Sea-Ice Splash and Tipsy Trees...

[J A Ginsburg]

(Animation showing the age of the Arctic sea ice from 1982 to 2007. Ice greater than 5 years old (in red) has mostly been replaced by much younger ice (in blue) credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center)

It's melting! It's melting! This summer, for the first time in human history, the ice at the North Pole may disappear away completely. Experts are quick to point out that the certainty of such a prediction is about as reliable as guaranteeing a Triple Crown winner (sorry Big Brown...). And with ice totals at the South Pole on on the increase, we are as ice-bound a blue planet as ever. But any change on this kind of scale has implications. Both trends, it turns out, are consistent with global warming, and neither are particularly good news.

Locking up water in ice at the bottom of the world leads to droughts, fires and crop failures in Australia, while the melt-down at the top leads to pot holes. Really big ones. The ground underfoot is literally giving way as the permafrost, a layer of frozen earth 1,000 feet or more thick and 20,000 to 40,000 years hard-as-rock old, gets squishy. Melting in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Permafrost Tunnel near Fairbanks has liberated the stench of decomposing Pleistocene plunder: bits of formerly frozen bison embedded in the walls.

In one of Nature's more ironic feedback loops, the melting mud will likely release vast quantities of long-sequestered CO2, a greenhouse gas, as well as pockets of poisonous methane, which molecule per molecule packs about 20x the greenhouse punch. About 1/3 of the planet's soil-stored carbon is in Arctic soils.

A new study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) found that the "rate of climate warming
warming over northern Alaska, Canada, and Russia could more than triple during periods of rapid sea ice loss..." (also see the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment)

Over the last half century, the average annual temperature has risen about 3.5 F degrees in Alaska -- even more in some areas -- versus an average of a little over 1 degree for the entire planet. According to NCAR's research, a decade of rapid sea-ice loss would send autumn temperatures, which are the warmest of the year in that part of the world, soaring much as 9 degrees.

Adding to the rosy glow are a series of newly discovered deep sea volcanoes, spewing molten lava and methane from ridge beneath the Arctic ocean stretching from Greenland to Siberia. Whether the plumes of hot water are enough to contribute significantly to the ice melt is unknown. But if methane escapes into the atmosphere, it is that much more gas for the global greenhouse.

Tipsy Trees
It is enough to drive a tree to drink. Or at least that's what it looks like. Unable to adapt to the shifting ground beneath them, stands of "drunken trees," all pointing in different directions -- a living record of what used to be "up" -- now dot the northern landscape.

Meanwhile, omnivorous potholes swallow homes, trucks and fields. Permafrost roads turn to mush. Native cultures drown. Polar bears struggle. And aging oil pipelines, whether insulated and buried or built to float above the muck, endure stresses engineers never imagined.

For all the many good arguments against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, getting stuck in the mud may the one that finally sinks the deal. Building and operating infrastructure for oil and gas projects anywhere in the in the north -- not just Alaska, but in Canada and Russia as well -- will get that much more expensive and risky with every warm breeze.