Study: Global warming is broadly affecting the Arctic

<body leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#000060" text="#FFFFFF" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#FF9900"> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="95%" height="1"> <tr> <center> <td valign="top" width="33%" height="33"> <b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="5">Study: Global warming is broadly affecting the Arctic</font></p> </b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="1"> July 15, 2005<br> Courtesy Johns Hopkins Medical Institutes<br> and World Science staff<br> </font> <b> <font face="Arial" size="2"><br> From glaciers to caribou, rivers to roads, global warming is affecting almost every aspect of life in the Arctic, researchers and others say in a new study. <br> <br> The findings appear two months after scientists predicted in the Aug. 23 issue of the weekly newspaper on the American Geophysical Union, Eos, that Arctic summers would be ice-free by this century’s end.<br> <br> The new paper—by researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and other institutions—is to appear in the October issue of the research journal Climatic Change. It’s the fruit of decades of research by dozens of scientists in various disciplines, said Larry Hinzman, a research professor with the university’s Water and Environmental Research Center and the paper’s lead author. <br> <br> It shows that warming has a cascading effect on the land, vegetation, animals, weather and human systems, he added. “This paper looks at how changes in one component can reverberate through an entire system,” said Hinzman. “It really makes the point that you can’t look at individual components; you have to look at the system as a whole.” <br> <br> What makes those effect particularly obvious in the Arctic is that “We are so close to the freezing point of water,” Hinzman said. “When you change a system from frozen to unfrozen it has dramatic impacts.” <br> <br> The paper says that some of the changes have been going on for four centuries, but have accelerated dramatically since the mid-1970s. </font></b> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <b> <font face="Arial" size="2"> “There is a clear perception among residents of the North American Arctic that the climate of the region has changed in living memory,” the paper says. “Arctic residents have also made many key observations that are not widely documented by Western science.”<br> <br> Among the changes: </font></b> </p> <ul> <li> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font face="Arial" size="2">Rivers and lakes are freezing later and breaking up earlier.</font></b></li> <li> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"> Vegetation is spreading.</font></b></li> <li> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"> Birds are changing their migration routes. </font></b></li> <li> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"> Some indigenous peoples are facing tougher hunting schedules. “In Barrow, Alaska, spring goose hunting is conducted at inland locations following the spring bowhead whale hunt, which is carried out from the sea ice. The ability to travel inland depends on the presence of snow, which has been melting earlier… As hunters are required to go inland sooner if the they want geese, whaling and goose hunting shift from being successive to being competing activities.”</font></b></li> <li> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"> Weather is becoming less predictable. “Hunters in Nunavut, Canada, report changing travel habits due to less predictable weather,” the authors note. “The decline in predictability is at least as important to northern communities as is a change in average erage conditions, because traditional cues for predicting the weather no longer work.”</font></b></li> <li> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"> The health of some of the animals on whom humans live is changing and in some cases worsening. “Changes in the behavior and health of caribou, a key subsistence species, have been observed in several communities,” the authors wrote. “In northern Canada the health of caribou in some herds has declined, and bulls are reported to die from overheating, in some cases associated with increased mosquito harassment.”</font></b></li> <li> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"> Other key subsistence resources, such as cloudberries, are in decline in some areas.</font></b></li> <li> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font face="Arial" size="2"> Ponds and wetlands are drying out.</font></b></li> </ul> <p class="MsoNormal"> <b> <font face="Arial" size="2"> Researchers started work on the paper in 2002, Hinzman said. It primarily draws on research done in Alaska, as well as studies in Siberia and Canada. “There were dozens and dozens of research programs that fed into this,” he said.<br> <br> The project was funded through the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Arctic System Science program. Hinzman said the foundation in recent years has encouraged such collaborative projects as a way to use research to paint a more comprehensive picture.  </font></b> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <b> <font face="Arial" size="2">* * *</font> </p> </b> <p><b><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#FFFFFF">Send us a <a href="mailto:editor@world-science.net">comment</a> on this story, or <a href="mailto:?Body=http://www.world-science.net/othernews/051028_arcticfrm.htm">send it to a friend</a></font></b> </p> <p>  </p> </center> </td> </tr> </table> </body>