The Arctic: Global Warming’s Canary in the Coal Mine
by Beth Gray
Photo taken from Discovery Magazine article: http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/055
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) explains that “the Arctic is global warming’s canary in the coal mine.” This environmentally sensitive area of the globe has been in danger for decades but recent images provide visual proof of just how dire the situation is. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado provides a daily update on the declining volume and size of Arctic sea ice. The daily images show where the sea ice boundary currently is with an orange line showing where it was in 1979. The NSIDC reports that as of August 16, “Arctic ice extent was 5.95 million square kilometers.” This may seem like a massive amount of ice but as NSIDC notes, this represents a decrease of some 1.68 million square kilometers below the 1979 to 2000 average for the season.
Though Arctic sea ice does melt during the Arctic summer (a time when the region experiences 24 hours of sunshine), this season’s melt has been dramatic. A recent Washington Post article explains that “After going into the melt season with more ice over a larger area than recent years, sea ice extent plummeted by a daily rate of 26,000 square miles per day during May, which was the highest rate of loss ever observed for the month since satellite records of sea ice began in 1979.” On his blog, Nick Sundt, Director of Communications, Climate Change Program at the World Wildlife Fund, put this figure into perspective writing, “That is an area roughly half the size of the entire United States (including Alaska)…” As if the analyses from satellite images was not startling enough, however, researchers studying the region are finding that the situation is worse than even the satellite images are showing. In a Time Magazine article earlier this year, David Barber, an Arctic climatologist at the University of Manitoba, describes his experience in visiting the area: “Some of what satellites identified as thick, melt-resistant multiyear ice turned out to be…’full of holes, like Swiss cheese. We haven’t seen this sort of thing before.’”
An overwhelming volume of evidence shows that Arctic sea ice is melting at a rate that outpaces the melting in previous years. What may be less obvious, however, is the long term impact of so much melting ice. The most obvious and discussed impact of melting sea ice in the Arctic region is the impact on polar bears. In May 2008, the U.S. Department of the Interior classified polar bears as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act, a move that many researchers had been encouraging for years. There are other, less obvious consequences, however. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provides some thorough information on the anticipated impact of this situation. For example, melting Arctic glaciers contribute to rising sea levels around the world which in turn creates a tenuous situation for wildlife and people living on the shorelines surrounding the Arctic region. Further, melting Arctic ice “will have implications for biodiversity around the world because migratory species depend on breeding and feeding grounds in the Arctic.”
As the Natural Resources Defense Council points out, the Arctic is global warming’s “canary in the coal mine.” With this in mind, one must consider the situation in that region from the perspective of what it means for the rest of the world. If the Arctic is experiencing such dramatic consequences of global warming, it stands to reason that it is perhaps only a matter of time before the effects of this phenomenon begin to leave their mark as dramatically on the rest of the world.
Tags: David Barber, Endangered Species Act, National Sea and Ice Data Center, Natural Resources Defense Council, Nick Sundt, polar bears, the Arctic, Time Magazine, University of Manitoba, US Department of the Interior, US Environmental Protection Agency, Washington Post
