End Of The Arctic We Knew; Owl Invasions, Overwintering Whales, Growing Methane, Vanishing Ice
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The past 10 years paint a dramatic picture of climate-related changes at the top of the world. First there were massive forest fires that torched a record 4.2 million hectares of trees in the Yukon and Alaska in 2004. Smoke from those fires could be detected all the way to the east coast of Canada and throughout many parts of the contiguous United States. Parts of the Alaska Highway were shut down for days at a time. Alaskans suffered for 15 days when air quality in cities such as Fairbanks was deemed to be hazardous to health by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards. Then it was the collapse of the 9-mile-long, 3-mile-wide, 120-foot-thick Ayles Ice Shelf off the north coast of Ellesmere Island in 2005. Scientist Warwick Vincent likened the collapse, the largest recorded in the Canadian Arctic, to a cruise missile hitting the shelf after it registered as a small earthquake at a seismic station 150 miles away.
Grizzly and polar bear hybrids like this one are icons of the changes taking place as traditional Arctic habitat disappears.
Credit: Jodie Pongracz, Government of the Northwest Territories.
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For the third year in a row, hundreds of beluga whales and narwhal made the mistake of staying in the Canadian Arctic longer than they should have because there was still much open water when summer came to an end. In Lancaster Sound alone, Inuit hunters shot more than 600 belugas that would have otherwise drowned as the small pools of open water they were trapped in shrank to nothing over a 10-day period.
But what really made the big melt of 2007 an eye-popping one was the absence of ice in areas where it almost never thaws. The so-called “mortuary” of old ice that perennially chokes M’Clintock Channel in the High Arctic of Canada virtually disappeared that August. The “birthplace” of a great deal of new ice that is manufactured in Viscount Melville Sound to the north was down to half of its normal ice cover. “The ice is no longer growing or getting old,” said John Falkingham, chief forecaster for the Canadian Ice Service.
Massive chunks of ice broke from the warming Petermann Glacier in Greenland in the summer of 2012.
Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
Extraordinary as the events of 2007 were, the changes that have been brought on by a rapidly warming Arctic have not let up since then. In 2010 and 2012, 100 square miles and 46 square miles respectively broke away from the Petermann Glacier in Greenland. The presence of so much warm open water in 2012 — when another record low for sea ice cover was established — fueled an unusually powerful summer cyclone that tore through the Arctic for nearly two weeks. It wasn’t just sea ice that was being churned up and melted more quickly by these increasingly powerful storms. In the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta in Alaska, which is already vulnerable to rising sea levels, storm surges sent waves of saltwater more than 30 kilometers inland on three occasions between 2005 and 2011. This doesn’t bode well for the million birds that nest in the delta nor for the Chinook (king) salmon, which have been in steep decline in the region for more than a decade. This year’s run of between 71,000 and 117,000 was expected to be as poor as last year’s, which established a record low.
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We are already seeing the effects of some of these changes ripple through various ecosystems. Capelin, not arctic cod, is now the dominant fish in Hudson Bay. Killer whales, once stopped by sea ice, are now preying on narwhals and beluga whales throughout the Arctic Ocean. Pacific salmon of all types are moving into many parts of the Canadian Arctic where they have never been seen before. Polar bears at the southern end of their range are getting thinner and producing fewer cubs than they have in the past. Chukchi Sea walrus are hauling out on land by the tens of thousands, as 35,000 of them did in September 2014 when there was no more sea ice to use as platforms.
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http://www.climatecentral.org/news/the-end-and-beginning-of-the-arctic-18407
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