The Big Thaw
As the climate warms, how much, and how quickly, will Earth's
glaciers melt?
BYDANIEL GLICK
"If we don't have it, we don't need it," pronounces Daniel Fagre
as we throw on our backpacks. We're armed with crampons, ice
axes, rope, GPS receivers, and bear spray to ward off grizzlies,
and we're trudging toward Sperry Glacier in Glacier National
Park, Montana. I fall in step with Fagre and two other research
scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey Global Change
Research Program. They're doing what they've been doing for
more than a decade: measuring how the park's storied glaciers
are melting.
So far, the results have been positively chilling. When President
Taft created Glacier National Park in 1910, it was home to an
estimated 150 glaciers. Since then the number has decreased to
fewer than 30, and most of those remaining have shrunk in area
by two-thirds. Fagre predicts that within 30 years most if not all
of the park's namesake glaciers will disappear.
"Things that normally happen in geologic time are happening
during the span of a human lifetime," says Fagre. "It's like
watching the Statue of Liberty melt."
Scientists who assess the planet's health see indisputable
evidence that Earth has been getting warmer , in some cases
rapidly. Most believe that human activity, in particular the
burning of fossil fuels and the resulting buildup of greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere, have influenced this warming trend.
In the past decade scientists have documented record-high
average annual surface temperatures and have been observing
other signs of change all over the planet: in the distribution of
ice, and in the salinity, levels, and temperatures of the oceans.
"This glacier used to be closer," Fagre declares as we crest a
steep section, his glasses fogged from exertion. He's only half
joking. A trailside sign notes that since 1901, Sperry Glacier has
shrunk from more than 800 acres (320 hectares) to 300 acres
(120 hectares). "That's out of date," Fagre says, stopping to
catch his breath. "It's now less than 250 acres (100 hectares)."
Everywhere on Earth ice is changing. The famed snows of
Kilimanjaro have melted more than 80 percent since 1912.
Glaciers in the Garhwal Himalaya in India are retreating so fast
that researchers believe that most central and eastern
Himalayan glaciers could virtually disappear by 2035. Arctic
sea ice has thinned significantly over the past half century, and
its extent has declined by about 10 percent in the past 30 years.
NASA's repeated laser altimeter readings show the edges of
Greenland's ice sheet shrinking. Spring freshwater ice breakup
in the Northern Hemisphere now occurs nine days earlier than
it did 150 years ago, and autumn freeze-up ten days later.
Thawing permafrost has caused the ground to subside more
than 15 feet (4.6 meters) in parts of Alaska. From the Arctic to
Peru, from Switzerland to the equatorial glaciers of Man Jaya in
Indonesia, massive ice fields, monstrous glaciers, and sea ice
are disappearing, fast.
When temperatures rise and ice melts, more water flows to the
seas from glaciers and ice caps, and ocean water warms and
expands in volume. This combination of effects has played the
major role in raising average global sea level between four and
eight inches (10 and 20 centimeters) in the past hundred years,
according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC).
Scientists point out that sea levels have risen and fallen
substantially over Earth's 4.6-billion-year history. But the
recent rate of global sea level rise has departed from the
average rate of the past two to three thousand years and is
rising more rapidly—about one-tenth of an inch a year. A
continuation or acceleration of that trend has the potential to
cause striking changes in the world's coastlines.
Driving around Louisiana's Gulf Coast, Windell Curole can see
the future, and it looks pretty wet. In southern Louisiana coasts
are literally sinking by about three feet (a meter) a century , a
process called subsidence. A sinking coastline and a rising
ocean combine to yield powerful effects. It's like taking the
global sea-level-rise problem and moving it along at fast-
forward.
The seventh-generation Cajun and manager of the South
Lafourche Levee District navigates his truck down an unpaved
mound of dirt that separates civilization from inundation, dry
land from a swampy horizon. With his French-tinged lilt,
Curole points to places where these bayous, swamps, and
fishing villages portend a warmer world: his high school
girlfriend's house partly submerged, a cemetery with water
lapping against the white tombs, his grandfather's former
hunting camp now afloat in a stand of skeleton oak snags. "We
live in a place of almost land, almost water," says the 52-year-
old Curole.
Rising sea level, sinking land, eroding coasts, and
temperamental storms are a fact of life for Curole. Even
relatively small storm surges in the past two decades have
overwhelmed the system of dikes, levees, and pump stations
that he manages, upgraded in the 1990s to forestall the Gulf of
Mexico's relentless creep. "I've probably ordered more
evacuations than any other person in the country," Curole says.
The current trend is consequential not only in coastal Louisiana
but around the world. Never before have so many humans lived
so close to the coasts: More than a hundred million people
worldwide live within three feet (a meter) of mean sea level.
Vulnerable to sea-level rise, Tuvalu, a small country in the
South Pacific, has already begun formulating evacuation plans.
Megacities where human populations have concentrated near
coastal plains or river deltas—Shanghai, Bangkok, Jakarta,
Tokyo, and New York—are at risk. The projected economic and
humanitarian impacts on low-lying, densely populated, and
desperately poor countries like Bangladesh are potentially
catastrophic. The scenarios are disturbing even in wealthy
countries like the Netherlands, with nearly half its landmass
already at or below sea level.
Rising sea level produces a cascade of effects. Bruce Douglas, a
coastal researcher at Florida International University,
calculates that every inch (2.5 centimeters) of sea-level rise
could result in eight feet (2.4 meters) of horizontal retreat of
sandy beach shorelines due to erosion. Furthermore, when salt
water intrudes into freshwater aquifers, it threatens sources of
drinking water and makes raising crops problematic. In the Nile
Delta, where many of Egypt's crops are cultivated, widespread
erosion and saltwater intrusion would be disastrous since the
country contains little other arable land.
In some places marvels of human engineering worsen effects
from rising seas in a warming world. The system of channels
and levees along the Mississippi effectively stopped the
millennia-old natural process of rebuilding the river delta with
rich sediment deposits. In the 1930s oil and gas companies
began to dredge shipping and exploratory canals, tearing up the
marshland buffers that helped dissipate tidal surges. Energy
drilling removed vast quantities of subsurface liquid, which
studies suggest increased the rate at which the land is sinking.
Now Louisiana is losing approximately 25 square miles (65
square kilometers) of wetlands every year, and the state is
lobbying for federal money to help replace the upstream
sediments that are the delta's lifeblood.
Local projects like that might not do much good in the very long
run, though, depending on the course of change elsewhere on
the planet. Part of Antarctica's Larsen Ice Shelf broke apart in
early 2002. Although floating ice does not change sea level
when it melts (any more than a glass of water will overflow
when the ice cubes in it melt), scientists became concerned that
the collapse could foreshadow the breakup of other ice shelves
in Antarctica and allow increased glacial discharge into the sea
from ice sheets on the continent. If the West Antarctic ice sheet
were to break up, which scientists consider very unlikely this
century, it alone contains enough ice to raise sea level by nearly
20 feet (6 meters).
Even without such a major event, the IPCC projected in its 2001
report that sea level will rise anywhere between 4 and 35 inches
(10 and 89 centimeters) by the end of the century. The high end
of that projection—nearly three feet (a meter)—would be "an
unmitigated disaster," according to Douglas.
Down on the bayou, all of those predictions make Windell
Curole shudder. "We're the guinea pigs," he says, surveying his
aqueous world from the relatively lofty vantage point of a 12-
foot-high (3.7-meter) earthen berm. "I don't think anybody
down here looks at the sea-level-rise problem and puts their
heads in the sand." That's because soon there may not be much
sand left.
Rising sea level is not the only change Earth's oceans are
undergoing. The ten-year-long World Ocean Circulation
Experiment, launched in 1990, has helped researchers to better
understand what is now called the ocean conveyor belt.
Oceans, in effect, mimic some functions of the human
circulatory system. Just as arteries carry oxygenated blood from
the heart to the extremities, and veins return blood to be
replenished with oxygen, oceans provide life-sustaining
circulation to the planet. Propelled mainly by prevailing winds
and differences in water density, which changes with the
temperature and salinity of the seawater, ocean currents are
critical in cooling, warming, and watering the planet's
terrestrial surfaces—and in transferring heat from the Equator
to the Poles.
The engine running the conveyor belt is the density-driven
thermohaline circulation ("thermo" for heat and "haline" for
salt). Warm, salty water flows from the tropical Atlantic north
toward the Pole in surface currents like the Gulf Stream. This
saline water loses heat to the air as it is carried to the far
reaches of the North Atlantic. The coldness and high salinity
together make the water more dense, and it sinks deep into the
ocean. Surface water moves in to replace it. The deep, cold
water flows into the South Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans,
eventually mixing again with warm water and rising back to the
surface.
Changes in water temperature and salinity, depending on how
drastic they are, might have considerable effects on the ocean
conveyor belt. Ocean temperatures are rising in all ocean basins
and at much deeper depths than previously thought, say
scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA). Arguably, the largest oceanic change
ever measured in the era of modern instruments is in the
declining salinity of the subpolar seas bordering the North
Atlantic.
Robert Gagosian, president and director of the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution, believes that oceans hold the key to
potential dramatic shifts in the Earth's climate. He warns that
too much change in ocean temperature and salinity could
disrupt the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation enough to
slow down or possibly halt the conveyor belt—causing drastic
climate changes in time spans as short as a decade.
The future breakdown of the thermohaline circulation remains
a disturbing, if remote, possibility. But the link between
changing atmospheric chemistry and the changing oceans is
indisputable, says Nicholas Bates, a principal investigator for
the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study station, which
monitors the temperature, chemical composition, and salinity
of deep-ocean water in the Sargasso Sea southeast of the
Bermuda Triangle.
Oceans are important sinks, or absorption centers, for carbon
dioxide, and take up about a third of human-generated CO2.
Data from the Bermuda monitoring programs show that CO2
levels at the ocean surface are rising at about the same rate as
atmospheric CO2. But it is in the deeper levels where Bates has
observed even greater change. In the waters between 820 and
1,476 feet (250 and 450 meters) deep, CO2 levels are rising at
nearly twice the rate as in the surface waters. "It's not a belief
system; it's an observable scientific fact," Bates says. "And it
shouldn't be doing that unless something fundamental has
changed in this part of the ocean."
While scientists like Bates monitor changes in the oceans,
others evaluate CO2 levels in the atmosphere. In
Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland, a lighthouse attendant opens a large
silver suitcase that looks like something out of a James Bond
movie, telescopes out an attached 15-foot (4.5-meter) rod, and
flips a switch, activating a computer that controls several
motors, valves, and stopcocks. Two two-and-a-half liter (about
26 quarts) flasks in the suitcase fill with ambient air. In North
Africa, an Algerian monk at Assekrem does the same. Around
the world, collectors like these are monitoring the cocoon of
gases that compose our atmosphere and permit life as we know
it to persist.
When the weekly collection is done, all the flasks are sent to
Boulder, Colorado. There, Pieter Tans, a Dutch-born
atmospheric scientist with NOAA's Climate Monitoring and
Diagnostics Laboratory, oversees a slew of sensitive
instruments that test the air in the flasks for its chemical
composition. In this way Tans helps assess the state of the
world's atmosphere.
By all accounts it has changed significantly in the past 150
years.
Walking through the various labs filled with cylinders of
standardized gas mixtures, absolute manometers, and gas
chromatographs, Tans offers up a short history of atmospheric
monitoring. In the late 1950s a researcher named Charles
Keeling began measuring CO2 in the atmosphere above
Hawaii's 13,679-foot (4,169-meter) Mauna Loa. The first thing
that caught Keeling's eye was how CO2 level rose and fell
seasonally. That made sense since, during spring and summer,
plants take in CO2 during photosynthesis and produce oxygen
in the atmosphere. In the fall and winter, when plants decay,
they release greater quantities of CO2 through respiration and
decay. Keeling's vacillating seasonal curve became famous as a
visual representation of the Earth "breathing."
Something else about the way the Earth was breathing attracted
Keeling's attention. He watched as CO2 level not only
fluctuated seasonally, but also rose year after year. Carbon
dioxide level has climbed from about 315 parts per million
(ppm) from Keeling's first readings in 1958 to more than 375
ppm today. A primary source for this rise is indisputable:
humans' prodigious burning of carbon-laden fossil fuels for
their factories, homes, and cars.
Tans shows me a graph depicting levels of three key greenhouse
gases—CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide—from the year 1000 to
the present. The three gases together help keep Earth, which
would otherwise be an inhospitably cold orbiting rock,
temperate by orchestrating an intricate dance between the
radiation of heat from Earth back to space (cooling the planet)
and the absorption of radiation in the atmosphere (trapping it
near the surface and thus warming the planet).
Tans and most other scientists believe that greenhouse gases
are at the root of our changing climate. "These gases are a
climate-change driver," says Tans, poking his graph definitively
with his index finger. The three lines on the graph follow almost
identical patterns: basically flat until the mid-1800s, then all
three move upward in a trend that turns even more sharply
upward after 1950. "This is what we did," says Tans, pointing to
the parallel spikes. "We have very significantly changed the
atmospheric concentration of these gases. We know their
radiative properties," he says. "It is inconceivable to me that the
increase would not have a significant effect on climate."
Exactly how large that effect might be on the planet's health
and respiratory system will continue to be a subject of great
scientific and political debate—especially if the lines on the
graph continue their upward trajectory.
Eugene Brower, an Inupiat Eskimo and president of the Barrow
Whaling Captains' Association, doesn't need fancy parts-per-
million measurements of CO2 concentrations or long-term sea-
level gauges to tell him that his world is changing.
"It's happening as we speak," the 56-year-old Brower says as we
drive around his home in Barrow, Alaska—the United States'
northernmost city—on a late August day. In his fire chief's
truck, Brower takes me to his family's traditional ice cellars,
painstakingly dug into the permafrost, and points out how his
stores of muktuk—whale skin and blubber recently began
spoiling in the fall because melting water drips down to his food
stores. Our next stop is the old Bureau of Indian Affairs school
building. The once impenetrable permafrost that kept the
foundation solid has bucked and heaved so much that walking
through the school is almost like walking down the halls of an
amusement park fun house. We head to the eroding beach and
gaze out over open water. "Normally by now the ice would be
coming in," Brower says, scrunching up his eyes and scanning
the blue horizon.
We continue our tour. Barrow looks like a coastal community
under siege. The ramshackle conglomeration of weather-beaten
houses along the seaside gravel road stands protected from fall
storm surges by miles-long berms of gravel and mud that block
views of migrating gray whales. Yellow bulldozers and graders
patrol the coast like sentries.
The Inupiat language has words that describe many kinds of
ice. Piqaluyak is salt-free multiyear sea ice. Ivuniq is a pressure
ridge. Sarri is the word for pack ice, tuvaqtaq is bottom-fast
ice, and shore-fast ice is tuvaq. For Brower, these words are the
currency of hunters who must know and follow ice patterns to
track bearded seals, walruses, and bowhead whales.
There are no words, though, to describe how much, and how
fast, the ice is changing. Researchers long ago predicted that the
most visible impacts from a globally warmer world would occur
first at high latitudes: rising air and sea temperatures, earlier
snowmelt, later ice freeze-up, reductions in sea ice, thawing
permafrost, more erosion, increases in storm intensity. Now all
those impacts have been documented in Alaska. "The changes
observed here provide an early warning system for the rest of
the planet," says Amanda Lynch, an Australian researcher who
is the principal investigator on a project that works with
Barrow's residents to help them incorporate scientific data into
management decisions for the city's threatened infrastructure.
Before leaving the Arctic, I drive to Point Barrow alone. There,
at the tip of Alaska, roughshod hunting shacks dot the spit of
land that marks the dividing line between the Chukchi and
Beaufort Seas. Next to one shack someone has planted three
eight-foot (2.4-meter) sticks of white driftwood in the sand,
then crisscrossed their tops with whale baleen, a horny
substance that whales of the same name use to filter life-
sustaining plankton out of seawater. The baleen, curiously,
looks like palm fronds.
So there, on the North Slope of Alaska, stand three makeshift
palm trees. Perhaps they are no more than an elaborate Inupiat
joke, but these Arctic palms seem an enigmatic metaphor for
the Earth's future.
Link:
Global Climate Change, Melting Glaciers (nationalgeographic.com)
