20 November 2016, New York Times, A Wrenching Choice for Alaska Towns in the Path of Climate Change. SHAKTOOLIK, Alaska — In the dream, a storm came and Betsy Bekoalok watched the river rise on one side of the village and the ocean on the other, the water swallowing up the brightly colored houses, the fishing boats and the four-wheelers, the school and the clinic. She dived into the floodwaters, frantically searching for her son. Bodies drifted past her in the half-darkness. When she finally found the boy, he, too, was lifeless. “I picked him up and brought him back from the ocean’s bottom,” Ms. Bekoalok remembered. The Inupiat people who for centuries have hunted and fished on Alaska’s western coast believe that some dreams are portents of things to come. But here in Shaktoolik, one need not be a prophet to predict flooding, especially during the fall storms. Laid out on a narrow spit of sand between the Tagoomenik River and the Bering Sea, the village of 250 or so people is facing an imminent threat from increased flooding and erosion, signs of a changing climate. With its proximity to the Arctic, Alaska is warming about twice as fast as the rest of the United States and the state is heading for the warmest year on record. The government has identified at least 31 Alaskan towns and cities at imminent risk of destruction, with Shaktoolik ranking among the top four. Some villages, climate change experts predict, will be uninhabitable by 2050, their residents joining a flow of climate refugees around the globe, in Bolivia, China, Niger and other countries. Read More here
Tag Archives: oceans
1 November 2016, The Guardian, Great Barrier Reef: why are government and business perpetuating the big lie? At the core of the Australian government’s failure to protect our Great Barrier Reef is the big lie. Through its actions and inaction, rhetoric, funding priorities and policy decisions, the Australian government has implicitly pursued the line that it is possible to turn things around for the reef without tackling global warming. This is the big lie. Last year, when the federal and Queensland governments released the Reef 2050 long-term sustainability plan, experts were emphatic about the deceit. Eminent coral reef scientist Prof Terry Hughes commented that the “biggest omission in the plan is that it virtually ignores climate change, which is clearly the major ongoing threat to the reef”. Great Barrier Reef historian Iain McCalman wrote that the new measures “deliberately ignore the dire long-term threats to the reef that are contained in the now unutterable words ‘climate change’”. “They are akin to investing in cures for a patient’s skin diseases while ignoring their cancer symptoms,” he wrote. As the experts make plain, any attempt to decouple the future of the Great Barrier Reef from the quest to contain global warming is simply dishonest. As another expert, Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland, has said, we either “re-examine the current plans for unrestricted coal exports, taking proper account and responsibility for the resulting greenhouse emissions, or watch the reef die”. Read More here
27 October 2016, Aust Antarctic Division, Impact of East Antarctic glacial melt on sea-level rise. The Australian Antarctic Program will study two glaciers, the Totten and Sørsdal, in East Antarctica this summer to better understand the impact ice melt is having on global sea-level rise. The Totten Glacier, near Australia’s Casey research station, is the largest glacier in East Antarctica, and is showing signs that it is sensitive to warm ocean waters that can increase melt at the base of the ice shelf. Australian Antarctic Division Glaciologist, Dr Ben Galton-Fenzi, said researchers want to better understand how much this glacial melt is driving sea-level rise. “Since the 1900s the global sea-level has risen by around 20 centimetres and by the end of the century it’s projected to rise by up to one metre or more, but this is subject to high uncertainty,” Dr Galton Fenzi said. “These estimates depend critically on understanding Antarctic glaciers, both how much and how fast they melt in a warming climate. This summer researchers will look at how warmer ocean water is melting glaciers and ice shelves from below. “We will land helicopters on the Totten to deploy six GPS units to measure glacial flow speeds and surface elevation changes. Read More here
24 October 2016, NASA, Studies offer new glimpse of melting under Antarctic glaciers. Two new studies by researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine (UCI), detect the fastest ongoing rates of glacier retreat ever observed in West Antarctica and offer an unprecedented direct view of intense ice melting from the floating undersides of glaciers. The results highlight how the interaction between ocean conditions and the bedrock beneath a glacier can influence the glacier’s evolution, with implications for understanding future ice loss from Antarctica and global sea level rise. The two studies examined three neighboring glaciers in West Antarctica that are melting and retreating at different rates. Smith, Pope and Kohler glaciers flow into the Dotson and Crosson ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica, the part of the continent with the largest loss of ice mass. A study led by Bernd Scheuchl of UCI, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on Aug. 28, used radar measurements from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellite and data from the earlier ERS-1 and ERS-2 satellites to look at changes in the glaciers’ grounding lines — the boundary where a glacier loses contact with bedrock and begins to float on the ocean. The grounding line is important because nearly all glacier melting takes place on the underside of the glacier’s floating portion, called the ice shelf. If a glacier loses mass from enhanced melting, it may start floating farther inland from its former grounding line, just as a boat stuck on a sandbar may be able to float again if a heavy cargo is removed. This is called grounding line retreat. Read More here