by Jean Jouzel
THE WHITE PLANET
THE WHITE PLANET
THE EVOLUTION AND FUTURE OF OUR FROZEN WORLD
Jean Jouzel, Claude Lorius, and Dominique Raynaud
Translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Princeton and Oxford
First published in France under the title Planète blanche, les glaces, le climat et l’environnement © Odile Jacob, 2008.
English translation, adapted and revised, copyright © 2013 by Princeton University Press
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
press.princeton.edu
Jacket Photograph: Fox Glacier, South Island, New Zealand. Te Wahipounamu UNESCO World Heritage Area. © Cloudia Newland. Courtesy of Shutterstock.
Cartoons by Michel Creseveur
All Rights Reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Jouzel, Jean, 1947-
[Planète blanche. English]
The white planet : the evolution and future of our frozen world / Jean Jouzel, Claude Lorius, and Dominique Raynaud ; translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan.
p. cm.
“First published in France under the title Planète blanche, les glaces, le climat et l’environnement, Odile Jacob, 2008.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-14499-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-691-14499-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Glaciers. 2. Glaciology. 3. Climatic changes.
4. Paleoclimatology. 5. Greenhouse effect, Atmospheric. I. Lorius, Claude. II. Raynaud, Dominique. III. Title.
QC981.8.I23J6813 2013
551.31--dc23 2012028432
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Ouvrage publie avec le concours du Ministere francais charge de la culture—Centre national du livre.
This book has been published with support from the French Ministry of Culture / National Book Center.
This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro
This book is printed on recycled paper
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
To Jean-Marc Barnola,
glaciologist and humanist, who liked so much to visit our White Planet.
PHOTO COURTESY OF J. CHAPPELLAZ, CNRS-UJF-IPEV.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
XI
PART ONE THE WORLD OF ICE: PAST AND PRESENT
1
Chapter 1 The Ice on Our Planet
3
Snow and Ice: A Multifaceted World
3
Mountain Glaciers and Ice Caps
5
Polar Regions: The Omnipresence of the White Planet
7
Greenland, Antarctica, and Ice Shelves
10
Ice: An Agent and Indicator of Climate Change
14
The White Planet and Sea Levels
16
Chapter 2 From Exploration to Scientific Observation
18
The Flow of Mountain Glaciers
19
Mass Balance: The Health of a Glacier
21
The Arctic Ocean in the Time of the Explorers
23
The Arctic Ocean: Vulnerable Ice
25
Greenland: An Island Inhabited for Millennia
28
Greenland: An Increasingly Negative Mass Balance
28
Antarctica: A Much More Recent Exploration
31
Antarctica: A Long Uncertain Mass Balance
34
Chapter 3 Ice through the Ages
37
The Time of the Pioneers
37
Ice of Long Ago
40
Glaciations of the Quaternary and Astronomic Theory
46
PART TWO POLAR ICE: AMAZING ARCHIVES
51
Chapter 4 Reconstructing the Climates of the Past
53
The Round of Isotopes
54
Going Back in Time
57
The Recent Period
57
The Distant Past
60
Paleoceanography
61
Continental Archives
62
Dating Oceanic and Continental Archives
64
A Cornucopia of Results
66
Chapter 5 Glacial Archives
68
The Long Story of a Snowflake
68
The Ice and Its Isotopes: A Paleothermometer
70
Impurities with Multiple Sources
71
Air Bubbles in the Ice: A Very Beautiful Story
73
The Headaches of Dating
77
Chapter 6 The Campaigns
82
Camps Century and Byrd: The First Deep Ice Core Drillings
82
Fifty Years Ago: The French on the Polar Ice
86
The First Drilling at Dôme C: Success of the French Team
88
Rapid Climate Variations: Initial Inklings
91
Vostok: A Collaboration between French and Soviet Teams
92
Europe and the United States: Two Drilling Operations in the Center of Greenland
96
Europe Turns to Antarctica
98
Vostok: More than 3,600 Meters of Ice
101
Other Core Drilling in Antarctica
103
The Glaciers of the Andes and the Himalaya
105
A Return to Greenland
106
The European EPICA Drilling: A Double Success beyond All Hopes
108
Chapter 7 Vostok: The Cornucopia
110
A Complete Glacial-Interglacial Cycle
112
Climate and Greenhouse Effect Go Hand in Hand
113
Much More Information
118
A Huge Lake under the Ice
120
Chapter 8 Dôme C: 800,000 Years and the Revolution of the Rhythm of Glaciations
122
Ice Older than That at Vostok
123
Inversion of the Magnetic Field
126
Chapter 9 Rapid Climatic Variations
130
The First Indications
130
Increasingly Clear Indications
132
A Connection with Ocean Circulation?
133
Confirmation
134
Rapid Events during a Warm Period?
139
Initially Underestimated Changes in Temperature
142
The Connection with the Ocean Henceforth Demonstrated
143
Consequences on a Planetary Scale
147
Chapter 10 The Last 10,000 Years: An Almost Stable Climate
149
Volcanism and Solar Activity: Natura
l Climatic Forcings
150
How Long Has Human Activity Been Changing the Composition of the Atmosphere?
152
PART THREE THE WHITE PLANET TOMORROW
157
Chapter 11 The Climate and Greenhouse Gases
159
The Greenhouse Effect: A Truly Beneficial Natural Phenomenon
159
The Greenhouse Effect Due to Human Activity: A Slow Awareness
163
How Did We Get to This Point?
168
Chapter 12 Have Humans Already Changed the Climate?
173
The Time of the Pioneers
173
The Awareness
174
The Establishment of the IPCC
177
The Problem of Aerosols
180
The Climate in the Last Millennium
183
Warming Is a Certainty
185
The Arguments of Skeptics
189
The White Planet on the Front Lines of Global Warming
195
Chapter 13 What Will the Climate Be in the Future?
201
A True Upheaval if We Aren’t Careful
202
What Will Become of Our Glaciers?
206
An Arctic Ocean without Ice?
209
Surprises under the Frozen Ground
210
A More Rapid and Higher Sea-Level Rise than Predicted
211
The Halt of the Gulf Stream
214
Chapter 14 A Warming with Multiple Consequences
218
A True Upheaval on a Global Scale
218
Mountain Regions
222
Polar Regions: Multiple and Diverse Impacts
223
The Political and Economic Stakes: Climate and Oil
225
Chapter 15 What We Must Do
227
Stabilizing the Greenhouse Effect: A True Challenge
228
The Kyoto Protocol: A First Step
230
The Bali Conference
234
Can the Challenge Be Met?
236
Copenhagen: Failure or Half-Success
238
A Necessary Adaptation
241
The “Grenelle de l’environnement”
242
PART FOUR THE POLES AND THE PLANET
245
Chapter 16 The Crucial Place of Research
247
A Short History of the Polar Years
249
The International Polar Year 2007–2009
251
Glacial Ice Coring: Ambitious Objectives
253
The Microbiology of Ice and Subglacial Lakes: Life in an Extreme Environment
255
Concordia: A Station Full of Promise
258
Chapter 17 Humans and the Rise of Pollution
261
The Story of Lead
262
Other Heavy Metals, Including Copper
264
Sulfates
266
Radioactivity
268
The Ozone Hole: An Emblematic Pollution
269
The Anthropocene and Greenhouse Gases
271
CONCLUSION: THE ANTHROPOCENE ERA
272
NOTES
277
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
289
INDEX
291
PREFACE
Do you know why the land and ice in the surroundings of the North Pole are called Greenland—in French, Groenland? You might think that the name comes from an old inuk word, but Erik the Red supposedly named the island when he founded a Viking colony there in 984 A.D. Some historians claim that Erik the Red invented the term green land to entice his kinsmen to that desolate land. This is perhaps not really true, because even if Greenland seems today to be a huge white expanse, along certain fjords one can still see green fields where animals are raised. Between 984 and the fifteenth century this was “the most distant fore-posts of European civilization.” “Scandinavians 1,500 miles from Norway built a cathedral and churches, wrote in Latin and Old Norse, wielded iron tools, herded farm animals, followed the latest European fashions in clothing—and finally vanished.”1 The stone church in Hvalsey endured; the Vikings of Greenland, who numbered five thousand in 1000, disappeared, while their neighbors the Inuits barely survived.
Around the year 800 Scandinavia was warming up, but the cultivatable lands in its mountainous regions and along its rocky coasts were too few to feed the large Viking population. On their fast-sailing ships that were capable of long voyages, the Vikings set off in search of more abundant lands. Some eventually settled under the Sicilian sun, but in the North Atlantic they founded several colonies: in the Orcades, the Shetland Islands, the Feroe Islands, in Iceland, and in Greenland. From there, the descendants of Erik the Red even tried to settle in a land they called Vinland, which today would include the coasts of Canada south of Labrador as well as Newfoundland, the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, and part of the coast of New England. But their attempts quickly failed, it seems, owing to a lack of means and men to fight the Indians. Those intrepid adventurers thus returned home to the shores of Greenland, which were more peaceful though less hospitable. Four hundred years after Erik the Red landed, only the ruins of farms where his countrymen attempted a life remained.
“The climate became too cold, and they began to die off,” wrote an archaeologist. In fact, between the ninth and fourteenth centuries the climate could have warmed to such an extent that when the Scandinavians reached Greenland around the year 1000 they found its climate a bit more propitious for farming and raising livestock. But the cooling of the Little Ice Age, which lasted until the nineteenth century, doesn’t explain everything. It was above all the Vikings’ inability to adapt their way of life, their values, their social structures, and their economy that caused them to die off. As Jared Diamond explains, in a hostile environment, collapse is not inevitable; it depends on the choices a society makes: “Environmental damage, climate change, loss of friendly contacts with Norway, rise of hostile contacts with the Inuit, and the political, economic, social, and cultural setting of the Greenland Norse. Greenland provides us with our closest approximation to a controlled experiment in collapses.”2
Today an even greater possibility of collapse threatens us because it involves the entire planet. We must turn to the icy lands to fully understand the nature and magnitude of the threat. But it is no longer a question of the ability or inability of some to react adequately to a temporary and local change in climate—our current situation is unlike that of the Mayan lords who were exhausted by wars and unable to foresee the consequences for their people of repeated droughts and overexploited land.
We are dealing with a perceivable degradation of living conditions in our society that is exacerbating the crises that already exist: poverty, access to clean water and to sources of energy, migrations, geopolitical destabilization and conflicts. Subsequently, the Inuits are protesting; the polar bear, the largest living land carnivore, is threatened; and the krill, very useful little shrimp, as well as the seals and the penguins in the southern seas that eat them, seem at risk. More than a sixth of the world’s population, most of which is in Asia, lives in regions that rely on the water from snow and glaciers: if those shrink in volume that could affect the future of those regions. One hardly dares mention the consequences on tourism of the melting of the glaciers in the Alps or the Pyrenees or of a shrinking of the snow cover that might be caused by a “mere” increase of 2°C. Our vacations would be seriously affected—but that would be the least of our problems.
“The Vikings were doomed from the beginning,” Jar
ed Diamond has written. And the petty Mayan kings were too concerned with their wars to sense any danger. Will we be able to react? The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize attributed to, Al Gore and to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) testifies that there is a growing awareness of the threat that climate change is posing to the planet. Glaciology and glaciologists have contributed to this heightened awareness.
More than fifty years ago, in 1957, one of the authors of this book, Claude Lorius, went to Adélie Land. His intention, within the framework of the International Geophysical Year, was to explore and learn more about Antarctica. Temperatures, the thickness of the ice, snow accumulation, the advance of the glaciers: everything was new, and there was much to learn. A few years later, around 1965, a new path was opened: ice analysis enabled glaciologists to determine the temperature of the atmosphere at the time the snow had fallen. These new data were a true gold mine, which has been developed in France in collaboration with the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique (CEA) within which one of the authors of this book, Jean Jouzel, spent the greater part of his scientific career. At the Laboratoire de Glaciologie et de Géophysique de l’Environnement (LGGE) du CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in Grenoble, we analyzed the impurities contained in the ice, in particular the air bubbles that are evidence of past atmosphere, a realm that our third author, Dominique Raynaud, brought to the forefront.