[Water_news] 3. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS: WATERSHEDS - 10/19/07

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment

 

October 19, 2007

 

3. Watersheds

 

 

The meltdown of Greenland's way of life

In the Arctic, a shockingly sudden retreat of the ice is changing everything

San Francisco Chronicle – 10/19/07

Colin Woodard, Chronicle Foreign Service

 

Lakes and ponds of open water are scattered across its cracking surface, some feeding streams that vanish into moulins - drain-like cavities about 40 feet across that pierce the bottom of mile-thick ice. Approaching the edge of the ice, mountain summits poke out like islands. Glaciers tumble toward the sea, where this year they discharged ice at an unprecedented rate in this self-governing province of Denmark. Melting at the top of the ice sheet was the greatest ever recorded, 150 percent more than average, according to a new NASA-sponsored study.

 

"The rate of melting is just phenomenal," said Robert Correll, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, an international scientific monitoring project. "We're adding freshwater to the ocean at a much more rapid rate than predicted" by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's most recent estimates, which are based on data through 2005.

 

Studies show that Greenland is undergoing a rapid meltdown, one with severe consequences for global sea-level rise and the 56,000 people who live on the world's largest island. Scientists report that glaciers draining the ice cap are picking up speed, while Arctic sea ice shrank this summer to its smallest extent on record, defying computer models that suggested such changes would not occur for decades.

 

"Arctic sea ice looks like it's reached the tipping point," said Robert Bindschadler, a polar ice expert at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "The suddenness of these changes we've seen in the Arctic over the past five years have really startled us, and we've been struggling to understand what is going on."

In Ilulissat, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, the town's 4,500 residents have seen the changes firsthand.

 

The Jakobshavn glacier, a 3-mile-wide, nearly 1 mile-thick tongue of ice that pours into the sea next to the town, has been picking up speed for years. A decade ago it flowed at between 2 and 21/2 miles a year, filling Disko Bay with icebergs that, in turn, attracted tourists. This year it flowed 9 miles - 61/2 feet an hour - adding enough freshwater to the oceans daily to meet the annual needs of any of the world's mega cities, according to Correll.

 

The icebergs haven't harmed Ilulissat residents, who are enjoying an economic boom fueled by tourism and fishing. Local fishermen ply the waters in and around the decomposing glacial front, pulling up enough halibut to keep the town's two fish plants running round-the-clock, seven days a week.

 

"We fish right by the icebergs," said Karl Thumassen, a local fisherman. "It was better 20 years ago, but it's still pretty good."

The lack of sea ice is another serious matter.

 

No roads connect Greenland's main towns - the island is too rugged, harsh and sparsely populated to make them feasible - meaning the prime modes of travel are by air (prohibitively expensive) or sea. In winter, ship travel is dangerous, so in central and northern Greenland, most people travel across the frozen sea by dog sled.

But in Ilulissat, the sea hasn't frozen solid for nearly a decade, wiping out the livelihoods of the country's subsistence hunters and isolating thousands more throughout the long, dark Arctic winter.

 

"It's as if somebody came to you and said, 'We're going to take your car away in mid-September and give it back to you in May or June,' " said Minik Rosing, a Greenland-born geologist at the University of Copenhagen who discovered the earliest evidence of life on Earth in Greenland's rocks. "It's a massive disruption to the way you live and perceive yourself."

 

Ilulissat's 5,000 sled dogs - who outnumber town residents - have been out of work for so long, their owners have exiled them to a lonely plain on the edge of town, where they bark and howl between meals. In the far north, hunters say they have a hard time feeding their dogs, which normally dine on seal and polar bear scraps. In 2004, the government had to airlift dog food to the northern settlement of Qaanaq to prevent mass starvation.

 

"It has been documented that (this) region will be most hard hit by the rising emission of greenhouse gases," said Aleqa Hammond, finance and foreign minister of Greenland's home rule government, which controls most local affairs. "But we don't need to read scientific documents and interpret highly complex mathematical models or charts. You can (tell) by living here and talking to the local people about what is changing."

 

Not all of the changes are for the worse.

 

In the far south, where a more temperate climate allows limited farming, the growing season is getting longer, and new areas are opening up for cultivation.

"It will be very exciting to see how the land will change in the next 20 years," said Tommy Maro, the mayor of Qaqortoq, the region's principal town. "Maybe we will have more sheep farmers, more green areas, more things we can grow."

 

Potato farming has expanded in size and area, with spuds now grown in the capital, Nuuk, which is just 185 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Near the southern village of Qassiarsuk, farmers say they succeeded in growing broccoli for the first time this year.

 

"Here in south Greenland, we are now approaching the climate conditions of northern Europe," said local elder Erik Rode Frederiksen. Like 90 percent of Greenland's inhabitants, Frederiksen is an Inuit, the indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic, whose culture is based on hunting and fishing. A milder climate, he says, will require a new generation of southern Greenlanders to take up agriculture.

 

Scientists say the accelerated melt will have decidedly negative effects for the globe, as it is certain to boost sea levels. The most recent assessment by the U.N. climate change panel forecast a surge of between 8 inches and 2 feet by 2100, but scientists say the rapidly melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica have already rendered those estimates obsolete.

 

Correll, who was in Greenland last month, described one such effect at work on the island. Just a few years ago, scientists didn't think meltwater could penetrate to the bottom of the ice sheet, but in recent years that's exactly what moulins have done.

 

"These holes have been built by all this swirling, melting water, and they are going straight to the base, where the water lubricates the bottom," he said. "It's as if we put oil on the bottom of the ice, so it's moving much more rapidly."

 

As for sea-level rise, Correll said most scientists in the field would argue that it will be "the upper part of a meter" (3 feet 3 inches) this century, roughly twice the current estimates, though nobody knows exactly how the Greenland ice sheet will behave as water intrudes underneath.

 

"We can't discount the possibility of an abrupt change, the equivalent of a sudden avalanche of snow," Correll said. "We don't think that will happen here, but there are these possibilities." #

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/19/MNVASLK4D.DTL