these models are right? Them? Who funds them? The government? Al Gore? The end result is that those same models FAILED to predict the Global COOLING that has happened in the past few years. That tells me the models and flawed and therefore, the whole argument is questionable. 90% of the scientists? NO! This also is a misstatement and no fact.
