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Polar Warning: Even Antarctica’s Coldest Region Is Starting to Melt

April 9, 2019

Melting ice on the coast of Adélie Land in East Antarctica.
Melting ice on the coast of Adélie Land in East Antarctica. REUTERS/PAULINE ASKIN

Polar Warning: Even Antarctica’s Coldest Region Is Starting to Melt

East Antarctica is the coldest spot on earth, long thought to be untouched by warming. But now the glaciers and ice shelves in this frigid region are showing signs of melting, a development that portends dramatic rises in sea levels this century and beyond. 

No place on Earth is colder than East Antarctica. Home to the South Pole and making up two-thirds of the southernmost continent, the vast ice sheets of East Antarctica — formed over tens of millions of years — are nearly three miles thick in places. The temperature commonly hovers around -67 degrees Fahrenheit (-55 degrees Celsius); in 2010, some spots on East Antarctica’s polar plateau plunged to a record-breaking -144 degrees F.

Now, however, parts of the East Antarctic are melting.

Research into what’s happening in East Antarctica is still in its early stages. It’s hard to decipher what exactly is taking place on a gigantic continent of ice with just a few decades of satellite data and limited actual measurements of things like snowfall and ocean temperatures. But according to one controversial paperreleased earlier this year, East Antarctica is now, in fact, shrinking, and is already responsible for 20 percent of the continent’s ice loss.

For decades, researchers considered this portion of the continent to be stable. While warming sea and air temperatures have caused ice shelves and glaciers in the lower-altitude, warmer western regions of the Antarctic to melt and collapse, the larger, colder East had seemed an untouchable behemoth. If anything, climate change was expected to bring more snow to its interior, making its ice sheets grow in size.

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How the World Passed a Carbon Threshold and Why It Matters

February 10, 2017

How the World Passed a Carbon Threshold and Why It Matters

Last year marked the first time in several million years that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 passed 400 parts per million. By looking at what Earth’s climate was like in previous eras of high CO2 levels, scientists are getting a sobering picture of where we are headed.

Last year will go down in history as the year when the planet’s atmosphere broke a startling record: 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide. The last time the planet’s air was so rich in CO2 was millions of years ago, back before early predecessors to humans were likely wielding stone tools; the world was a few degrees hotter back then, and melted ice put sea levels tens of meters higher.

“We’re in a new era,” says Ralph Keeling, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s CO2 Program in San Diego. “And it’s going fast. We’re going to touch up against 410 pretty soon.”

There’s nothing particularly magic about the number 400. But for environmental scientists and advocates grappling with the invisible, intangible threat of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, this symbolic target has served as a clear red line into a danger zone of climate change.

When scientists (specifically, Ralph Keeling’s father) first started measuring atmospheric CO2 consistently in 1958, at the pristine Mauna Loa mountaintop observatory in Hawaii, the CO2 level stood at 316 parts per million (ppm), just a little higher than the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm. 400 was simply the next big, round number looming in our future.

But as humans kept digging up carbon out of the ground and burning it for fuel, CO2 levels sped faster and faster toward that target. In May 2013, at the time of the usual annual maximum of CO2, the air briefly tipped over the 400 ppm mark for the first time in several million years.

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Trouble in Paradise: Fatal Blight Threatens A Key Hawaiian Tree

April 25, 2016

Trouble in Paradise: Fatal Blight Threatens A Key Hawaiian Tree

The ʻohiʻa is Hawaii’s iconic tree, a keystone species that maintains healthy watersheds and provides habitat for numerous endangered birds. But a virulent fungal disease, possibly related to a warmer, drier climate, is now felling the island’s cherished `ohi`a forests.

Rikki Cooke/The Nature Conservancy
An ‘ohi’a forest in the Kamakou Preserve on the Hawaiian island of Moloka’i.
Hawaii’s isolation, 2,390 miles from the North American mainland, has given the island chain a unique array of species found nowhere else, including the ʻohiʻa lehua, an evergreen in the myrtle family with delicate pom-pom-shaped flowers composed of clusters of showy stamens in a range of hues from red and orange to pale yellow. In 2010, homeowners on the Big Island of Hawaii began reporting that ʻohiʻa in their upland rainforest were dying without apparent cause. Researchers named the mysterious condition “Rapid ʻOhiʻa Death” (ROD).

On Google Earth, you can see the telltale brown streaks in the Puna forest reserve, Hawaii’s largest remaining upland rainforest located on the slope of Kilauea volcano, where many ʻohiʻa lehua (Metrosideros polymorpha) trees have already succumbed. If you scroll over 60 miles to the west to the other side of the island, the green canopy behind Kealakekua Bay on the Kona coast — where Captain James Cook first set foot on Hawaii and was later killed — is pocked with the bleached skeletons of dead and dying trees.

Scenes like these have become commonplace in the American West, where several conifer species, weakened by long-term drought and warmer temperatures, have been decimated by bark beetles. Researchers are wondering if climate change may also have stressed ʻohiʻa trees, perhaps helping to trigger the current outbreak on Hawaii.

The fungus clogs the vascular system of the trees, making them wilt and die as if from a drought.

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On Burning Ground: The Human Cost Of India’s Push to Produce More Coal

March 15, 2016

On Burning Ground: The Human Cost Of India’s Push to Produce More Coal 

Girls scavenge coal at a dump site of an open-cast mine in the Jharia coalfield. View gallery.   Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

As part of India’s modernization program, Prime Minister Narenda Modi has called for doubling the nation’s coal production by 2020. For the villages in the Jharia coalfield, which is frequently shrouded in smoke from underground fires, the government’s plans have only increased the pressures and dangers of living alongside huge, burning open-pit mines.

“Come,” says Raju. “Let me show you my house.” His clean white shirt, well-brushed hair, and calm demeanor belie the almost apocalyptic landscape in which he and his family lived.

We are standing on the edge of a 650-foot unfenced drop into an open-pit coal mine that is shrouded in dust. As we gingerly approach his home, a two-room brick hut just 30 feet from the precipice, we have to clamber over the rubble of collapsed houses and avoid deep fissures and spots of hot earth from which smoke is erupting. What remains of the once-rural village of Lantenganj — now deep inside India’s largest coalfield in the mining state of Jharkhand — is being consumed by underground fires that burn the coal beneath. The government-owned company Bharat Coking Coal, whose mines are responsible for the fires, wants the villagers to leave — for their own safety, the company says, and so the mine can be expanded.

But Raju’s family and the 50 others that cling on here say they will not go without proper compensation and new homes near to their jobs in these mines. “We’ve got nothing from the government,” Raju tells me, as we inspect a crack that has opened up in his living room floor. “We want a better deal or we will not move.” Until, presumably, their houses fall into the abyss below.

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The Haunting Legacy of South Africa’s Gold Mines

November 13, 2015

The Haunting Legacy of South Africa’s Gold Mines 

Thousands of abandoned gold mines are scattered across South Africa, polluting the water with toxics and filling the air with noxious dust. For the millions of people who live around these derelict sites, the health impacts can be severe. 

The name is derived from “happy prospect” in Afrikaans, and once upon a time, life and the gold haul were both good at the Blyvooruitzicht Gold Mine, 50 miles west of Johannesburg. But two years after the mine’s owners abandoned it because it was unprofitable, sewage runs in the streets of the old mining village, tailings impoundments cover nearby towns in dust, and illegal miners rule the abandoned shafts.

“I’m just going to take one or two potshots at them to keep them at a distance,” says Louis Nel, head of security at the now-abandoned Blyvooruitzicht.

Dean Hutton/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Mining waste piles from the closed Blyvooruitzicht gold mine line a roadside in South Africa.

He raises his shotgun and shatters the afternoon calm with several blasts. A few zama zamas — illegal miners whose title means “We try! We try!” in Zulu — run for cover.

Blyvooruitzicht is but one of thousands of abandoned mines scattered across South Africa, many from the gold industry. With recently shuttered mines adding to the massive impact of those left derelict years ago, the country faces a growing environmental, health, and social crisis created by a withering gold industry and inadequate oversight.

South Africa’s Department of Mineral Resources, or DMR, holds a list of 6,000 “derelict and ownerless” mines, which became the government’s problem over the years when the former owners disappeared. While the DMR slowly rehabilitates those mines— at a rate of about 10 per year — companies continue to walk away from operations such as Blyvooruitzicht, and both mining companies and the government are slow to accept responsibility.

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Beyond Keystone: Why Climate Movement Must Keep Heat On

November 12, 2015

Beyond Keystone: Why Climate Movement Must Keep Heat On

It took a committed coalition and the increasingly harsh reality of climate change to push President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. But sustained public pressure will now be needed to force politicians to take the next critical actions on climate.

The key passage — the forward-looking passage — of President Obama’s speech last week rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline came right at the end, after he rehashed all the arguments about jobs and gas prices that had been litigated endlessly over the last few years.

“Ultimately,” he said, “if we’re going to prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we’re going to have keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution into the sky.”

Chesapeake Climate/Flickr
Demonstators protest the Keystone XL pipeline at the White House in November 2012.

This is a remarkable evolution for the president. He came into office with “Drill Baby Drill” ringing in his ears from the 2008 Republican convention, and baby did he drill. Before his first term was out, he gave a speech in front a stack of oil pipe in Oklahoma in which he laid out his accomplishments:

“Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That’s important to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some. So we are drilling all over the place.”

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Natura 2000: EU Reserves Are Facing Development Pressures

September 1, 2015

Natura 2000: EU Reserves Are Facing Development Pressures

An astonishing 18 percent of the European Union’s land area is protected under a network of preserves known as Natura 2000. Now, at the urging of business interests and farmers, the EU is examining whether regulations on development in these areas should be loosened.

Berlin’s world-famous landmark, the Brandenburg Gate, is only 9 miles away. But in the Tegeler Fliess area, a protected nature reserve on the northern outskirts of Germany’s capital, visitors seem far removed from the city’s bustle. River otters, rare throughout Germany, are active along the creek that runs through the wetlands. Eurasian cranes circle overhead, searching for food in its extensive meadows and wetlands. On summer nights, the monotonous song of the corncrake, a species of rail in decline in Germany, can be heard.

Rospuda Valley

Erik de Haan/Flickr
The Natura 2000 network helped preserve the 29,000-acre Rospuda Valley in eastern Poland.

“The Tegeler Fliess is a biological treasure trove,” says Anja Sorges, managing director of the Berlin branch of the Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union, Germany’s largest nature conservation organization, known as NABU. Sorges attributes the high diversity of the 1,144-acre reserve to its legally protected status as part of the European Union’s Natura 2000network, the world’s largest system of nature reserves. “There is so much pressure from the city to use areas like this for building or infrastructure,” says Sorges.

But how strong this protection will remain in coming years is unclear. Tegeler Fliess and all the areas that form the EU’s Natura 2000 network — which now covers 18 percent of the European Union’s land area — are facing growing political pressure to scale back some of the protections the reserves now enjoy. Triggered by a group of member states, especially Great Britain and the Netherlands, the European Commission is carrying out an in-depth review of its nature conservation directives, which some top EU officials, as well as business and agricultural interests, say are outdated and stifle farming and business development.

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In Northern Canada Peaks, Scientists Are Tracking Impact of Vanishing Ice

August 28, 2015

In Northern Canada Peaks, Scientists Are Tracking Impact of Vanishing Ice

In the summer of 1955, a floatplane flew a small group of American climbers to the edge of a massive icefield straddling the Continental Divide along the Yukon/Northwest Territories border in northern

Canada. When the group saw the cluster of jagged peaks and sheer rock walls they were searching for, they were stunned: Emerging from the edges of the Brintnell/Bologna icefield was a 9,000-foot palisade of ice-polished granite that bore an uncanny resemblance to the craggy spires of Yosemite.

Having underestimated the challenge he and his team would confront that day, expedition leader Arnold Wexler turned to his partners and declared most of the icy peaks to be “unclimbable.” Today, still largely untrodden because of its extreme remoteness, the “Cirque of the Unclimbables” remains legendary in the world of rock climbing.
cirque of the unclimbables

Canada’s Cirque of the Unclimbables, located on the edge of the Bologna/Brintnell icefields along the border of the Yukon and Northwest Territories. Ice in and around these peaks has melted back considerably over the last half-century.
All photos by Ed Struzik.

Now, however, the region is the focus of Canadian scientists for another reason: its vanishing ice. This month, I accompanied a group of Canadian researchers monitoring the retreat of the icefields surrounding the “Cirque of the Unclimbables.” The scenes that greeted us were nothing like those seen by Wexler or the scientists who took aerial photographs of the icefields in 1982. Instead of pristine, crystalized layers of firn that are typically left over from past winter seasons, we found an atrophying glacial surface darkened by sand and dirt. In several places, we came across the frozen carcasses and bones of caribou and wolverines that had fallen into crevasses decades or even centuries earlier and had melted out of the disappearing ice. 

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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