>Published on Thursday, July 31, 2003 by the Knight Ridder Newspapers
>Alaskan Warming is Disturbing Preview of What's to Come, Scientists Say
>by Seth Borenstein
>
>ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Alaska is melting.
>
>Glaciers are receding. Permafrost is thawing. Roads are collapsing. Forests
>are dying. Villages are being forced to move, and animals are being forced
>to seek new habitats. What's happening in Alaska is a preview of what
>people farther south can expect, said Robert Corell, a former top National
>Science Foundation scientist who heads research for the Arctic Climate
>Impact Assessment team. "If you want to see what will be happening in the
>rest of the world 25 years from now, just look at what's happening in the
>Arctic," Corell said.
>
>Alaska and the Arctic are warming up fast, top international scientists will
>tell senior officials from eight Arctic countries at a conference in Iceland
>next week. They will disclose early, disturbing findings from a massive
>study of polar climate change.
>
>In Alaska, year-round average temperatures have risen by 5 degrees
>Fahrenheit since the 1960s, and average winter temperatures soared 8 degrees
>in that period, according to the federal government. The entire world is
>expected to warm by 2.5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, predict scientists
>at the International Panel on Climate Change.
>
>2002 was the hottest year in Alaskan history, and this past winter was the
>second warmest on record, according to the National Climatic Data Center in
>Asheville, N.C., which found that Alaskan temperatures began to rise
>dramatically in 1976. This July, Anchorage recorded its second highest
>temperature ever as tourists got suntans.
>
>Deborah Williams, the executive director of the Alaska Conservation
>Foundation, used to take visitors from the Lower 48 to the famous Portage
>Glacier just outside Anchorage, where the $8 million Begich-Boggs visitor
>center opened in 1986. By 1993, the Portage glacier had receded so much that
>it no longer could be seen from the visitors' center. Williams still takes
>visitors to the site, seeing the glacier's retreat as a warning.
>
>"Alaska is the melting tip of the iceberg, the panting canary," said
>Williams, who was the chief Interior Department official for Alaska during
>the Clinton administration. Portage is "a glacier that's almost out of
>water; it's thinned dramatically," said U.S. Geological Survey geologist
>Bruce Molnia, the author of the book "Glaciers of Alaska." About 98 percent
>of Alaska's glaciers are retreating or stagnant, he said.
>
>Alaskan glaciers add 13.2 trillion gallons of melted water to the seas each
>year - the equivalent of more than 13 million Olympic-sized swimming pools,
>University of Alaska in Fairbanks scientists concluded after a decade of
>studying glaciers with airborne lasers. The rate of glacier run-off has
>doubled over just a few decades, they found. Alaska's melting glaciers are
>the No. 1 reason the oceans are rising, Molnia said.
>
>Another frozen staple of Alaska's northernmost lands - permafrost - is also
>thawing and "is probably the biggest problem on land," said Gunter Weller,
>director of the Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research at the
>University of Alaska in Fairbanks. Permafrost is land that stays frozen
>year-round. Villages rely on the hard permafrost to prevent beach erosion
>from violent ocean storms. Two Alaskan native villages, Shishmaref and
>Kivalina, must relocate because melting permafrost has caused beach erosion,
>leaving the towns vulnerable to severe storms.
>
>About 600 people live in 150 homes in Shishmaref, a centuries-old village on
>a barrier island just south of the Arctic Circle. On the island's northern
>edge, erosion is so severe that the village voted to move two years ago, but
>villagers haven't been able to find a new site or money to finance the
>massive undertaking, said Percy Nayokpuk, president of the Shishmaref Native
>Corporation. "It's a matter of safety," Nayokpuk said. "We're on this
>small low island. One bad storm could possibly wipe out the village. There
>is nowhere to run."
>
>Melting permafrost also means trouble for the oil industry. Oil companies
>build pipelines and roads on it to support drilling on the North Shore. To
>minimize damage to Arctic tundra, oil companies explore for oil on Alaska's
>North Slope only when roads are frozen with a foot of ice and six inches of
>snow. The ice-road season has dropped from 200 days a year in 1970 to 103
>days in 2002, according to Alaska state documents. "It is unlikely the oil
>industry can implement successful exploration and development plans with a
>winter work season consistently less than 120 days," an Alaska Department of
>Natural Resources budget document said in March.
>
>While global warming is hurting oil drilling, it's the increased burning of
>fossil fuels such as oil that causes global warming. In June, the Department
>of Energy announced that it would spend $270,000 to help Alaska rewrite its
>rules about how thick ice roads should be.
>
>Permafrost lies under 166 Alaskan towns and 1,700 miles of Alaskan highways.
>Melting is causing whole chunks of the Alaska Highway to come apart, state
>officials said at a January global-warming conference. Permafrost is
>melting "under forests as well as under buildings and roads," said
>atmospheric scientist Michael MacCracken, who headed federal climate-change
>studies in the 1990s.
>
>So far, the greatest effect on forests has come from the spruce-bark beetle,
>according to Glenn Juday, a professor of forest ecology at the University of
>Alaska at Fairbanks. The beetle, which kills spruce trees, has long lived in
>Alaska's forests, but normally takes two years to grow and reproduce; cold
>spells cut their numbers.
>
>With global warming, however, the beetles now are damaging as many trees
>each year as they used to ruin in two, Juday said. More than 4 million acres
>of spruce - Alaska's predominant tree - have been killed, especially on the
>Kenai Peninsula. "It's the largest episode of insect-caused tree mortality
>ever recorded in North America," Juday said.
>
>The spruce-bark beetle isn't alone. Other tree-killing invaders made welcome
>by warmer weather include the larch soft fly, the aspen leaf miner and the
>birch leaf roller, Juday said.
>
>As Alaska's climate gets warmer and drier, Juday's studies indicate, black
>and white spruces, which make up 80 percent of the state's main forests,
>won't survive. By the turn of the next century, Alaska's forests will
>resemble the Aspen-treed grasslands along the northern edge of the Great
>Plains in North Dakota and Montana, Juday said.
>
>Some scientific reports also blame global warming for plummeting herring and
>salmon populations, Williams said. In the Yukon River, a warm-water parasite
>has infected salmon and herring, a key food source for marine mammals such
>as the stellar sea lion. Warm waters have made Alaska's Bristol Bay salmon
>runs occur earlier than normal, making it harder for the salmon to survive,
>said Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Slim Morstad.
>
>In addition, warm-weather wildlife, such as moose and beaver, are heading
>unusually far north, while species that require frigid weather "don't have
>anywhere to move to," said scientist MacCracken. Marine mammals such as
>walruses, ring seals and polar bears may soon see their numbers shrink along
>with the Arctic ice, Weller said.
>
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