Arctic Science Journeys
Radio Script
1996

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Arctic Future Shock
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STORY: Driving past the corner bank in downtown Fairbanks, Alaska, recently, it was hard to miss the bank's large outdoor thermometer. Flashing in two-foot-high numbers, it read minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit. That's cold enough to make spit freeze before it hits the ground. When you feel temperatures like that, it's hard to imagine that the planet is actually getting warmer. But if scientists are right, global warming is happening, and its consequences will be felt here in the Arctic first.

Glenn Shaw: "For the first time in all the four billion years the planet has been around, we are massively perturbing the system. I'm not an environmentalist, I'm not a green person, I tend to be a little more on the right end of the spectrum than my colleagues. But I do agree that we are perturbing the chemical cycles on earth and we do so at our great peril."

That's the ominous warning voiced by Professor Glenn Shaw, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, but it's an opinion shared by most scientists who study global climate trends.

Professor Gunter Weller also studies the global climate. He says the Arctic is getting warmer because the very things that now keep it cold--ice, snow and glaciers--are melting.

Weller: "One of the major effects of this amplification of the climate signal at high latitude is due to the so-called Albido Effect. Albido is the reflectivity of sunlight from the earth's surface. If you have a lot of snow cover, a lot of the radiation is reflected back into space. As you remove the snow, as it gets warmer, it gets less radiation reflected back into space."

Professor Weller says a warm Arctic will have long-term consequences to the environment and to humans. He says the region's permanently frozen ground--called permafrost--may not actually stay frozen. Sea ice also would become thinner and less extensive in the Arctic Ocean. One recent United Nations report even went so far as to predict sea levels would rise by as much as three feet over the next century.

Weller: "A meter or three feet will submerge a large area of real estate, not only in the South Pacific, a lot of island nations will disappear. But it will have impact around the coast of Alaska and the high latitudes too. It could also displace marine mammals, particularly those whose habitat is on the ice, such as seals and walrus which haul out on the ice."

To blame for heating up the Arctic are fossil fuels, or more precisely, ourselves. The oil, gas and coal we burn adds billions of tons of carbon dioxide and other gases to the earth's atmosphere. Carbon dioxide traps heat close to the earth where it dramatically alters global climate patterns.

While there are serious consequences to global warming, there likely also will be benefits. Captain Cook sailed to Alaska in the late 1700s looking for a northwest sailing route to Europe. With the melting of Arctic sea ice, Cook's dreams of a trans-polar sailing route to Europe might finally come true. But, looking at the thermometer, we may think of global warming in a much more personal and selfish way. If the Arctic finally gets warm, we won't have to shop for low-cost airline tickets to Hawaii.

Reporting from Fairbanks, this is Debra Damron for Arctic Science Journeys.