Knight Ridder Newspapers
July 31, 2003

Alaskan Warming is Disturbing Preview of What's to Come, Scientists Say

by Seth Borenstein

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Alaska is melting.

Glaciers are receding. Permafrost is thawing. Roads are collapsing.
Forests are dying. Villages are being forced to move, and animals are
being forced to seek new habitats.

What's happening in Alaska is a preview of what people farther south
can expect, said Robert Corell, a former top National Science
Foundation scientist who heads research for the Arctic Climate Impact
Assessment team.

"If you want to see what will be happening in the rest of the world
25 years from now, just look at what's happening in the Arctic,"
Corell said.

Alaska and the Arctic are warming up fast, top international
scientists will tell senior officials from eight Arctic countries at
a conference in Iceland next week. They will disclose early,
disturbing findings from a massive study of polar climate change.

In Alaska, year-round average temperatures have risen by 5 degrees
Fahrenheit since the 1960s, and average winter temperatures soared 8
degrees in that period, according to the federal government. The
entire world is expected to warm by 2.5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by
2100, predict scientists at the International Panel on Climate Change.

2002 was the hottest year in Alaskan history, and this past winter
was the second warmest on record, according to the National Climatic
Data Center in Asheville, N.C., which found that Alaskan temperatures
began to rise dramatically in 1976. This July, Anchorage recorded its
second highest temperature ever as tourists got suntans.

Deborah Williams, the executive director of the Alaska Conservation
Foundation, used to take visitors from the Lower 48 to the famous
Portage Glacier just outside Anchorage, where the $8 million
Begich-Boggs visitor center opened in 1986. By 1993, the Portage
glacier had receded so much that it no longer could be seen from the
visitors' center. Williams still takes visitors to the site, seeing
the glacier's retreat as a warning.

"Alaska is the melting tip of the iceberg, the panting canary," said
Williams, who was the chief Interior Department official for Alaska
during the Clinton administration.

Portage is "a glacier that's almost out of water; it's thinned
dramatically," said U.S. Geological Survey geologist Bruce Molnia,
the author of the book "Glaciers of Alaska." About 98 percent of
Alaska's glaciers are retreating or stagnant, he said.

Alaskan glaciers add 13.2 trillion gallons of melted water to the
seas each year - the equivalent of more than 13 million Olympic-sized
swimming pools, University of Alaska in Fairbanks scientists
concluded after a decade of studying glaciers with airborne lasers.
The rate of glacier run-off has doubled over just a few decades, they
found. Alaska's melting glaciers are the No. 1 reason the oceans are
rising, Molnia said.

Another frozen staple of Alaska's northernmost lands - permafrost -
is also thawing and "is probably the biggest problem on land," said
Gunter Weller, director of the Center for Global Change and Arctic
System Research at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.

Permafrost is land that stays frozen year-round. Villages rely on the
hard permafrost to prevent beach erosion from violent ocean storms.
Two Alaskan native villages, Shishmaref and Kivalina, must relocate
because melting permafrost has caused beach erosion, leaving the
towns vulnerable to severe storms.
In 1986 the federal government built an $8 million visitors center
here next to the Portage Glacier. The glacier is no longer visible
from the visitors center. Seth Borenstein, KRT

About 600 people live in 150 homes in Shishmaref, a centuries-old
village on a barrier island just south of the Arctic Circle. On the
island's northern edge, erosion is so severe that the village voted
to move two years ago, but villagers haven't been able to find a new
site or money to finance the massive undertaking, said Percy
Nayokpuk, president of the Shishmaref Native Corporation.

"It's a matter of safety," Nayokpuk said. "We're on this small low
island. One bad storm could possibly wipe out the village. There is
nowhere to run."

Melting permafrost also means trouble for the oil industry. Oil
companies build pipelines and roads on it to support drilling on the
North Shore. To minimize damage to Arctic tundra, oil companies
explore for oil on Alaska's North Slope only when roads are frozen
with a foot of ice and six inches of snow. The ice-road season has
dropped from 200 days a year in 1970 to 103 days in 2002, according
to Alaska state documents.

"It is unlikely the oil industry can implement successful exploration
and development plans with a winter work season consistently less
than 120 days," an Alaska Department of Natural Resources budget
document said in March.

While global warming is hurting oil drilling, it's the increased
burning of fossil fuels such as oil that causes global warming. In
June, the Department of Energy announced that it would spend $270,000
to help Alaska rewrite its rules about how thick ice roads should be.

Permafrost lies under 166 Alaskan towns and 1,700 miles of Alaskan
highways. Melting is causing whole chunks of the Alaska Highway to
come apart, state officials said at a January global-warming
conference.

Permafrost is melting "under forests as well as under buildings and
roads," said atmospheric scientist Michael MacCracken, who headed
federal climate-change studies in the 1990s.

So far, the greatest effect on forests has come from the spruce-bark
beetle, according to Glenn Juday, a professor of forest ecology at
the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. The beetle, which kills spruce
trees, has long lived in Alaska's forests, but normally takes two
years to grow and reproduce; cold spells cut their numbers.

With global warming, however, the beetles now are damaging as many
trees each year as they used to ruin in two, Juday said. More than 4
million acres of spruce - Alaska's predominant tree - have been
killed, especially on the Kenai Peninsula.

"It's the largest episode of insect-caused tree mortality ever
recorded in North America," Juday said.

The spruce-bark beetle isn't alone. Other tree-killing invaders made
welcome by warmer weather include the larch soft fly, the aspen leaf
miner and the birch leaf roller, Juday said.

As Alaska's climate gets warmer and drier, Juday's studies indicate,
black and white spruces, which make up 80 percent of the state's main
forests, won't survive. By the turn of the next century, Alaska's
forests will resemble the Aspen-treed grasslands along the northern
edge of the Great Plains in North Dakota and Montana, Juday said.

Some scientific reports also blame global warming for plummeting
herring and salmon populations, Williams said. In the Yukon River, a
warm-water parasite has infected salmon and herring, a key food
source for marine mammals such as the stellar sea lion.

Warm waters have made Alaska's Bristol Bay salmon runs occur earlier
than normal, making it harder for the salmon to survive, said Alaska
Department of Fish and Game biologist Slim Morstad.

In addition, warm-weather wildlife, such as moose and beaver, are
heading unusually far north, while species that require frigid
weather "don't have anywhere to move to," said scientist MacCracken.
Marine mammals such as walruses, ring seals and polar bears may soon
see their numbers shrink along with the Arctic ice, Weller said.