Winter temperatures plummeting six degrees Celsius and sudden droughts scorching farmland around the globe are not just the stuff of scary movies. Such striking climate jumps have happened before—sometimes within a matter of years … Most climate experts agree that we need not fear a full-fledged ice age in the coming decades. But sudden, dramatic climate changes have struck many times in the past, and they could happen again. In fact, they are probably inevitable … new evidence indicates that global warming should be more of a worry than ever: it could actually be pushing the earth’s climate faster toward sudden shifts (Alley 2004: 62, 64).
IN 2007, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN RECORDED history, the Northwest Passage between Alaska and Greenland became ice free. Since then, Arctic sea ice has continued to shrink in terms of its thickness, extent, and longevity (fig. 2.07). It was reported that bowhead whales from the Pacific and Atlantic stocks met in the ice-free channels of the central Canadian Arctic when Arctic Ocean sea ice reached an historic summer minimum in 2007. In 2010 such a meeting was documented conclusively by satellite tracking of two tagged whales, one from the Pacific and another from the Atlantic, in Viscount Melville Sound in the Northwest Passage (Heide-Jørgensen et al. 2011). Genetic studies by these authors suggest that these whales must have been meeting sporadically during the past 500 years, which would account for the genetic similarities between the two stocks. In its 2012 “Arctic Report Card,” the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration announced a new minimum ice-cover record was established that exceeded that of 2007 by 18 percent, a huge reduction by any standard.
Throughout the Maritime Far Northeast, one single geological and climatological factor has molded the landscape: the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which repeatedly buried northeastern North America in ice to a maximum depth of 4.8 km (3 mi) over the past 2.3 million years. This ice sheet was about one mile thicker than Greenland’s present ice cap and had more volume than the Antarctica Ice Sheet today. The Laurentide Ice Sheet was at least 50 percent larger than the combined ice masses in all of Europe and Asia (Pielou 1991). During the last full glacial period, the Late Glacial Maximum (LGM) of 18,000 years ago, the merged Laurentide and Cordilleran Ice Sheets formed an unbroken expanse covering nearly all of Canada and much of the northern United States (Mann 2005: 156). Today we are witnessing the rapid extinction of the frozen remnants of this last ice age. Increased acceleration of burning fossil fuels and clearing of land by humans may be delaying the “scheduled” onset of the next ice age—after a 10,000-year interglacial period—an ironic twist for global warming.
2.02 Correlation Between Rising CO2 in Parts per Million and Rising Global Temperature. (Credit: ACIA 2004)
2.03 Projected Arctic and Global Termperature Divergence, 2000–2100.
As one travels north into higher latitudes, the direct effects of climate change begin to be experienced as rising temperatures, melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, sea ice loss, and shifts in animal migrations and indigenous subsistence patterns. The cause is the correlation between temperature rise and increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2. By the end of this century, the CO2 level is likely to be the highest that it has been “at any time since the Eocene–36 million to 55 million years ago … [when] crocodiles lived in the Arctic” (Hileman 2004: 44).
In early 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Fourth Assessment report on earth’s climate (its next report is due in 2013), concluding, with 90 to 99 percent certainty, that the current global warming is attributable to anthropogenic factors, specifically the increase in CO2 released through fossil fuel use and changes in land use. For polar regions the consequences include enhanced rates of glacier melting, reduced glacial volume and area coverage, reduced albedo (reflectivity of snow and ice), and the warmest polar temperatures in 125,000 years. Temperatures in the upper layer of permafrost continued a warming trend that began in the 1980s. Rising temperature and reduced albedo leads to increased positive feedback as glaciers and snowfields melt, exposing water and land surfaces that are darker than snow and absorb more solar energy (ACIA 2004; Ruddiman 2005).
These warming trends are more pronounced in the Arctic than in other regions of the planet due to the dramatic change from ice (a solid) to water (a liquid) with a change of temperature of only one degree Celsius. As the extent of polar ice decreases, the reflectivity (albedo) of northern regions decreases and the light retained is converted into heat that is absorbed by Arctic lands and the Arctic Ocean. Naturalist and marine biologist Carl Safina described how the loss of the sea ice that buffered the Alaskan coastal village of Shishmaref from the raging Chukchi Sea and subsequent erosion impacted the local population:
If a few Eskimos recently descended from a nomadic culture are finding the challenge of moving [their village] daunting, can our own entrenched energy, water, agricultural systems adapt to accelerating changes? (2011: 233).
2.04 Receding Glacier
Flying north along Greenland’s west coast, one sees shrinking rivers of glacial ice, which may be evidence of climate warming.
The natural phenomena of weather and climate have “inevitable uncertainties,” writes S. George Philander in the often-cited definitive work Is the Temperature Rising? The Uncertain Science of Global Warming. This uncertainty is particularly true of the greenhouse effect and global warming that have resulted from humans changing the gaseous composition of the planet (1998: xiv, 20). The correlation, on the one hand, between human production of CO2 and, on the other hand, temperature increase, is now accepted as fact by almost all climate scientists and by many politicians. The albedo relationship (figs. 2.05–06) is the primary reason why Arctic temperatures are rising (fig. 2.03) four times as fast (+2.80 C/5.00 F) as the global mean (0.80 C /1.440 F).
Ironically, in the past, global warming has sometimes led to global cooling. Around 8,200 years ago meltwater from the collapsing Laurentide Ice Sheet that accumulated in glacial lakes Ojibway and Agassiz drained suddenly into the Labrador Sea through Hudson Strait. This massive infusion of cold freshwater disrupted the global thermohaline circulation that is normally powered by cold, dense saltwater entering the North Atlantic via the East Greenland and Labrador Currents. The heat generated in southern regions of the Pacific and Indian Oceans is carried by the THCB to other parts of the earth, while the Gulf Stream flows from the much closer Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean. This event, a product of massive Laurentide glacier melt, created a cold period less severe than the Younger Dryas (ca. 12-13,000 years ago) but colder than the Little Ice Age and lowered atmospheric temperatures about 3.5 degrees C for sixty to 150 years. The combined melting from Greenland, alpine glaciers, and Antarctica is not expected to have such an effect because their volume is less and their water is being released gradually, not in a single deluge as it was 8,200 years ago.
The Gulf Stream (more accurately termed the North Atlantic Drift) also transports heat to the North Atlantic from the equatorial zone of the Western Hemisphere. Although the Gulf Stream and the THCB are different mechanisms, both bring heat from the southern latitudes to the North. The primary distinction between the two is that heat carried by the THCB is transported from the Pacific and Indian Oceans while the Gulf Stream flows from the much closer Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean.
2.05 Albedo Effect
Exposed dark rock soil or open sea as seen in this Greenland landscape absorb solar energy (low albedo) and warm the earth, while ice- and snow-covered lands and water reflect solar energy (high albedo) and cool the earth.
Research on annually deposited snow layers in Greenland ice cores (Dansgaard et al. 1985; 1989; Alley 2002, 2004) shows that climate changes, including the onset and termination of major climate events, can occur very rapidly, on the order of decades or less.
2.06 Arctic Warming Enhanced
Factors that enhance the effect of warming in Arctic regions are explained in this graphic.
Global climate usually changes little over the course of a human lifetime, but a large and rapidly growing body of research has begun to reveal just how variable it is on longer time scales … transitions between fundamentally different climates can occur within only decades … [and there is] growing awareness of how profoundly human activity is affecting climate (Smith and Uppenbrink 2001: 657).
For the first time in decades, scholarly and public media have responded to these changes by running high-profile articles and programs featuring climate change, and the topic has become a central issue of national policy debates. NOAA and the National Science Foundation have devoted more resources to gathering climatological and geophysical field data, and scores of complex computer programs have been developed to model past climate change and future projections. Slowly, fields like the geosciences, climatology, and astronomy are contributing to better understanding of earth science systems (Lovelock 2006: 162). One of the convincing results is a strong relationship between the use of fossil fuels and climate change. Recently the term “tipping point” has been applied by ecologists, geophysicists, and climatologists with reference to climate change. Global climate is at the point where a small increase in CO2 may not just create a little change in temperature but lead to a dramatic change, for example, greatly increased glacial melting and storm activity. The amount of CO2 measured in parts per million (ppm) has grown by about 40 percent from 270 ppm in 1750 to 389.78 ppm on 1 December 2011, according to researchers at Scripps Oceanographic Institution. In April 2012 NOAA reported a new milestone when for the first time a monthly average of 400 ppm was recorded at Barrow, Alaska. Although the cause of rising CO2 has sometimes been contested, the data begin to reveal the hydrographic and atmospheric factors that force climate change. The real challenge now is to discover and then model the many feedback mechanisms that collectively constitute the climate matrix.
2.07 Arctic Sea Ice Minima Mapped, 1982–2007
Recent decades have seen a major reduction of summer sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean, and predictions call for ice-free summers by 2040 or sooner.
Sea currents, long investigated in general terms, are being studied more intensively as potentially one of the most powerful agents of climate phenomena (figs. 2.09–10). Discussions at the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change in 2009 revealed the lack of knowledge and disagreements among geophysicists, hydrologists, and other specialists about North Atlantic currents. H. P. Huntington et al. (2010: 265) assert, “neither local residents nor scientists have much detailed understanding of currents in any of the locations [of the Western Hemisphere Arctic] nor does anyone have an inexpensive way to monitor currents.”
As the Arctic Ocean continues to change from a giant reflector of ultraviolet light to a massive sink of ultraviolet light, or as Arctic permafrost melts, releasing not only more CO2 but also the much more potent greenhouse gas, methane (CH4), from soils and seafloor sediments, how much more will temperature rise? What are the implications for not only northern ecosystems but also for the whole planet?
2.08 Arctic Sea Ice Minima Observed, 1979 and 2003
2.09 Western North Atlantic Currents
The general understanding of currents in the Western Hemisphere is illustrated in this map, but little more detailed knowledge is available.
2.10 Thermohaline Conveyor Belt
Sometimes called the Ocean Conveyer Belt, a simplified diagram of the THCB illustrates how ocean water is “pumped” around the globe, powered by changes in salinity, density, and temperature. A major driver is the pressure of cold saline Arctic water as it descends into the deep abyss of the northwest Atlantic. After circulating the globe these waters warm and rise, returning to the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans as warm surface currents.
Three incontrovertible facts have been established by late 2011 from the debate over the causes of recent climate change: sea levels are rising due to the net melting of the world’s glaciers and volumetric expansion of seawater as it warms and expands; the production of CO2 by humanity continues to increase across the globe; and human agency currently has greater impact on climate than either earthquakes or changes brought on by the earth’s orbital ellipse (that is, the extent of tilt as the earth ‘wobbles’ on its axis). Paul Crutzen first (2002) used the term “Anthropocene” to emphasize the human origins of this era of dramatic warming on our planet; the idea has been popularized by Kolbert (2006) and Flannery (2005).
If the level of CO2 in the atmosphere doubles, as predicted, by the end of the twenty-first century, we are likely to see a temperature increase of about 1°C (1.8°F) “if everything else is held constant … [but] everything else cannot be held constant” (Alley 2011: 85). Predictions assume a positive feedback loop; that is, more CO2 will produce an increased warming effect. The effects of theses changes are difficult to measure in absolute terms, but they are contributing factors in observed changes in atmospheric water vapor, severity of storms, drought and flooding, changes in vegetation, and crop failures.
Even before the decline of sea ice began to make Arctic regions more accessible to outsiders, studies of atmospheric circulation showed that pollutants generated in the tropics and temperate zones are carried north by air currents, where they descend and are deposited in polar regions. The phenomenon of heat rising, transporting pollutants with it, can be observed when we sit around an open fire. Soot from coal-fired generating plants, aircraft engines, and other industrial processes is a major contributor to airborne pollution that reaches Arctic regions and hastens both global and Arctic warming. Soot and other carbon particulates also are deposited on snow on land and on sea ice, decreasing albedo and accelerating polar glacier and sea ice melting. During the summer, old multiyear sea ice in the Arctic Ocean becomes black with soot as the annual layers melt out, becoming blacker and more heat-absorbent as the melt progresses. Alun Anderson (2009: 249–252) notes that black carbon (ice dust) generated by industry, jets, forest fires, and annual spring burning by agriculture covers one-quarter to one-half of the Arctic between N50° and N60° latitude. Either way, whether suspended in Arctic air or deposited on the earth or ice, soot captures solar radiation. In just twenty years, between 1990 and 2010, air temperature in the Arctic rose by 2.5°C (4.5°F).
2.11 Northwest Greenland Glaciers
The symmetrically arranged glaciers, viewed from air when crossing over the Nuussuaq Peninsula from Disko Bay to Uummannaq Fjord, present a good sense of Greenland’s rugged coastal terrain.
A final factor contributing to Arctic warming results from the structure of the polar atmosphere: its troposphere—the lower portion of earth’s atmosphere—is only half as thick as elsewhere and has a correspondingly diminished carrying capacity. Polar regions therefore have less capacity to absorb pollutants, which are flushed out and deposited in the Arctic. As a result polar areas contain higher relative concentrations of synthetic chemicals such as PCBs. Multiple studies of the marine food web reveal how organic mercury, a metal that is contained within airborne pollution from burning coal, builds up (Gray 2002). When these pollutants enter the food chain, they are biomagnified as they progress from phytoplankton to zooplankton, and to fish, seals, whales, and eventually to humans.
Change in much of the Maritime Far Northeast is occurring at an increasingly rapid rate. Stress factors—that is, a constellation of climate, environmental, and economic changes that are outside the normal boundaries of traditional cultural adaptations and ecological knowledge—are now being experienced by Arctic peoples. The implications of this “regime shift” or “rapid systemic change” have yet to be fully appreciated (Yalowitz et al. 2008: 5).
Climate change as it is currently being experienced can be traced to humans whose presence—although brief—on this planet exceeds the impact of any other species during Earth’s history. Richard Alley emphatically lays the blame for global warming on our species, noting that while the rise in temperature from the Ice Age took “10,000 years, we may achieve a similar warming in not much more than a century” (2011: 186). This same mantra of human culpability is noted by others: “Continued loading of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere only increases the uncertainty and the instability with which we will have to contend. [Humans] have become the biggest force in the climate system” (Conkling et al. 2011: 22–23).
2.12 Petermann Glacier Ice
In 2010–2011 a massive iceberg, so large it became known as Petermann Ice Island, flowed south from Greenland. In August 2011, several very large icebergs calved off, including these photographed from the town of St. Carol’s on French Bay, Newfoundland.
A consensus on human agency and the increase in greenhouse gases has been reached between two of the most involved US agencies. Addressing global climate, the IPCC report concludes: “There is evidence that some extremes have changed as a result of anthropogenic influences, including increases in atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. It is likely [IPCC emphasis] (66 to 100% probability) that anthropogenic influences have led to warming of extreme daily minimum and maximum temperatures on a global scale” (IPCC 2011: 6).
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) annually focuses on the Arctic, issuing a “Report Card.” Its December 2012 Report Card states:
An international team of scientists who monitor the rapid changes in the Earth’s northern polar region say that the Arctic is entering a new state, one with warmer air and water temperatures, less summer sea ice and snow cover, and a changed ocean chemistry. This shift is also causing changes in the region’s life, both on land and in the sea, including less habitat for polar bears and walruses, but increased access to feeding areas for whales.
NOAA cites record-low winter snowfall and sea ice extent; record-setting summer melting season in which 97 percent of the outermost layer of the Greenland Ice Cap experienced some thawing; increased vegetation growing season; and record-high permafrost temperatures in Alaska; warmer sea surface temperatures and massive phytoplankton blooms in the Arctic Ocean. According to Martin Jeffries,
The record-low spring snow extent and record-low summer sea ice extent in 2012 exemplify a major source of the momentum for continuing change. As the sea ice and snow cover retreat, we’re losing bright, highly reflective surfaces, and increasing the area of darker surfaces—both land and ocean—exposed to sunlight. This increases the capacity to store heat within the Arctic system, which enables more melting—a self-reinforcing cycle. (Jeffries, from NOAA 2012 Arctic Report Card)
2.13 Harp Seals Basking off Labrador
Thousands of harp seals pause on their northward spring migration to Greenland and Baffin Bay, resting on the pack ice of the northern Labrador coast.
2.14 Harp Seal Migration Routes and Whelping Grounds
How these changes affect northern life and cultures became evident to us as we pursued our travels and research in the Maritime Far Northeast.
Personal experiences and reports of local observers have documented that the ice season in the eastern Arctic is now shorter and more erratic than in the past, and winds are higher and more frequent. As waters become increasingly ice-free, northern peoples are finding it more difficult to obtain food. Warmer water has enabled southern species of sharks to move north into Subarctic and Arctic waters, and orcas (killer whales) are now competing with Inuit and polar bears for seals. Insects, such as wasps, never seen previously in northern Greenland, have recently been reported in Uummannaq.
Particularly striking changes are occurring in harp seal habitats. Perry Colbourne, a resident of Lushes Bight, Newfoundland, and skipper of the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center’s archaeological research vessel, and Phil Vatcher, a former wildlife officer for the Quebec Lower North Shore (LNS), noted the decrease in the harp seal population in August 2010. Historically, the harp seal has been a highly dependable seasonal resource for prehistoric and modern hunters in Labrador, Newfoundland, and the Quebec Lower North Shore (Stenson and Sjare 1997). The population of the annual fall and spring migrations has been estimated at 9–12 million animals in recent years. Harp seals require stable winter pack ice (fig 2.14) on which they give birth (fig 2.13) and tend and feed their pups from February until April (Lacoste and Stenson 2000; Lavigne and Kovacs 1988; Sargeant 1991). The only ice that appeared in the northern Gulf in the 2005–06 sealing season were thin ice pans that had drifted down from Labrador and quickly melted in the warmer waters around Newfoundland (Johnston et al. 2005). In 2009 and again in 2010, seals came as usual to the LNS, but the winters were so warm that little sea ice formed. In early winter of 2010–11 the absence of sea ice forced females to give birth on shore, and many of the pups, known as “white coats” because of their fluffy fur, were abandoned by their mothers and starved or were taken by predators. Others, born on thin ice, drowned when the ice melted before the pups molted, forcing them into the water before their white coats were replaced by the adult seal hair required for swimming and feeding on their own. Hunters along the LNS estimate that thousands of young harps perished during the past two seasons as a direct result of warm winters and lack of stable sea ice. Scientific studies report similar harp seal declines throughout the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Newfoundland region and attribute them to warming climate (Johnston et al. 2007, 2012). Compounding the loss of young animals, adult harp seals have begun to abandon their winter range in the Gulf and become unavailable to local hunters. The resulting population decline will impact other regions of northern Canada and Greenland where harps are a major seasonal food for people and dogs and a source of income from sale of their valuable pelts on the European market. (The US Marine Mammal Act prohibits importation of these pelts or other sea mammal products into the United States.)
2.15 Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus)
This apex marine predator (other than humans) ranges throughout the Arctic. Its primary prey is the ringed seal, but it also takes sea birds and small walruses and, when on land, caribou. Polar bears that hunt on the southward-moving pack ice off Baffin Island and Labrador often end up in northern Newfoundland and are killed or darted for transport north when they come ashore and attempt to travel back north over land.
2.16 Greenland Sledge Team
The husky, originally bred as a sledge dog in Siberia, arrived in Alaska 1,500 years ago and helped make possible the Thule culture migration into the Eastern Canadian Arctic and Greenland around AD 1250. Teams of dogs can travel with a loaded sledge as much as one hundred miles in a single day.
2.17 Halibut Fishing on Spring Ice
Halibut and cod are important components of the West Greenland economy. This rank of halibut hooks will be baited and set as a long-line through a hole in the ice. Without stable ice winter fishing will not be possible for locals who lack large boats, and this subsistence resource for dogs and humans will be lost.
2.18 Old Arctic Hand
Raymond Buffitt, who worked for years as an economic development officer with the Department of Indian Affairs in the Canadian Arctic, explained the Inuit switch from dogs to snow machines from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Warmer winters are also affecting plants. The bakeapple (Rubus chaemamorus), also known as cloudberry or salmonberry (fig. 2.19), a tasty fruit that grows in bogs, is a favorite seasonal food in Subarctic regions. Phil Vatcher, Lloyd Rowsell, and Gilles Mongait—all LNS residents—attributed the failure of the 2010 bakeapple harvest to a lack of snow, which caused the roots of the plants to freeze. Here and in Newfoundland, snow and sea ice were so scarce in 2010 that snowmobile travel on land and sea ice was not possible. The warmer weather in Newfoundland in 2010 also brought reports of the arrival of new species, including the pine grosbeak and goldfinch.
As sea ice melts and melting permafrost turns the tundra into a bog, even local water sources may become undrinkable without filtration or sterilization. Some speculate that melting permafrost might release long-dormant bacteria like tetanus, for which, at least in Greenland, there is currently no vaccination program.
In Greenland the winters from 2008 to 2011 saw very little fast ice, the ice that freezes firmly to the shore and provides a road for dogsleds and snowmobiles. While some fast ice still forms, it is weakly anchored and easily broken up by storms and blown out to sea. Consequently seal hunting and fishing on the ice by dogsled (fig. 2.20) has become limited to a few weeks in mid-winter, and summer hunting by small boats has been restricted by the increased number of icebergs calving from melting glaciers. Food shortages are an increasing consequence of such limitations to hunting. Some families migrate to towns with the hope that it will be easier to sustain self and dependants, but this disrupts the familial traditions and patterns of life on the land.
Polar bears (Ursus maritimus), the best-known charismatic species of the Arctic, are experiencing stress caused by climate warming and reduced sea ice (Vongraven and Richardson 2011). Polar bears hunt by stalking seals on the pack ice. As the ice retreats northward into the Arctic Ocean in the summer, polar bears are forced to abandon their dwindling sea-ice hunting grounds and swim long distances to land. Although good short-distance swimmers, polar bears are not adapted for open-ocean swimming, and some—especially the young animals—drown before reaching shore. This has been a particular problem for polar bears in the Beaufort Sea, less so in the Eastern Arctic.
2.19 Bakeapple
The ubiquitous bakeapple (Rubus chamaemorus), or chicoutai in Innu, is the northern fruit of choice. It grows around the world in boreal latitudes in muskeg and wet boggy soils. According to local observers, bakeapple harvests are decreasing, perhaps as a result of global warming.
Melting sea ice also affects the human harvest of polar bears and other sea mammals, as hunters must travel further to hunt, causing them to replace dog teams with gas-guzzling snowmobiles or outboards. Owners incur debt to purchase or lease large boats that are costly to maintain. As motorized craft are displacing dog sledges, owners are forced to shoot the dogs they cannot afford to feed. The choice between dogs and machines is a real dilemma as neither is truly satisfactory. “[T]he line between nostalgia and progress is mixed, [in] that it must always—and can never can truly—be straddled, and that the danger and necessity of doing so is both palpable and real” (Haake 2002: 62–63).
Nuugaatsiaq in northern Greenland has historically enjoyed a long winter ice season, but in the spring of 2009 hunters could not safely use dogs as they risked falling through thin ice (fig 2.22). In the winter of 2009 and 2010, the waters of Uummannaq, the northern Greenland village, remained open, without ice, forcing hunters to hunt from boats (figs. 2.21, 2.23). As ice mass declines much of the food that has sustained Inuit life and culture for millennia is disappearing. Hunting is increasingly conducted by boat, but without sea ice, ring seal, harp seal, and polar bear populations will fall and be geographically displaced. Some fear polar bears could face extinction, while others wonder if a tipping point has already been reached in terms of the Arctic Ocean’s albedo.
That tipping point portends a complex series of events, seen for example in the relationship between ice, seal, and hunters. Without sea ice as a hunting platform, the Inuit hunter, like the polar bear, must adopt new hunting methods, using boats rather than sledges or snow machines. New technologies also change efficiencies; the success rate of shooting a seal on the ice is greater than retrieving a seal shot in the water, because a dead seal may sink, especially in the spring when its blubber is thin. Overall, northern hunters are likely to turn from hunting to fishing for food and income. The combined impact on a number of species in an ecosystem is called a “trophic cascade” (Anderson (2009: 68).
2.20 Winter Ice Road
For the past 800 years, from Northern Greenland to the Quebec Lower North Shore, the use of dog sledges for hunting, fishing, and winter travel has been the primary means of transport. Today it is almost absent outside of northern Greenland, where its use is declining as a result of climate and economic change.
In northern Greenland and Labrador spring hunting at the ice edge has sustained Inuit populations for 4,000 years. The means of transport has changed from hand-drawn sledge to dog sledge to snow machine, and boats have become essential to this important seasonal hunt as safe ice declines.
Moose (Alces alces), caribou (Rangifer tarandus), and muskox (Ovibos moschatus)—northern ungulates that have to dig through the snow to reach winter forage—have suffered in recent years when warm spells melted ice and then refroze in crusts too hard or thick for the animals to penetrate. Loss of these ungulates results in stress on northern subsistence hunters who use animal products for food, clothing, tools, and raw materials to produce tourist and commercial art.
In the Far Northeast, “small-footprint cultures”—those whose adaptations do not greatly alter the natural ecological balance—offer the urbanized world examples of how to ensure continued prosperity in spite of the environmental challenges that are headed this way. We need to ensure continuity of other cultural systems, for success lies neither in homogenization nor in maintaining a death grip on the status quo. Success is best ensured through diversification and adaptation. This logic operates elsewhere in the sphere of economics through portfolio diversification, in technology through redundancy in computer operating systems, and in society’s contingency planning and risk assessment strategies. Nature itself employs this concept through genetic diversity expressed at the individual level in every species. At the onset of the climatic period known as the Little Ice Age (ca. 1400–1850), the Greenland Norse colonies disappeared because their economy was geared primarily toward animal husbandry and trade of products like sheep’s wool and walrus ivory to Europe. Although their subsistence base broadened to include more marine products (seal and fish) as the climate deteriorated, trade with Europe diminished as the increasingly stormy and ice-infested seas around Greenland began to restrict contacts between Greenland, Iceland, and northern Europe (Diamond 2005; Arneborg 2000; Miller et al. 2012).
2.22 Spring Ice
As ice begins to melt in the Eclipse sound area of Canada’s Nunavut the sea ice melts and becomes a shallow lake that presents many challenges to the hunter. With futher melting, the ice thins, holes develop, and the water drains off; but by this time it is unsafe and hunters must await open water for hunting by boat.
2.23 Summer Hunting and Fishing
When the ice breaks up in late spring hunters return, nowadays using aluminum or fiberglass outboards instead of kayaks, to hunt seals and fish in the iceberg-filled waters of Disko Bay.
2.24 Aaju Peter in Sealskin Outfit
Until recent times sealskin clothing was the common summer garment worn by Inuit people throughout the North American Arctic. Waterproof, durable, and warm, sealskins provide a variety of markings and colorations for fashioning stylish outfits.
Compared to the Western cultural model, aboriginal technology has been frugal in its use of energy, because until recently traditional cultures had little energy to spare. Whether energy was extracted as oil from a seal or as firewood from a tree, it was hard to procure. In ancient times the Inuit “mobile home,” which was always worn on the trail, was a large, loose-fitting, hooded fur anorak (parka) designed to release moisture during times of exertion so that perspiration did not freeze within one’s clothing (fig. 2.24). Dog sledge travel offered the hunter the assurance that his team would find the way home when a hunter became lost in a blizzard. Increasingly over the last few decades, traditional Inuit technology has been replaced by the rifle, motorboat, snowmobile, and most recently, the ATV. Modern technology dramatically increases the need for importing costly petroleum products. The shift from traditional gathering of carbohydrates directly from the land to that of employing imported hydrocarbons to leverage local carbohydrates has created an Arctic dependency upon imported oil, making this form of energy, “the lifeblood of modern Arctic settlements” (Dowdeswell and Hambrey 2002: 189). Modern life in the Arctic has seen an explosion in the need for imported energy to generate fuel for reserve stations, heat homes, and support airplane, snowmobile, outboard, and ATV transport. The skyline of every Arctic village is now marked by at least one fuel-storage tank (figs. 2.25–26).
2.25 & 2.26 Tank Farms in Uummannaq and Upernavik
In the heart of every village, town, settlement, or hamlet in Nunavut or Greenland, is a fossil fuel-tank farm. That energy is used to produce heat and electricity and to power boats, wheeled land vehicles, and snow machines.
This industrial legacy substitutes liquid fossil energy for energy formerly obtained from the blubber of seal, walrus, and whale. Before the arrival of Europeans in the Arctic securing energy was conducted in Labrador, Nunavut, and Greenland by acquiring blubber as a by-product of hunting sea mammals for food. Compared with the global society’s industrial supply system, Inuit methods have been small scale, and today seals continue to be hunted, with one or two hunters taking a few seals by rifle, harpoon, or net each year. Pelts are sold if the price is high but otherwise are used for making sealskin boots and other local craft products; all blubber and meat is consumed by people and dogs. Although rifles are an innovation, Inuit sealing constitutes a traditional practice as the hunt is embedded in Inuit kinship structure of sharing what is harvested from sea and land. In earlier days food and blubber also came from walrus and whale, and walrus also supplied ivory for tools and harpoon heads, and hides for covering the large umiaks used for whaling and long-distance summer travel. Walrus meat was used only for dog food. Whale meat was also used for dog food, and its inner skin, known as maktaaq, has long been considered an Inuit delicacy, while its baleen was used for making baskets, buckets, snares, and fishing line. During the continuing controversy over the hunting of baby harp seals around Newfoundland and the subsequent U.S. ban on importing Canadian marine mammal products, the Western world has been “unable to recognize that Inuit subsistence was a matter of cultural right, as well as need” and that “food was only available through hunting” (Wenzel 1991: 55, 113). Much of today’s developed world:
has acted with little difference from earlier generations of southern imperialists. In essence, it has acted with same ethnocentric raison d’être that has characterized all but perhaps the earliest moments of Inuit contact with Western culture (1991: 180).
Heretofore, energy needs were met from one source: whether for heating, cooking, or lighting, the oil that fueled the lamp was locally rendered from sea mammal fat. Now, energy sources in much of the Arctic are not only imported, they are imported for specific applications such as gasoline for snow machines or diesel generators for electricity. In Maine, much of the heat for homes is derived from firewood that is locally gathered. Heating with wood allows us to transfer heat locally, reducing our need for imported oil-based energy. Fortunately, in both the Arctic and Maine local fuel resources are abundant (Fallows 2008). However, in recent years the Arctic has shifted from using local sources of energy to imported energy and consumer goods. Now most Inuit hunt seals by snowmobile. Raymond Buffitt (fig. 2.18) of Chevry, Quebec, who spent a career in the Arctic as an economic development officer with the Canadian Ministry of Northern Resources, questions the belief that the Canadian government encouraged the Inuit to shift from dogs to snowmobiles. He recalled that when Inuit began resettling in villages in the late 1950s and early 1960s local resources no longer provided enough seals for dog food, and so the use of dogs had to be abandoned. In the central Canadian Arctic, snowmobiles were a later introduction that gave villages a wider resource zone to exploit. Dog-sledging has continued into the present in the northern parts of West Greenland because oil rendered from a seal cannot power a snowmobile, but blubber will fuel up a dog team.
2.27 Fuel Barrel in Nunavut
The omnipresent rusting fuel barrel is the ubiquitous cultural hallmark of the twentieth-century age of fossil fuels. After thousands of years of using sustainable oil sources, petroleum has replaced the blubber of whales and seals for heating, lighting, and transport.
The shift from dogs to snow machines has impacted the quality of local diets. Rising gasoline prices—around $1.50 Canadian per liter ($.91/quart) or about $6.00 Canadian per gallon in 2010—have made it extremely costly for Inuit to obtain wild game, known to many northerners as “country food.” As foods such as fish and caribou are replaced by imported foods high in fat and sugar, the energy levels of the Inuit has dropped, and the shift has contributed to increased rates of diabetes and tooth decay (Kuhnlein and Receveur 2007).
The introduction of southern market strategies and use of fossil fuels by northern communities are beginning to subvert regional communities where the economies have previously been based on local ecological interdependence. Growing dependence on the global economy threatens to engulf them in same perils that endanger the rest of the world. As Safina notes (2011: 108), “the economy sits entirely within the ecology … Edward Abbey long ago observed that growth for the sake of continuous growth is the strategy of cancer.” He warns of the inherent conflict of supporting environmental stewardship within a market economy: “The failure of markets to realistically price the destruction of living systems and the fuels we use to run civilization makes it economically attractive to risk the entire planet” (2011: 271).
As the world debates the issue of whether the world’s climate is changing as a result of human activity and considers what mitigation measures might be applied, northern residents already have been experiencing a new climate regime for the past ten to twenty years. It is now recognized that the Arctic is a bellwether, the “canary in the coal mine.” The presence or absence of sea ice—a condition reflecting simply the difference of one degree on a temperature scale—does make all the difference in the world. In the following chapters we will see the effects of these changes on societies and ecology in a series of northern environments from Maine to Greenland.
TRANSIT OF THE PETERMANN ICE ISLAND
By Wilfred E. Richard
ALAN HUBBARD, A GLACIOLOGIST FROM Aberystwyth University in Wales, had been working at the head of Uummannaq Fjord in Greenland, measuring glacial movement, when we met in spring 2010. In 2009 and earlier in 2010, Dr. Hubbard had placed recording instruments on the Petermann and Humboldt glaciers, which are located in far northwestern Greenland on Nares Strait. These glaciers consist of both a land component and a floating ice shelf—the latter, an uncommon feature of Arctic glaciers. His instruments measured sugnificant ice movement, evidence that the structural integrity of the Petermann ice shelf was rapidly degrading.
In August 2010, a 12-mile-wide, 3,000-foot-thick iceberg calved from the Petermann Glacier. This was the largest piece of floating ice released in Greenland in almost half a century. This floating massif, transported by the southbound Labrador Current, began its yearlong journey to Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
When the Arctic Studies Center archaeology crew arrived in Newfoundland for our tenth season on Quebec’s Lower North Shore in July 2011, we soon heard that a 10-mile-long iceberg had grounded in southern Labrador off the settlement of Battle Harbor. Within fifteen minutes of setting sail from Long Island, we encountered our first icebergs at the base of Notre Dame Bay. Usually we see one or two icebergs near the northern tip of Newfoundland, but in 2011 there were many icebergs all along the east side of Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula, in the Strait of Belle Isle, and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. They had all calved from the stalled mother remnant of the Petermann Glacier.
In mid-August, on the return leg back to Newfoundland, local fishermen at Quirpon informed us that the Quirpon Tickle (narrow passage) was jammed with ice and would be very difficult to navigate through. After waiting for fog to lift, Skipper Perry Colbourne was able to weave through a plethora of massive icebergs, which were the prominent feature of the seascape until well into Notre Dame Bay. Later we learned that the mother iceberg located off Labrador earlier in the summer had broken free as two icebergs, which measured 2.8 × 3.4 miles and 2.4 × 2.2 miles. The Pitsiulak had motored through this concentration of floating ice off the east coast of Newfoundland. This ice had floated from 81 degrees North Latitude (fig. 2.12), the Arctic waters of Greenland, to 50 degrees North Latitude, the High Temperate zone of Atlantic Canada.
2.28 Alan Hubbard
Glaciologist Alan Hubbard predicted the breakup of the massive Petermann ice shelf located high in the narrows between Greenland and Canada, months before it broke off in August 2010.
I called our skipper, Perry Colbourne, in October 2011, in search of a lost piece of photo equipement, and learned that consequences of Petermann Glacier breakup were still being experienced in Newfoundland. A ferry crosses the “tickle,” about 0.4 miles wide, between Pilley’s Island and Long Island, where Perry lives. That day Perry had counted 59 icebergs in the waters between Long Island and Pilley’s Island; earlier the tickle was blocked by one very large iceberg, and ferry service had been temporarily discontinued. The melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet may deliver more than these inconveniences and maritime hazards, as climate change in this part of the world begins to ripple throughout the Maritime Far Northeast.
2.29 Glacial Remnants
These impressively large icebergs, spawned from Petermann Glacier, were sighted off the east coast of Newfoundland in July 2011, one year after the Petermann ice shelf broke off from north Greenland.
COASTAL ECOLOGICAL DYNAMICS OF THE NORTHWEST ATLANTIC
By Walter Adey
SCIENTISTS HAVE LONG REGARDED WITH puzzlement the marine biology of the northwestern North Atlantic rocky shore from Cape Cod to the Arctic. Early twentieth-century scientists considered the region highly unstable, and later argued about whether or not some abundant and ecologically important organisms, such as the periwinkle (Littorina littorea), were exotic invaders from Europe. Over the millennium of such an invasion, its ecological disruption, and the role of humans have been the source of much disagreement. Since the nineteenth century, some invasions, such as that of the conspicuous European rockweed (Fucus serratus), have been documented in considerable detail. And, on the southern parts of this coast, entire kelp forests have been observed rapidly coming and going, and fishing and disturbance by the removal of the top predators of sea urchins have been blamed. Even this explanation is not widely accepted.
The vast majority of rocky shore research on this spectacular and often stormy coast has been carried out in the southern portion of the Maritime Far Northeast, i.e., in the Gulf of Maine and Nova Scotia. Roads and communities near the more northerly shores are few, and visitors and residents need boats to visit these shores. Using diving equipment is essential to obtaining a real view—a submerged one—of the rugged rocky terrain below. As a result our understanding of the organisms and ecosystems of the northwestern Atlantic Coast have been skewed by research that is concentrated on the ever-changing shores to the south. A comprehensive understanding of the rocky shore of the entire region has been quite slow to develop.
Most of the research aboard the ALCAi. is carried out by SCUBA. Here two divers search for thick coralline algae (pink coating on rocks), which can provide a wealth of past temperature and salinity data on Labrador Sea waters. A 100mm thick specimen can be 800 years old and provide monthly data on sea water conditions throughout its long lifespan.
2.31 ALCAi, a Floating Marine Laboratory
Walter Adey, a Smithsonian scientist, built ALCAi on his farm on the Chesapeake shore to support his marine research in the coastal northwest Atlantic. His work has concentrated on the history and distribution of seaweed and marine algae from Long Island to northern Labrador.
Beginning in the 1960s, I began collecting calcified seaweeds known as the corallines over the entire stretch of this coast from Long Island Sound to northernmost Labrador. Later, carrying the field research to Western Europe and the North Pacific, I was able to gain a broader understanding of the complex history of this coast. However, even though the corallines provide a reef-like base to the kelp forests of this region, these early findings were largely ignored because of the exotic nature of corallines. The reef-like coralline bottoms were often referred to as “barrens.” In the last decade, I returned to these shores to carry out a broad assessment of the kelps and other larger algae and their associated grazing invertebrates. This time, I had a biogeography model for rocky-shore organisms that a colleague and I developed with the coralline data. The results of a series of SCUBA-diving expeditions to these northern shores, with a sailing research vessel built specifically for this work, provided a unique view into the ecological dynamics of the coast. With the new data, the interaction of climate and humans can be seen as creating spectacular changes in the biota and its ecology.
The endemic organisms on this wave-swept, rocky coast arrived from the North Pacific after the continental glaciers receded from this shore 10,000–14,000 years ago. These organisms moved to a largely empty shore. Few of the preglacial inhabitants of the northwestern North Atlantic were able to move southwards for they would have been blocked by sandy shores, inhospitable to most of the denizens of the northern rocky coasts. After the glaciations, a warmer period with higher sea levels in the Canadian Arctic archipelago, 6,000 to 8,000 years ago, allowed those rocky-shore Subarctic species of the North Pacific to move easily through the briefly hospitable Arctic to colonize the northwestern Atlantic Coast that was now open for colonization. As our current geological period, the Holocene, matured, this coast became entirely occupied by North Pacific Subarctic species. While the southerly regions of the Canadian Maritimes and New England could climatically accommodate much of the warmer European flora and fauna, at least in shallow water, they had to get there over a deep ocean that has currents that were either contrary or passed through cold Arctic waters. Undoubtedly, a few European species overcame all the odds, perhaps on floating logs, to make the trip. Mostly the entire coast was like the northern Maritimes today, Subarctic in character.
2.32 North Atlantic Seaweed History
Coralline abundance on North Atlantic rocky shore locations (solid black circles) establishes a baseline for reconstructing ocean history. Red hachure represents regions with greater than 89% Subarctic species; blue hachure denotes areas with greater than 90% boreal (European) species. In recent centuries European corallines have moved into the western Atlantic, probably carried by ship ballast. Nonetheless, European corallines are less abundant than their fleshy seaweed counterparts in the western Atlantic.
Just as the early naturalists suspected, the rocky shores of New England and the southern Maritimes are rapidly changing, and have been doing so for at least 500 years, or perhaps a thousand. The early European explorers and fishermen and then colonists brought free-riding invaders with them. These hitchhikers were attached to their boats and the accompanying ballast that was often thrown overboard on arrival. This unintended and largely unseen invasion of European marine invertebrates and seaweeds was as disruptive and long-lasting to the rocky shore of the New World as the changes that their human carriers were bringing to the broad terrestrial lands to the west. However, to the north in Quebec, Newfoundland, and Labrador, the waters were too cold for the transoceanic invaders. Here the original postglacial North Pacific Subarctic flora and fauna with their ecosystems still dominated, slowly evolving from their Pacific ancestors on their own evolutionary clocks.
This multicentury panorama of interaction of humans with a largely unseen natural world, one that has taken so long to piece together, is about to change anew. Global warming, expected to be severe in this region, will shuffle the biological and ecological deck. Fortunately, for the scientists who need to understand this process, the corallines are now giving up the deep secrets hidden in their yearly-layered crusts of calcite crystals. Detailed temperature and salinity information for 1,000 years, and perhaps longer, is stored in their trace-element chemistry. If we are clever enough—and do not lose heart—perhaps we can now learn quickly what is in store for the planet and then acquire the fortitude to prevent the excessive global change that could well devastate societies around the globe.
2.33 Walter Adey in the R/V ALCAi. Wet Laboratory
Walter sorts seaweeds harvested from meter-square quadrants at each station. All of the algae in each quadrant is harvested, sorted by species, and then weighed and logged.
3.01 View from the Camden Hills
Located in Camden Hills State Park, Mt. Baty affords a panoramic evening view of Camden Harbor, with church spires and sailboat masts ringed by Maine’s spectacular autumn foliage.
