Far North Science

Homer author and adventurer Shelley Gill has reached Stanley in the Falkland Islands after a voyage to Antarctica and back. She asked her mates to write their impressions for her blog. More photos are online too!

Yva wrote:

My brain says that Antarctica is about light, and whiteness, and blueness, and remoteness so crystalline that all else seems smudged and grey and crowded in comparison. My heart says I want to come back here and spend more time floating in the shimmering glow of the sea, the ice and the sky. My stomach says: where is some food?

Alaska Natives have warned that the Earth “moves faster,” seasons have shifted. Break-up comes sooner, ice forms later. The old ways of reading the land and sea have been undercut as the climate changes.

Spotted seal in the Bering Sea
NOAA Photo Library

Scientists have increasingly listened to these observations, recognizing that such “Traditional Ecological Knowledge” offers data and insight into the Arctic world.

Canadian researchers have also begun to focus on the value of Native knowledge in studies discussed this past week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Fall storms eat the land. Permafrost that stabilized bluffs for centuries washes away. Homes topple, roads collapse. And now the community must move.

A Shishmaref house topples
Shismaref Relocation Committee

Alaska’s village of Shishmaref, nestled on a barrier island along the Chukchi Sea, took the international stage Sunday during a global warming “town hall meeting” at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The meeting featured the premiere of a video illustrating how Shishmaref’s very existence has been threatened by shifting Arctic climate, forcing the 600 residents to seek as much as $100 million to relocate the village on stable ground. Late-forming sea ice in the fall lets storms pound the shore, allowing surf and high water to erode the land beneath homes, schools and roads.

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Warming temperatures. Summer sea ice melting. Longer storm seasons eroding coastal villages. Permafrost melting. Greenhouse gases reaching levels unseen in 650,000 years. The ocean turning more acidic. Forests browning. Tundra brushing up.

And the near-certainty that the Earth’s climate “sweet spot” — the conditions that enabled human civilization to flower — has been thrown out of whack for at least another 1,000 years.

Shismaref shoreline erosion 2004
Shismaref Relocation Committee

The impact of human-caused warming on the globe has been spelled out in detail, with an international panel calling it “unequivocal” and even Republican conservatives like Sen. John McCain declaring the climate change debate is over.

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2007 has begun with a sizzle, punctuating an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that called human-caused warming “unequivocal.”

Average global temperatures rose into record territory last month, making it the Earth’s warmest January since reliable record-keeping began in the 1880s, according to a new analysis posted Thursday morning.

National Climate Data Center

Just how warm was it? January’s combined average temps over land and sea were 1.53°F (0.85°C) warmer than the 20th century average of 53.6°F (12.0°C) and greater than any seen over the past 128 years, based on preliminary data by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

The temps beat the previous record set in 2002, when they averaged 1.28°F (0.71°C) above the century’s mean. The driver of last month’s record appeared to be land-surface temperatures that hit 3.40°F (1.89°C) above average. The global ocean-surface was cooler, in a manner of speaking. It was fourth warmest on record, but only 0.1°F (0.05°C) cooler than the record hit during the very strong El Niño of 1998.

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Give those rocket scientists some clear skies, with the moon below the horizon. And it’ll be time for another blast.

NASA Visible Earth

Update: Four NASA suborbital sounding rockets launched from Poker Flat Research Range early Valentine’s Day and drew vapor trails into a shimmering aurora display, according to a release from the Geophysical Institute.

The experiment, called HEX2, was intended to give scientists insight into the behavior of high altitude winds associated with the aurora. Researchers were able to watch the movement of the vapor trails from Poker Flat, about 30 miles north of Fairbanks.

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Despite a somewhat cooler summer in Alaska, it was truly hot last year for most of the globe.

Goddard Institute

The Earth’s average temperature over land and water was fifth highest on record, since the 1880s, according to a report issued last week by climatologists with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City.

Only 2005, 1998, 2002 and 2003 broasted the planet to higher didgets.

The report came only weeks after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared that climate warming was “unequivocal” — and 90 percent likely that observed warming during the past century has been caused by greenhouse gas emissions from cars, powerplants and smokestacks.

GISS/NASA

Though the Arctic has seen far more warming than the rest of the globe over the past decades, with Alaska increasing significantly since the 1970s, 2006 brought cooler temperatures and more summer rain.

“Annual temperatures for 2006 averaged across the state of Alaska ranked 33rd warmest since 1918: the coolest annual period since 1999,” the National Climate Research Center reported last month. “Both spring and summer were slightly cooler than average and fall was slightly warmer. Wildfires across Alaska were not as active as in recent years.”

Not so for the rest of the globe.

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One of the world’s most influential scientists and a pioneer in auroral research has retired as director of the climate change research center at University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Photo courtesy IARC
Syun-Ichi Akasofu

Syun-Ichi Akasofu, who help found the International Arctic Research Center, said he hopes to return to his own scientific passions after spending decades as an administrator.

“My older academic studies became hobbies, so now that I am retired I plan to work on my research and teach auroral physics at the university,” Akasofu told Jillian Ladegard, in a story published by the Fairbanks News-Miner and republished Monday by the Anchorage Daily News.

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