Retreating glaciers, early arrival of birds, record hot spring days – Conor O'Clery, North America Editor, witnesses the signs in Alaska that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world
On April 27th, when the temperature rose to a record 22 degrees, the rotting ice shifted beneath a tripod of black and white rods on the Tenana River near Fairbanks, Alaska. As it floated away it pulled a string which automatically stopped a clock on the bank. Observers noted the time: 12.01pm. Contestants in a state lottery known as the Ice Classic then learned from the radio whether they had guessed the correct date and time of the ice break-up.
Prof John Walsh of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks got the day right, but not the time, so he didn't get a share of the $285,000 (€225,500) jackpot. However, as a leading expert on global climate change who has been observing the warming of Alaska for many years, he did have a better idea than most of when it would happen. Last year the ice broke on the second earliest date since the lottery was started in 1917. Since 1975, the date on which the clock stops has advanced by nine days. It is one sign that in Alaska the winters are getting shorter and the spring is coming earlier.
The day I meet Prof Walsh at the university geophysics department, the birch and aspen trees in the taiga around Fairbanks are bursting into leaf in the abrupt way winter changes to spring in this far northern US state. This year, the transformation of the landscape from brown to green is happening 10 days earlier than usual, says Prof Walsh, who specialises in studying the effects of snow and ice on weather patterns. "Every month of this year was warmer than average, and March was warmer by 8-9 degrees, and that got the snow melt starting earlier."
The warm winter (it actually rained on Christmas Eve) followed the hottest summer temperatures ever during the previous June to August. Everybody in Fairbanks worries now about fires. In summer, lightning storms always set off forest fires across the state, but the conditions were so hot and dry last year that a record 6.7 million acres of the interior burned. A toxic haze of airborne particles enveloped Fairbanks at the height of last summer. "For 10 weeks we were shrouded in smoke. It was terrible," Prof Walsh recalls.
This year the fires are also starting much earlier than usual. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner splashes a story with the headline: "Fire season off to an early start". The next day I drive about 50 miles out of Fairbanks, through stunted coniferous forests where old snow-drifts lurk. Blue and yellow pasqueflowers and yellow-brown birch catkins are already in bloom and the air is heavy with birch pollen. But there are patches of scorched trees and wisps of smoke where black spruce had burned the previous day. In one hot spot near Dot Lake, southeast of Fairbanks, the Billy Creek fire that raged all last summer is flaring up again, after smouldering in layers of dry needles and spruce cones under the snow all winter.
Like canaries in a mine, birds are a harbinger of climate change, so I head to Creamer's Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge just north of Fairbanks, a vast expanse of marshy tundra where tens of thousands of migrating birds arrive with the spring.
A noticeboard informs birdwatchers when the different species can be expected to turn up. Canadian geese normally arrive on April 15th-16th. This year they came early, on April 6th, says the refuge's executive director, Nancy de Witte, and last year they came even earlier, on April 3rd. A lesser yellowleg was spotted on April 25th though it is not usually sighted until May. The first spotted red-necked grebes were seen on May 1st, five days earlier than normal, and the common redpoll finches have already hatched their fledglings and left several weeks early.
The observatory's senior biologist, Susan Sharbaugh, tells me the flycatchers are also here already, seven days too soon. "A lot of them come from South America," she says. "It amazes me that they can tell to come early." She hesitates to speculate whether the early arrivals are due to global warming, as there is so much year-to-year variation and records of sightings at the refuge were incomplete. But she says: "Last week, the temperature broke records two or three days in a row, so I think something's going on."
Don Johnson, a white-bearded park volunteer I meet on the refuge thinks so too. He tells me he has seen a golden plover arrive early close to his home near Chena Hot Springs, but he questions my motives for asking about early birds. Like many Alaskans, he regards climate change as natural and not unduly influenced by human activity.
"Take it from this old Alaskan, global change is an industry - and you are part of that industry," he says. Perhaps, I think, but why am I being attacked by mosquitoes weeks before they are supposed to appear?
WEST OF THE bird observatory, Ballaine Road runs north from Fairbanks outskirts into the forest where many commuters live in sylvan hideaways. A tarmacadam cycle path runs alongside it for many miles. It was flat when first laid through the taiga but now it is buckled and misshapen.
This is due to the deterioration of the permafrost that covers about 60 per cent of the area around Fairbanks, explains Prof Vladimir Romanovsky, an expert on the frozen ground beneath the taiga and tundra of Alaska.
Permafrost is defined as land where the temperature beneath the surface stays below zero for two consecutive years, he explains, and it can be hundreds of metres deep. The surface area that melts in summer is called the active layer and can support plant life.
Prof Romanovsky, associate professor of geophysics at the University of Alaska, takes me on a tour of the permafrost. As he leans over to point out the hummocky cycle track I worry that he will drive off the raised roadway. The road itself is cracked and undulating in places. It is common around Fairbanks to come across road signs warning motorists of "dips", especially in valley bottoms where permafrost is prevalent. He points out thermokarsts beside the cycle track, deep holes filled with brackish water where giant ice wedges that formed during the last Ice Age, 120,000 years ago, have melted.
Prof Romanovsky takes me to see a grove of spruce trees leaning drunkenly against each other where a thermokarst has formed in the forest, and shows me a row of detached bungalows that has been abandoned because the walls have tilted due to melting permafrost. Thermokarst fissures have formed just behind the geophysical institute, where the earth was disturbed to extend a car park.
Measurements taken by the institute produce ominous signs of widespread permafrost retreat. In some places, the active layer didn't freeze this year, and it is growing deeper. Following the hot summer of 2004 and heavier snow than usual in the winter - deep snow protects the ground from the bitter frosts - he expects the permafrost to warm more than usual this year. Permafrost is typically minus 2 degrees near the surface and "the most alarming thing is that the permafrost around Fairbanks is very close to zero". In general terms, the permafrost across Alaska has warmed by 3 to 6 degrees in the last two decades.
"Permafrost in Alaska is disappearing," Prof Romanovsky says. "In 20 or 30 years the permafrost thaw could become widespread." This could cause serious damage to the state's infrastructure of roads and pipes, and to the ecosystem. Permafrost holds water, he explains. If it dies, drainage of rain and snow melt would be faster, and with only 300mm of precipitation a year, the land would become drier - and the fires even worse.
Prof Romanovsky, a graduate of Moscow University who came to the US in 1992, insists he is not an alarmist like some "extreme environmentalists", but says: "I can, at this time, see what is happening."
Many Alaskans are happy with the warmer weather. In the long term the effects of warming could be beneficial, with a longer growing season and less harsh winters. The problem is that the transition period of about 100 years will be "very hard", says Prof Romanovsky.
There is another worrying consideration. Deep permafrost contains organic matter such asgrass and stems - some still green after thousands of years - which, if broken down, will produce carbon dioxide. This methane will decompose like gunpowder, says Prof Romanovsky. The effects of the release of such a large body of greenhouse gases are incalculable. There is enough matter in the top layer of frozen soil in the world's permafrost to double the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and that is a "minimal" estimate. "We are already at much higher levels than in several hundred thousand years and we are now in an area we have never been before."
Thinking of President George Bush's withdrawal from Kyoto and his refusal to impose curbs on carbon monoxide emissions, I ask the Russian scientist what he would say to Bush if he had the chance.
"Why say anything?" he replies. "He doesn't listen."
NEXT DAY I take an hour-long flight from Fairbanks to the North Bank, the polar wilderness along the Arctic Ocean from which the ice has been disappearing in recent years. The Alaskan Airways Boeing 737, its front half closed off for cargo, flies over boreal forest, snow-blanketed granite ridges and vast snow fields where polar bears and caribou roam freely. It lands at Barrow, 340 roadless miles above the Arctic Circle and the most northerly town on the American continent.
HERE WINTER IS still hanging on. It is minus 10 at noon and the ocean pack ice, called sarri in the local Inupiat language, is jammed up against the shore forming a white lunar landscape as far as one can see. The sarri will all crack up and blow away in late May, leaving open water for up to six months.
That's two months longer than a generation ago, says my guide, Bunna Edwardson, a burly Inupiat with shoulder-length hair, who relates some of the freak meteorological events that have been occurring in the Arctic in recent years.
"My grandfather saw lightning only about three times in his life," he says. "It comes once a year now. Last year it was awesome. The storm came on the night of July 3rd and went on for seven hours with purple and violet lightning. Also last year the temperature went up to 25 degrees one summer day and the kids were swimming in the sea. When I was a kid we never swam in the sea."
Here too, bird life betrays the shifts in the climate. The robin started nesting on the Arctic coast some years ago. Never having seen one before, the Inupiat people had no word for it. In studying a colony of black guillemots on nearby Cooper Island from 1975 to 1995, George Divoky, an ornithologist from Seattle, found the snow was melting in northern Alaska on average five days earlier each decade, and each decade the guillemots laid their eggs on average five days earlier.
In the 1970s, summer pack ice sometimes prevented supply ships finding a passage around the Arctic coast to supply the oil-drilling installations at Prudoe Bay to the east. Now the sea surface is clear in summer as far as the eye can see. In the last three years, people in Barrow have even spotted tourist cruise ships on the horizon. The loss of the summer ice makes the town of 4,800 people vulnerable to storms, as the wind whips up huge waves on the open ocean. One such storm in the late summer of 1963 washed 32 homes from their foundations but that was a rare event.
"Our storms are bigger and bigger now," says Edwardson, pointing out the huge gravel berm that has been pushed up by diggers to protect the coastal road. "There used to be icebergs as big as houses that would block the waves," he says. "Now there is no ice and we have big waves that eat up all the beach." High waves have also consumed land and undercut houses in Shishmaref along the west coast of Alaska, and the village is being relocated.
Bowhead Transportation, an Inupiat corporation that runs supply barges from Seattle to Barrow every season, announced two weeks ago that "because of the general shift in weather patterns", sailings will start on June 17th this year, two weeks earlier than before. The news was posted on a community noticeboard in the Barrow high school in which, five years ago, officials from the US, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia and Sweden met to consider global warming.
A summary of their Arctic Impact Climate Assessment was released in Iceland last November and caused a sensation. It concluded that the Arctic is heating twice as fast as the rest of the globe and that human activity is the dominant factor.
"Over the next 100 years," it warned, "climate change is expected to accelerate, contributing to major physical, ecological, social and economic changes, many of which have already begun."
Prof Walsh is one of the report's main authors. Back in Fairbanks he showed me computer projections that Alaskan temperatures could rise by another 7 degrees before the end of the century. This means that by the 2050s there will be very little summer ice off the Arctic coast and by the 2070s some years will have no summer ice. The loss of sea ice means a loss of the world's reflective surface and reinforces the change, he points out.
I ask him about critical comments by Sen James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the Republican chairman of the senate environment committee in Washington, who said in a speech on April 25th that the impact report was "biased", "selective" and produced by "alarmists". Prof Walsh replies that the report was summarised to make an impact on policy-makers, and that there were wasn't full agreement among the scientists, but "broadly speaking it gets the facts right". He points out, for example, that in the entire hemisphere, eight of the last 10 years have been among the 10 warmest years on record.
Another fact is that glaciers in Alaska and across the world are shrinking fast. They have dumped 400 cubic kilometres of fresh water into the ocean since 1960. Glaciologists from the University of Alaska who measured the thickness of more than 70 glaciers across Alaska found they had all been thinning since the 1950s and that the rate had doubled in the last decade, contributing to global sea rise. However, Scandinavian glaciers have increased in volume and mass in the last five years. Glaciers are the "wild card" says Prof Walsh.
Before leaving Alaska I stop over in Anchorage, and drive 50 miles south along the Seward Highway to see the famous Portage Glacier, the state's most frequently visited tourist destination. Arriving at the official viewing point and tourist centre I find that it can now be glimpsed only in the far distance. It has retreated by between seven and 10 kilometres in the past 50 years. I have to walk along the shore of the lake to glimpse its "tongue" behind a distant mountain slope.
On the way back to Anchorage I pull in for coffee at a roadside cafe. When the waitress, Suzanne Jane Thomas, finds out I am writing about climate change she tells me of her own experience.
"It was so warm on April 28th I was able to go out in shorts, something I have never done before mid-May," she exclaims. "And it was so hot last year that a friend who went fishing saw rainbow trout going belly-up in the river."
It reminds me of what Prof Walsh tells me as I wind up my interview with him at the University of Alaska. "Events that might seem small add up. The pieces keep coming together. Something is going on."