Environmental groups are well aware of the issues. In 2008 the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) called for a moratorium on further oil exploration in the Arctic until effective oil spill technologies are available and deployed, a call they repeated on the twentieth anniversary of the Exxon Valdez spill in 2009.23 In Alaska, a coalition of environmental groups is calling for a ban on offshore drilling until oil spill measures are addressed. Techniques for tackling oil spills in ice are developing. Ice can sometimes even help contain a spill. In a cold environment, oil does not flow quickly and can be trapped in calm waters among ice floes. The toughest situation, says Ian Buist, an oil spill expert with the consulting firm SL Ross Environmental Research in Ottawa, is a spill in close pack ice with big floes where oil is released under the ice (a blowout from a well would be an example). “It is really hard to find exactly where the oil is,” he explains. “You can’t find it exactly, so you have to track the ice floes and wait until spring.” When the oil hits the cold undersurface of the ice it stops spreading and is gradually encapsulated by growing ice. When the spring melt comes around and channels open in the ice, the oil floats up and appears in melt ponds on the surface. Then there is a chance to burn it off. Helicopters carrying a “helitorch” which fires blobs of burning gasoline jelly (napalm) at the surface can get the oil burning. “You’ll probably get two-thirds of it,” says Buist. Other techniques can be used. Ships equipped with “skimmers” that scoop up the top surface of the sea and then separate oil from water have been developed to work among loose ice but suffer from an “encounter rate” problem says Buist. Out on open water, skimmers can use booms a few hundred meters wide and pick up a lot of oil quickly. Maneuvering among ice floes makes it hard to encounter the oil at a fast enough rate. Cold water chemical dispersants have been developed, too, but lack extensive testing.
The prospect of leaving a big spill of oil out all winter and using napalm to set it alight in an ugly plume of thick smoke when it surfaces in spring will fill most people with horror, especially as the oil may travel long distances and cross international boundaries. No surprise then that Shell arranged for a flotilla of fourteen rapid oil spill response vessels for its planned work in Alaska.24 Open water spills could be tackled efficiently by tugs equipped with long booms and skimmers, although if ice were present, burning would be the best option. Around a fixed well, an oil company can be well prepared. No one can be really ready for a tanker wreck in heavy ice.
One way of reducing risk from spills is to make sure ships don’t go where they will do the most harm. Kees Camphuysen of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research analyzed oil spills in Europe over recent decades and found a surprising result: the smallest spill (600 tonnes from the tanker Stylis in 1980) killed the most birds (450,000) while one of the largest (223,000 tonnes from the Amoco Cadiz in 1978) killed fewer than 5,000 birds. “It is not the amount of oil spilled that matters most, but rather when and where it happens,” Camphuysen writes.25
Around the Arctic are special places where spills could have terrifying consequences. Animals with feathers or fur are most immediately vulnerable, especially when they gather in big groups. Seabirds come together at breeding colonies and in polynyas (areas that are open every year among the ice) where they gather to feed before breeding, or at staging areas before migrating. Seals aggregate to pup on the ice. The all-important Arctic cod spawns in the winter under the ice and its eggs have a long incubation time. Biologists are busy making maps of the places in the Arctic where the risks are greatest, but routing ships away from them requires political action.26
Oil spills alone do not exhaust the list of worries for the Arctic from increased shipping. There’s also the risk that invasive alien species will enter the Arctic in ballast water, and that toxic chemicals used in antifouling paints will harm wildlife. Garbage dumped at sea can pollute the Arctic for years, and the fine, black particles emitted as exhaust from the ship’s engines can land on the ice, turn it gray, and speed its melt.
Testifying to the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs in March 2009, Treadwell stated that the Arctic Ocean today is “open to ships of any nation, whether or not those ships are properly prepared for Arctic ice conditions, properly defended against oil spills, or properly served by navigation and search-and-rescue infrastructure. Rules to prevent harmful interactions with marine mammals, or subsistence hunting, are not in place.”27
We have already seen that many of these issues can be dealt with in principle under the Law of the Sea and by International Maritime Organization conventions, but action is needed to strengthen and enforce them, along with all the other wider issues of Arctic governance. Then there are the issues of ports, charts, rescue tugs, and training of mariners that must be tackled.
When you consider the risks of loss of life or a catastrophic oil spill, you might think that there would be an immediate rush to ensure Arctic safety and to strengthen many of the rules that already exist. History teaches otherwise. The first international conventions on safety of life at sea were agreed upon after the Titanic sank; MARPOL was precipitated by the huge oil spill from the Amoco Cadiz off the coast of Brittany in 1978; the Exxon Valdez disaster drove the switch to safer double-hulled tankers, but it took further accidents to move the deadline from 2015 to 2010. Much could be done quickly, but the pace of change in the Arctic may prove too fast for international organizations. Vardø will be organizing the rescue of a cruise ship in Svalbard before the world demands action.
FINALE
Chapter Fifteen
THE ARCTIC’S REVENGE
It is midnight. The summer sun dips briefly below the hills that lead up to the Greenland ice sheet and the air grows chill. Across the bay, the enormous Eqi glacier is now half hidden in the twilight, but its restless reverberations fill the air; huge cliffs of ice collapse into the sea, calving off bergs that slowly drift away.
After a few nights camped out here, I am beginning to recognize the glacier’s range of sounds and rhythms. In the background there are long, deep rumbles that reverberate as if emerging from deep inside a vast cavern. Nearer by, loud crashes and cracks unexpectedly fracture the more comforting bass, sometimes swiftly gaining pace, merging into a crescendo of explosions and ending in angry thunder. There is another sound, too, deceptive in its gentle beginning—a long, soft sigh that often fades ever so slowly into the air, but sometimes can turn violent, gathering strength and rising to a roaring torrent.
I sit and watch carefully, and the glacier’s language begins to make sense. The deep rumbles come from huge collapses within the glacier, echoing from high up, where the ice is broken into mile after mile of twisted ridges and crevasses. The long, soft sighs are the signature of snow avalanches, some beginning as a trickle and dying away, others sending larger and larger slopes of snow into a torrent of flowing powder. The crashes and cracks come when the cliffs of the glacier front begin to break up and slide into the sea. Sometimes the collapse spreads, each falling cliff bringing down its neighbor. Soon after, a huge wave breaks on the beach below, arriving with great speed and surprising stealth. I’ve been warned to walk carefully on the beach because the silent swell can easily outrun you. Unwary people have been swept away and drowned.
Listen a little longer to the glacier and something odd emerges about the pattern of its sounds: it is impossible to guess whether a sound will grow or fade. Sitting there on the Greenland shore, I wonder if the glacier is trying to teach me a lesson. Its unpredictable nature and sudden surprises chime with everything I am learning about how the Arctic is reacting to the changes we’ve wrought. I call it the “Arctic’s Revenge.” On land, on sea, in the air—everywhere I hear that the changing Arctic is, in turn, beginning to change the rest of the world. Some of those changes are big, some small, some quick, some slow. Many will be unpredictable and some of them, once they start, will be impossible to stop (although I have met a couple of eccentric Russians who want to put up a fight).
There are so many
ways the Arctic might react, and so many different interlinked possibilities, that it scarcely matters where we begin our investigation. I’ll start with the wider consequences of the loss of the sea ice, as we can see them taking shape already.
It was always inevitable that if the Arctic lost its summer sea ice, the heat balance of the world would change. Instead of sunlight being reflected back into space from that shining dome at the top of the world, dark seas would soak up the summer sunlight.
Julienne Stroeve of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, who I’d earlier talked to about predicting changes in the ice, has a brightly colored map of the Arctic Ocean that shows what is happening. On the map you see a great red blob where, over the last four years, temperatures at the end of the summer have been around 3°C higher than the average in the previous twenty years. Within that large red area are smaller, brighter spots where temperatures have risen around 5°C. The increases are worrying, but it is their position that is really important. “The warming is directly located over those areas where we’ve lost all the ice,” Stroeve explains.1 The Arctic amplification of air temperatures driven by the ice-albedo feedback has arrived. Instead of bright, white ice reflecting sunlight back into space, the growing area of dark open water is soaking it up.
Back in 2007, the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that global mean temperatures would rise by 2.5°C to 3°C by the end of the century. In the Arctic the rise may be more like 7°C. The white cap of ice has always helped cool the planet, but its powers are weakening. “The Arctic is really the air conditioner of the northern hemisphere, and as you lose the sea ice you change the air conditioner, and the rest of the system has to respond,” explains Stroeve. “You start affecting the temperature gradient between the Arctic and equator which in turn affects atmospheric patterns and precipitation patterns.” So what will happen next as the Arctic warms? “Our research is in its infancy,” says Stroeve. “Exactly how this is going to play out, we really don’t know yet.” Already the first subtle signs of the Arctic’s reach are appearing. When there is little ice in the Arctic in summer, there is less rain in winter across the United States and Scandinavia and more rain in the north Mediterranean and Japan.2
A little nearer to the ice, the impact of the Arctic amplification is clearer. The pool of warm autumn air over the Arctic seas is spreading out over the surrounding Arctic lands and is warming them, too. The big surprise is in how far this widening gyre of Arctic warmth can reach and what it may do. Stroeve’s map of the Arctic, with its bright red hot spots over the areas of open seas where temperatures are soaring, fits seamlessly with another map of the wider Arctic from her colleague, computer modeler David Lawrence.
On his map, 3 the coastal strip of the Arctic is painted deep magenta, with various shades of red continuing far inland and across the top of Greenland. The colors denote zones where temperatures are predicted to rise at rates of 3°C and 2°C per decade as a result of the warming sea: they extend over 900 miles from the Arctic seas, deep into Canada and the tundra of Siberia. All of the north seems to have caught fire. “It’s not just warming the land at the margin of the Arctic seas, the whole of the pan-Arctic land is being heated up,” explains Lawrence. He estimates that the rate of warming on land set in motion by rapid ice loss will be some three and half times greater than that predicted from current long-term trends.
Already the temperature on land is changing around the Arctic and its impact is growing. Donald “Skip” Walker of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks is a geobotanist who has been measuring how “green” the Arctic is, combining both satellite observations that pick out green vegetation from space and studies on the ground. I heard him speak at the 2008 American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco where he explained that between 1982 and 2007, as the summer sea ice declined by a little over a quarter along a thirty-mile band off the Arctic shores, the greening index along the North American coast leapt by almost a quarter. Where once there was bare tundra, shrubs are marching toward the sea. Trees will follow. As they advance, some beautiful and rare desert-like ecosystems of the farthest north, where the Arctic poppy grows, will be pushed off the edge of the map and disappear forever. A little farther south, the Arctic’s characteristic tundra is under siege. That tundra forms a strip around the Arctic’s sea, equal to the area of the United States, but rarely more than a hundred miles wide.
I’ve seen these places and for me their gradual disappearance is a profound loss, but a bigger worry is that a greener Arctic is a darker Arctic. Trees are darker than shrubs, which are darker than tundra.4 And trees and shrubs shed snow. Fly over an expanse of tundra in winter and it is almost pure white; a forest is not. The snow is lying on the ground beneath the branches of the trees, acting as a blanket that helps keep the soil warmer than usual in winter, speeding its thaw in summer, while the darker vegetation above soaks up heat that would normally be reflected back by the white tundra into space. The change that begins with the loss of ice widens and the earth grows warmer still. At the end of his talk, I asked Walker if there was any upside to this change. Surely, more vegetation would mean more carbon will be taken out of the atmosphere? “Yes,” he said, “but the amount is small.”5
The spreading Arctic warmth is being felt in the north of Greenland already. In 2008, Marco Tedesco of the City College of New York reported in the journal Eos that the northern part of the Greenland ice sheet showed a record snowmelt.6 The melt lasted eighteen days longer than the previous maximum, which may not seem significant until you learn that it pushed the melt season from its usual twelve to fifteen days to thirty-five days. “High surface temperatures are most likely to blame,” wrote Tedesco. “The average temperature here is going up by 1.5°C every decade.”
Maybe it is not surprising that an eleven-square-mile chunk of the Petermann Glacier broke away nearby. A huge crack opened up farther back in the glacier and another twenty-three square miles were under threat. A few weeks afterwards, across the water on Ellesmere Island, the 4,500-year-old, nineteen-square-mile Markham Ice shelf broke off and drifted away into the Arctic sea. Tedesco ran off this list of disasters when I met him at a conference and asked him what he had seen in Greenland, and then he added with a wry smile, “It is worrying when you see so many extreme events in a row.”
Farther south in Greenland, temperatures are also rising. Tedesco told me that he had also picked up a record snow melt on the ice cap there in 2007.7 Here we join a bigger and much better-known story about the way the changing Arctic may change the world. The Greenland ice cap is melting away at a speed that nobody predicted in the past. The melt might be partly due to a natural cycle that will slow or reverse, but if it is not, then sea levels around the world are going to rise faster than anyone has seen before.
The fastest changes are happening just thirty miles south from where I sat listening to my restless glacier. Ten huge ice streams drain the enormous mass of Greenland’s ice cap and the Jakobshavn Glacier is the greatest of them all. Almost two miles wide and fed by the ice of 7 percent of Greenland’s interior, Jakobshavn has been retreating slowly up the long fjord in which it sits for over a hundred years.8 In 1992, scientists logged the glacier moving along at a steady 3.5 miles a year. An unexpected spurt followed: in 2000, it was running at 5.8 miles a year, and by 2003, roaring along at 7.8 miles a year. As the glacier moved faster, the ice deeper within the ice cap that fed it began to thin rapidly. Greenland’s ice was rushing for the exit, and no one was sure why.
The final outlet for the glacier is just a little south of the town of Ilulissat (formerly Jakobshavn) and is one of the wonders of the world. Here you can sit all day, with the wooden houses of the town neatly painted in reds, blues, yellows, and greens on the hill behind you, and watch huge icebergs sail by across the bay. There are bergs that remind you of medieval castles, complete with crenellations and towers. They have floated unchanged from the glacier with cliffs and crevas
ses intact. Other giants have capsized and now show their water-polished undersides; they rise from the sea as smooth-faced mountains of ice. Some have capsized many times and you can read their history from the waterlines written across the bergs at a range of angles. Occasionally a berg is marked by a vein of the most brilliant blue, a crack that filled long ago with stream water and froze so clear to sunlight that the true blue color of the ice can shine from it. Look to the south and the icebergs form a jostling wall that sometimes advances menacingly right up to town. This is the mouth of the fjord into which the glacier spills its ice.
There is busy trade for fishing boats carrying tourists as far into the fjord as they dare go. Even then you are still thirty-four miles from the front of the glacier where the bergs calve. They drift through the ice-clogged fjord for months until they reach the sea, where a now drowned glacial moraine forms a shallow sill. Here the larger icebergs run aground and must wait until they grow smaller and can tumble into the deeper sea.
After the Ice Page 25