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Climate Change Is Pushing Greenland Over the Edge

January 31, 2022

Detail of the Jakobshavn Glacier also knows as Ilulissat glacier in Greenland

Whether the ice cap in western Greenland grows or shrinks depends on a balance between snow accumulation and melting. In the past, warm periods increased snowfall which caused it to grow. Today, melting is winning. Photo by Ruben Ramos/Alamy Stock Photo

Climate Change Is Pushing Greenland Over the Edge

New data from Greenland shows that modern warming is outpacing even historically warm eras like the Medieval Warm Period.

Matthew Osman stands atop an ice cap in western Greenland looking out over the Nuussuaq Peninsula. In the distance and more than 2,000 meters below, the village of Ilulissat is a tiny speck in the vast expanse of snow and ice. As Osman steps into the snow, he sinks into a crevasse up to his thigh. Carefully easing his way out, he’s reminded of the hazards of working on ice. Like others who have ventured to drill into Greenland’s ice, Osman and his colleagues are braving the dangers to search for clues as to how the climate has changed in the past, and, by extension, how it may change in the future. What they’ve found is an unexpected sign of just how acute ongoing climate change really is.

The research team led by Osman, a geoscientist at the University of Arizona, came to Greenland to extract a 140-meter-long ice core. This core stretches nearly to bedrock and, in the gases and chemicals housed within, holds evidence of climate change over the past 2,000 years. Their analysis of the core shows that in this place during the Medieval Warm Period, a roughly 400-year phase of higher global temperatures around 1,000 years ago, the ice was growing thicker and advancing—the opposite of what it’s doing today.

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Against Climate Gloom and Doom

February 2, 2021

Against Climate Gloom and Doom

When given a chance, life finds a way. Here are some reasons to keep hoping — and fighting.

HumpbackWhaleFlukeSunset.jpg
Environmental scholar Elin Kelsey suggests that the conservation of coastal ecosystems hinges on hope. Photo via Shutterstock.

[Editor’s note: As the environmental problems facing our world compound, despair may feel like a rational response. In her new book Hope Matters: Why Changing the Way We Think Is Critical to Solving the Environmental Crisis, environmental scholar Elin Kelsey makes an evidence-based argument for choosing hope over despair. Kelsey holds up examples of how ecosystems — including along our coasts and in our ocean — have managed to rebound from damage when given the chance, illustrating nature’s impressive resilience. By sharing these case studies, Kelsey offers reasons to reject apathy and to mobilize. Only if we believe there’s an opportunity to make a real positive impact will we find the motivation to fight for the protection and restoration of ecosystems we depend on. In this condensed excerpt, Kelsey shares a few hope-filled success stories specific to coastal ecosystems.]

We are living amid a planetary crisis. “I am hopeless,” a student in an environmental study graduate program recently told me. “I’ve seen the science. I am hopeless because the state of the planet is hopeless.”

It’s not surprising she feels so depressingly fatalistic. In his speech at the start of a two-week international conference in Madrid, Spain, in December 2019, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres said, “The point of no return is no longer over the horizon. It is in sight and hurtling toward us.”

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British Columbia First Nations’ Failing Fisheries

January 14, 2016

Climate change means marine creatures are migrating—away from First Nations’ territory.

Seafood has sustained the First Nations of British Columbia for millennia. The annual migration of Pacific salmon, in particular, is lifeblood. Each year, millions of salmon swim and leap their way up major river systems such as the Fraser and Skeena all the way to landlocked communities in the province’s interior. But now, climate change is threatening to strike at the heart of those time-honored connections by pushing marine life farther north in search of cooler waters.

As a new study warns, “unprecedented climate change poses a considerable threat” to First Nations’ food, cultural, and economic values. By 2050, aboriginal catches are expected to decline significantly, depriving indigenous people from 16 coastal communities of up to CAN $12-million annually in commercial fisheries, the study shows.

Warming and changing oxygen concentrations in the ocean, spurred on by anthropogenic climate change, will send marine life swimming northward at an average rate of about 10 to 18 kilometers per decade. For the 98 fish and invertebrate species studied, this will equate to an average drop in annual catches of 4.5 to 11 percent, with the declines being much higher for certain species.

The study shows that two critical species will suffer the greatest declines: salmon by 17 to 29 percent; and their prey, herring, by 28 to 49 percent. Catches of green sea urchin could shrink by as much as 36 percent, flounder and sole by 30 percent, shrimp and prawns by 18 percent, and halibut by 13 percent.

Aboriginal groups located in British Columbia’s more southerly waters are expected to suffer the greatest catch losses: up to 27 percent for the Tsawwassen First Nation near the Canada-United States border, compared with 6.6 percent for the Haida First Nation off the province’s north coast.

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Coast Today, Toast Tomorrow

January 2, 2016

Coast Today, Toast Tomorrow

Slumping shorelines, roving rivers, and exploding islands — five coastlines that I’m sure were here yesterday.

Krakatau

Volcanic eruptions have repeatedly built and destroyed the island of Krakatau. Photo by buitenzorger, Creative Commons licensed.

As sure as waves hitting a beach, coastlines are subjected to subtle changes. Sand shifts with each wave, tides ebb and flow, dunes grow and recede throughout the year. But sometimes, the change is catastrophic and forever alters the coastline and the communities living on it.

Swept away

On Dec. 26, 2004, in Aceh province, Sumatra, tourists and locals enjoying the beach were fascinated when the water suddenly receded, revealing parts of the sea floor that they had never seen. But this was the first sign of the oncoming tsunami, caused by a magnitude 9.15 earthquake off the coast of Indonesia. The water roared back to shore, killing more than 200,000 and leaving devastation and an unrecognizable shoreline in its wake.

In Aceh, huge swaths of the coastline dropped dramatically, allowing seawater to surge inland where it filled waterways and destroyed bridges. The coasts of nearby islands rose as much as two metres. Today, the coast may look dramatically different, but locals in Aceh are well into their recovery process and are living much as they did before the disaster. In the decade since the tsunami, survivors have rebuilt, and tourists are returning.

Wearing Down

Since 1996, citizens of the coastal hamlet of Newtok, Alaska, have worked toward a difficult decision: most of the approximately 350 townspeople voted to abandon their homes and relocate to a new settlement about 14 kilometers to the south. The reason, in short, is global warming. The sea ice that used to protect the Alaskan coast from violent waves is melting rapidly. As a result, the town is losing meters of shoreline each year as erosion and rising water levels eat away the coast.

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Humans Kill 14 Times More Adult Fish Than Wild Predators

August 24, 2015

Enter the super predator.

Across the world, humans have overwhelmed wild populations and brought chaos to natural ecosystems. We may suspect this intuitively, but now researchers have some hard numbers to show just how efficient humans are as predators.

The result of a decade of work, new research shows that the typical marine fishery kills adult fish at 14 times the typical rate of a wild predator. Humans tend to hit fisheries harder—with hands, hooks, and nets—than any other group of wild animals.

Even the better managed fisheries often start with the proposition of harvesting as much as possible. “That’s the general paradigm,” says Chris Darimont, a Hakai Institute-Raincoast Conservation Society scholar at the University of Victoria. “How can we maximize the so called sustainable yield to humanity?”

Drawing on existing data, Darimont compared the predation rates of human versus wild predators. For example, in Alaska’s Kodiak Archipelago, grizzly bears catch six percent of the adult salmon, while humans catch 78 percent, or 13 times more fish. Given the numbers, he says, humanity’s toll on ocean species is alarming and underlies many of the problems observed in the oceans today.

“Everyone assumes we are this dominant predator, but until now we didn’t know how to describe it,” he says. “Those cross-ecosystem comparisons had never been done before. It provides details at a global scale.” (Darimont’s research is supported by a grant from the Tula Foundation, which also funds Hakai Magazine. The magazine is editorially independent of the institute and foundation.)

Mechanized fishing methods, global seafood markets, and industrial processing—combined with relatively high reproduction rates among fish and their schooling behavior—may help to explain the high take in fisheries, says Darimont.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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