[A must see: Photos of Boulder Glacier comparing the years 1932 and 1988]
LOSING GROUND Sea ice near the North Pole. Bright Arctic Ocean ice reflects sunlight, but open dark water absorbs it, warming in the process. As more ice melts, more open water could amplify the warming trend. photo: Andrew C. Revkin / The New York Times 25oct2005 |
Manitoba It seems harsh to say that bad news for polar bears is good for Pat Broe. Mr. Broe, a Denver entrepreneur, is no more to blame than anyone else for a meltdown at the top of the world that threatens Arctic mammals and ancient traditions and lends credibility to dark visions of global warming.
Still, the newest study of the Arctic ice cap finding that it faded this summer to its smallest size ever recorded is beginning to make Mr. Broe look like a visionary for buying this derelict Hudson Bay port from the Canadian government in 1997. Especially at the price he paid: about $7.
By Mr. Broe's calculations, Churchill could bring in as much as $100 million a year as a port on Arctic shipping lanes shorter by thousands of miles than routes to the south, and traffic would only increase as the retreat of ice in the region clears the way for a longer shipping season.
With major companies and nations large and small adopting similar logic, the Arctic is undergoing nothing less than a great rush for virgin territory and natural resources worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Even before the polar ice began shrinking more each summer, countries were pushing into the frigid Barents Sea, lured by undersea oil and gas fields and emboldened by advances in technology. But now, as thinning ice stands to simplify construction of drilling rigs, exploration is likely to move even farther north.
Last year, scientists found tantalizing hints of oil in seabed samples just 200 miles from the North Pole. All told, one quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas resources lies in the Arctic, according to the United States Geological Survey.
The polar thaw is also starting to unlock other treasures: lucrative shipping routes, perhaps even the storied Northwest Passage; new cruise ship destinations; and important commercial fisheries.
"It's the positive side of global warming, if there is a positive side," said Ron Lemieux, the transportation minister of Manitoba, whose provincial government is investing millions in Churchill.
If the melting continues, as many Arctic experts expect, the mass of floating ice that has crowned the planet for millions of years may largely disappear for entire summers this century. Instead of the white wilderness that killed explorers and defeated navigators for centuries, the world would have a blue pole on top, a seasonally open sea nearly five times the size of the Mediterranean.
But if the Arctic is no longer a frozen backyard, the fences matter. For now it is not clear where those fences are. Under a treaty called the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, territory is determined by how far a nation's continental shelf extends into the sea. Under the treaty, countries have limited time after ratifying it to map the sea floor and make claims.
In 2001, Russia made the first move, staking out virtually half the Arctic Ocean, including the North Pole. But after challenges by other nations, including the United States, Russia sought to bolster its claim by sending a research ship north to gather more geographical data. On Aug. 29, it reached the pole without the help of an icebreaker the first ship ever to do so.
The United States, an Arctic nation itself because of Alaska, could also try to expand its territory. But several senators who oppose any possible infringement on American sovereignty have repeatedly blocked ratification of the treaty.
Indeed, not everyone agrees that warming of the Arctic merits concern. No one knows what share of the recent thawing can be attributed to natural cycles and how much to heat-trapping pollution linked to recent global warming, and some scientists and government officials, particularly in Russia, are dismissive of assertions that a permanent change is at hand.
"We are not going to have apple trees growing in Vorkuta," said the mayor of that coal-mining city, Igor L. Shpektor, who is also the president of Russia's union of Arctic cities and towns.
But the current thaw is already real enough for the four million people within the Arctic Circle, including about 150,000 Inuit. "As long as it's ice," said Sheila Watt-Cloutier, leader of a transnational Inuit group, "nobody cares except us, because we hunt and fish and travel on that ice. However, the minute it starts to thaw and becomes water, then the whole world is interested."
Increasingly, big corporations, the eight countries with Arctic footholds and other nations farther south are betting on the possibility of a great transformation. Energy-hungry China has set up a research station on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen and twice deployed its icebreaker Snow Dragon, which normally works in Antarctica, to northern waters to conduct climate research.
Interest in Arctic-hardy vessels has picked up so much that in January, Aker Finnyards, a giant shipbuilder based in Helsinki, created a subsidiary just to develop ice-hardened ships. Its new double-ended tanker slips smoothly through open water bow first but can spin around and use an icebreakerlike stern to smash through heavy floes. A Finnish energy company bought two for about $90 million apiece, and after buying one Russia licensed the design and is building two more.
In January, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research held a closed two-day meeting to hear from experts on the implications of a warming, opening Arctic.
"There are likely to be a number of foreign-policy issues that must be addressed by the United States and other nations" if the climate trends persist, said a summary of the meeting. "These issues include the availability and potential for exploitation of energy, fisheries and other resources; access to new sea routes; new claims under Law of the Sea; national security; and others."
A look at a map of the globe with the North Pole at its center explains why a new frontier matters. Some countries that one might think of as being half a world part appear as startlingly close neighbors, and relatively speaking, they are.
In the days of empire, Rudyard Kipling called jockeying among world powers in Central Asia the Great Game. Christopher Weafer, an energy analyst with Alfa Bank in Moscow, says this new Arctic rush is "the Great Game in a cold climate."
The Petroleum Rush
To understand the practical terms of this new competition for territory, opportunity and resources, a good place to begin is Hammerfest, Norway, one of the northernmost towns in the world and one of 12 Arctic settlements visited over six months by correspondents of The New York Times preparing this series of articles.
Hammerfest, once an austerely beautiful fishing village burned to the ground by the Nazis in World War II, is starting to swell with young people from other parts of Norway, Finland, Russia and Asia, as well as with highly trained technical workers from Europe and North America. They are drawn by Snohvit (in English, Snow White), a mammoth complex being built to receive natural gas piped from the Barents Sea and liquefy the gas for shipping.
The Norwegian government, which controls Snohvit in part through its majority ownership of the energy company Statoil, is desperate for Snohvit to be a success and put the country in the forefront of Arctic energy exploration. Being first, however, has had its challenges in the severe operating environment of the High North, as Arctic areas are called in Norway. Overruns have put the price of Snohvit at $8.8 billion, almost 50 percent above its original estimate.
The project has a firm backer in John Doyle Ong, the blunt United States ambassador in Oslo. Snohvit is scheduled to start sending liquefied natural gas to the Cove Point port in Maryland in 2007, just as American imports of liquefied gas from competing sources in the Middle East and Africa are set to rise rapidly. Importing natural gas from a stable country like Norway already the world's third-largest oil exporter, after Saudi Arabia and Russia is a rare option these days.
"Norway's importance to the United States in terms of our national energy policy is increasing with every passing year," Mr. Ong said.
But the United States' interests go beyond that too far beyond for many in Norway. In September, the opening of frontier areas in the Barents and Norwegian Seas emerged as a central issue in elections that brought a leftist coalition to power, with some coalition members favoring a ban on Arctic oil and gas exploration in environmentally sensitive areas.
And besides supporting Snohvit, Mr. Ong, a former energy executive, has stepped into disputes between Norway and Russia over a large gray zone in the Barents. His insistence that Arctic-related matters be "trilateral" rather than bilateral is viewed as belligerent by some Norwegians.
In private, Norwegian officials welcome the heft of the United States in its negotiations with Russia. Norway is eager to resolve the territorial dispute so that some order, and Norwegian drilling expertise and environmental standards, can be imposed on Arctic exploration. Because as large as Snohvit is, it is dwarfed by a far bigger gas field to the east in Russian waters. That field, called Shtokman, is being developed by Gazprom, Russia's gas behemoth.
In September, Gazprom selected five companies Statoil and Norsk Hydro from Norway, Total from France and Chevron and ConocoPhillips as finalists in a search for partners to develop Shtokman, in the Barents Sea, 350 miles north of Russia's Kola Peninsula. The development costs are estimated at $15 billion to $20 billion. The field is reported to hold more than double all of Canada's gas reserves.
"They're going to find more of them," Mr. Weafer, the Moscow-based energy analyst, said of Arctic gas deposits. "It's the next energy frontier."
And while natural gas is certainly valued, the prize that is generating the biggest interest is oil. Virtually every large international energy company is studying how eventually to win permission from Norway and Russia to explore in the Barents, and the Norwegian Polar Institute has been contacted repeatedly by oil companies to explore the feasibility of drilling in the icier waters north of Spitsbergen.
Jan-Gunnar Winther, director of the institute, said the seasonal melting of the polar cap might allow access to more petroleum deposits but also create more challenges.
"A warmer climate in the north would mean more icebergs, rather than less," he said. "There will be obstacles in getting to the petroleum, but if oil prices stay high there will be enticements as well."
A push into the Barents Sea could help redraw the politics of energy allegiances, and gas in particular puts Russia in a strong position. "It has a good chance of becoming a more effective counterbalance to OPEC," Mr. Weafer said.
As for Norway, the warming world gives it the chance to seek influence far beyond its size. Energy-hungry countries that might have written off the Arctic not long ago are showing considerable interest in Norway's opening of the Barents; one visitor to Oslo in September was India's oil minister, seeking a role in exploration. And if a route farther north opens just four or five months of the year, Norway could even become a major supplier of oil and gas to China, said Sverre Lodgaard, director of the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs.
Norway is trying to position itself as "a dwarf among giants," Mayor Alf Jakobsen of Hammerfest said. "We're attracting young people to Hammerfest instead of sending them away, for the first time in years. The opportunity to become a springboard into the Arctic is upon us."
Fisheries Head North
Charlie Lean easily recalls when he realized that big changes were sweeping the fish stocks along the northern shores of Alaska.
Just over 10 years ago, when Mr. Lean was the state's fisheries manager for the northwest region, a call came in from the tiny Eskimo outpost of Kivalina, on the Chukchi Sea 150 miles northeast of the Bering Strait. A village elder was reporting "a massive fish kill" in the Wulik River, Mr. Lean said. Everyone assumed it was from some toxic spill upriver at the giant Red Dog zinc mine.
"I rounded up a plane and blasted off and flew up there," he said. "Flying overhead I could see right away it was the end of a pink salmon run. They were dying of natural causes as they always do once they spawn."
The elders had never seen a run of this salmon species. But they have shown up every year since.
The colonization of new rivers by pink salmon is just one of many changes in fish and crab stocks that appear linked to retreating sea ice and warming waters in the Chukchi Sea and, farther south, the Bering Sea. The changes are important because the Bering is rich with pollock, salmon, halibut and crab, already yielding nearly half of America's seafood catch and a third of Russia's.
Recent studies have projected that in a few decades there could be lucrative fishing grounds in waters that were largely untouched throughout human history.
In a 2002 report for the Navy on climate change and the Arctic Ocean, the Arctic Research Commission, a panel appointed by the president, concluded that species were moving north through the Bering Strait. "Climate warming is likely to bring extensive fishing activity to the Arctic, particularly in the Barents Sea and Beaufort-Chukchi region where commercial operations have been minimal in the past," the report said. "In addition, Bering Sea fishing opportunities will increase as sea ice cover begins later and ends sooner in the year."
But problems could emerge, as well, as stocks shift from the waters of one country to those of another. Snow crabs, for example, appear to be moving away from Alaska, north and west toward Russia, as the sea ice retreats. They depend on nutrients that sink to the bottom from algae growing under the ice. The valuable fishery could eventually move entirely out of American waters, some federal fisheries scientists said.
The fishing industry, a business where surviving one year to the next is the main worry, has largely not taken notice of the changes, although American crab boats are finding they have to steam farther and farther to haul in a decent catch.
"If the crabs move over into the Russian zone," said Glenn Reed, the president of the Pacific Seafood Processors Association in Seattle, "there's not much to be done about that except hope they come back someday."
Who Governs What
"Stalin once just drew a line from Murmansk to the North Pole and then to Chukchi and said, 'U.S.S.R. Polar Region' and nobody worried about it," said Artur N. Chilingarov, an Arctic explorer and deputy speaker of Russia's lower house of Parliament.
Now, instead of Stalin, the lines will be drawn by an international commission and the geography of the seabed itself.
That means that the Arctic land grab could be decided in part inside a lab at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. There, at the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping, scientists are studying sonar scans of the seabed from a 2002 expedition on a United States Coast Guard icebreaker in waters north of Barrow, Alaska.
In the lab, Larry Mayer, the center's director, gave a reporter a joystick-driven virtual tour of the seabed two miles beneath the ice. The ocean appeared on a wall-size screen as a basin with ridges and valleys dropping into the depths around the edges, representing oceanographers' best guess at the topography before the expedition. Then Dr. Mayer pushed a button, adding depth data from the survey, which used new multibeam sonar. Suddenly a giant underwater mountain sprouted up 10,000 feet where the old chart had shown only a vague bump.
One of the old depth-sounding voyages had passed within a few miles but missed it. "That's the state of our knowledge," said Dr. Mayer, who named the undersea mountain Healy, after the icebreaker.
Such physical features matter enormously to nations seeking to expand their undersea territory under a murky clause, Article 76, in the Law of the Sea. With only fragments of the Arctic ever surveyed, by icebreaker or nuclear submarine, various countries are mounting new mapping expeditions to claim the most territory they can.
The exclusive economic zone controlled by a country generally extends 230 miles from its shores. But under Article 76, that zone can expand if a nation can convince other parties to the treaty that there is a "natural prolongation" of its continental shelf beyond that limit.
The shelf is the relatively shallow extension of a landmass to the point where the bottom drops into the oceanic abyss. But in many places, the drop-off is a gentle slope or is connected to long-submerged ridges that, if precisely mapped, might add thousands of square miles to a country's exploitable seabed.
Claims of expanded territory are being pursued the world over, but the Arctic Ocean is where experts foresee the most conflict. Only there do the boundaries of five nations Russia, Canada, Denmark, Norway and the United States converge, the way sections of an orange meet at the stem. (The three other Arctic nations, Iceland, Sweden and Finland, do not have coasts on the ocean.)
"The area does get to be a bit crowded," said Peter Croker, chairman of the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, which assesses claims. It is composed of experts appointed by countries that ratified the treaty.
Disputes over overlapping claims must be worked out by the countries involved, but the commission weighs control over areas that would otherwise remain international waters.
Countries that ratified the treaty before May 13, 1999, have until May 13, 2009, to make claims. Other countries have 10 years from their date of ratification.
Russia adopted the treaty in 1997, and four years later laid claim to nearly half the Arctic Ocean. The commission's technical panel rejected the claim, and now Russia hopes the recent voyage of its research ship Akademik Fyodorov to the North Pole will yield mapping data in its favor.
In June, Denmark and Canada announced that they would conduct a joint surveying project of uncharted parts of the Arctic Ocean near their coasts.
Denmark is particularly interested in proving that a 1,000-mile undersea mountain range, the Lomonosov Ridge, is linked geologically to Greenland, which is semiautonomous Danish territory. If it finds such a link, Denmark could make a case that the North Pole belongs to the Danes, Danish officials have said.
Canada could also claim a huge area, and then face challenges from the other Arctic nations. The United States could petition for a swath of Arctic seabed larger than California, according to rough estimates by Dr. Mayer and other scientists. But while the government financed Dr. Mayer's survey, it has not made a definitive move toward staking a claim.
American ratification of the Law of the Sea treaty has repeatedly been blocked by a small group of Republican senators, now led by Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma. They say, among other things, that the treaty would infringe on American sovereignty.
In a Senate hearing last year, Mr. Inhofe said, "I'm very troubled about implications of this convention on our national security." The deadlock has persisted even though the Bush administration in 2002 described ratification of the Law of the Sea and four other treaties as an "urgent need."
Many proponents of the treaty, including the Pentagon, the American Petroleum Institute and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, say this paralysis leaves the United States on the sidelines while others carve up an ocean.
"We need to be in the game, at the table, talking about fisheries management, mineral extraction, freedom of navigation," said Adm. James D. Watkins, a retired chief of naval operations who is chairman of the United States Commission on Ocean Policy.
Mr. McCain said, "I think what it would require really is a hard push from the president."
Treaty or no, territorial disputes ultimately imply questions about a country's ability to defend its interests. Here, too, the United States has shown less urgency while Canada has acted more aggressively to ensure sovereignty over a fast-changing domain it had long neglected.
Already, oil tanker traffic is rising and fishing boats are going farther north. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police is concerned that melting seaways could make it easier for narcotics traffickers to reach indigenous communities, and for organized crime to exploit the growing diamond trade. And the United States, which disputes Canada's control over parts of the petroleum-rich Beaufort Sea, has in the past sent vessels unannounced through other Arctic waters that Canada claims.
Three years ago Canada began patrolling the most remote Arctic reaches with army rangers, a mostly Eskimo force of 1,500 irregulars. Next year the military plans to launch Radarsat 2, a satellite system that will allow surveillance of the Arctic and sea approaches as far as 1,000 miles offshore.
The military is also buying three reinforced tankers to supply ships patrolling the north. The fleet of Twin Otters, the primary surveillance and transport planes in the north since the 1960's, will be replaced with bigger, faster transports. And senior officials are touring places that offer little but symbolic value.
Canada's aim is not only to tighten control of its territory, but also to establish a strong posture in future talks over the Northwest Passage, the long-sought shortcut from Europe to Asia across the top of Canada.
Bill Graham, the defense minister, said, "I don't see the Northwest Passage as something for another 20 years, but at the rate of present global warming, we know that it will be within 20 years and we have to get ahead now." This summer he made a point of visiting Hans Island, a two-mile-long rock claimed by both Canada and Denmark.
The Pentagon has focused elsewhere. The Navy spent up to $25 million a year on polar research in the 1990's, and in April 2001 produced a report warning that weapons and ships were not designed with arctic conditions in mind, and that charts, navigational systems and support networks were inadequate for the north.
"Safe navigation and precision weapons delivery capability," the report said, "may be significantly constrained unless these shortfalls are addressed."
But in the budget shake-up after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Navy severely reduced spending for polar research.
At the same time, America's three large icebreakers are deteriorating. One of them, the Polar Sea, is inoperable and docked in Seattle, where it is being readied for a year or two of repairs. No replacements are planned.
Three Shipping Passages
Churchill, Manitoba, and Murmansk, on the Russian Arctic coast, are unlikely sister cities.
Churchill is not a city at all, but a barren outpost of 1,100 people on the western shore of Hudson Bay. It survives on the 15,000 tourists who visit each year for the chance to see and photograph migrating polar bears.
Murmansk, by contrast, has a population of 325,000, making it the biggest city inside the Arctic Circle. Founded in 1916 as Romanov-on-Murman, just before the revolution wiped out the Romanovs, it is a place of stolidly attractive old buildings, newer high-rises, wide boulevards and green parks. Though it lies north of Churchill, which is ice-bound up to eight months a year, Murmansk's harbor is kept free of ice by the Gulf Stream, the ideal base for the Russian Arctic fleet and commercial shipping.
One thing the communities have in common, however, is hard times. Churchill, never much to begin with, lost most of its population when Canada finished phasing out the Fort Churchill military base in the 1980's. Murmansk, like much of the rest of Russia, lost economic ground with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the more relevant connection is an accident of geography and a shared dream: that the thawing of the Arctic Ocean would help create the so-called Arctic Bridge, a shipping route with their ports as the logical terminals.
The advantage of maritime shortcuts across the top of the world can be startling. For example, shipments from Murmansk to midcontinental North America by the well-worn route through the St. Lawrence Seaway and Great Lakes to Thunder Bay, in western Ontario, typically take 17 days. The voyage from Murmansk to Churchill is only 8 days under good conditions, and from Churchill, rail links snake down through Manitoba, the American Midwest and points south all the way to Monterrey, Mexico.
For Murmansk, an extended shipping season in Arctic ports that are now frozen much of the year could mean a boon in traffic to the west and, perhaps once again, to the Far East.
The city was once the anchor of the Soviet Union's Northern Sea Route, which stretched to nearly 3,500 miles to the rich nickel mines at Norilsk and on to newly established Arctic colonies at Dikson, Khatanga, Tiksi and Pevek before reaching the Bering Sea.
At its height, in 1987, more than seven million tons of cargo traversed the icy route. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, so did the Northern Sea Route. Today it handles only 1.5 million tons.
The Murmansk Shipping Company, newly privatized, now uses its icebreakers for tourist cruises to the North Pole $15,000 to $20,000 a ticket, depending on the cabin.
The same way an Arctic Bridge could drastically cut the distance to Canada, a revived Northern Sea Route could shorten the journey for goods and raw materials from Northeast Asia to Europe by 40 percent.
Vladimir M. Chlenov, the transportation minister from the Siberian republic of Sakha, a vast region that borders the Laptev Sea, envisions dozens of ships carrying gold, timber and other resources up the Lena River to the port of Tiksi, and from there through ice-free seas to Europe and Asia.
The waters near the Siberian shore when free of ice are too shallow for giant cargo ships, and the infrastructure needed for navigation has deteriorated. But a study conducted from 1993 to 1999 by researchers from Russia, Norway and Japan found that a route once sustained by Soviet diktat could also be viable for private enterprise.
There is, of course, a third Arctic shipping route besides the Arctic Bridge and the Northern Sea Route: the Northwest Passage. It would be the last of the three main routes to succumb to the thaw. But some Canadian officials, eyeing what will happen in 20 years, say it is all the more justification for investing in the rebirth of Churchill.
"We're gearing up for the future," said Mr. Lemieux, the Manitoba transportation minister. "We look to be the gateway, the logistical hub of the world for circumpolar navigation."
A lucky winner would be Pat Broe, the American who bought the Port of Churchill in 1997 almost as an afterthought, for a token $10 Canadian. Looking to expand his railroad company, OmniTrax, he had already paid $11 million for 810 miles of denationalized tracks in Manitoba. He acquired the port at auction, figuring he would rather own it than have someone else use it as a "toll booth" for his railroad.
Mr. Broe, a private man, declined to be interviewed for this article.
Since his acquisitions, OmniTrax estimates it has spent $50 million modernizing the port to accommodate big ships carrying exports like grain and farm machinery to Murmansk, and incoming Russian products, including fertilizer and steel. By some hopeful estimates, Churchill's shipping season could eventually grow to 8 or even 10 months a year, compared with the current 4.
Michael J. Ogborn, OmniTrax's managing director, said he could see a future for Churchill when "the activity at the port will be as busy as an anthill, with machines, people, freight and ships at dock."
For now, though, there is a problem. While the port has continued to ship grain to Europe and North Africa, it is still waiting for its ship to come in any ship from Russia, to demonstrate the advantages of the Arctic Bridge.
"There is still a huge marketing effort needed to educate shippers why they should ship through Churchill," Mr. Ogborn conceded.
And in an arena where sharp elbows are often the norm, there is great cooperation between Canada and Russia, not least through Russia's ambassador to Canada, Georgy E. Mamedov. A spreader of good will, the ambassador has even suggested using decommissioned nuclear submarines to transport cargo under the ice. On a visit to Churchill last year, he appointed his local driver honorary Russian consul, and stopped at the "jail" for polar bears that wander into town, laying his hand on the big black nose of one anesthetized inmate and addressing it fondly in Russian.
In the months since, Mr. Mamedov has talked ebulliently of the Arctic Bridge in meetings with Canadian officials, business groups and reporters. "Go to Churchill," he said in one interview. "Go there."
Clifford Krauss reported from Canada for this article, Steven Lee Myers from Russia, Andrew C. Revkin from New Hampshire and Washington, and Simon Romero from Norway. Craig Duff contributed reporting from Canada, Norway, Russia and Alaska.
source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/10/science/10arctic.html?ex=1129953600&en=d6bf9d05c80ed921&ei=5070 20oct2005
Russia Freed by warming, waters once locked beneath ice are gnawing at coastal settlements around the Arctic Circle.
In Bykovsky, a village of 457 on Russia's northeast coast, the shoreline is collapsing, creeping closer and closer to houses and tanks of heating oil, at a rate of 15 to 18 feet a year. Eventually, homes will be lost, and maybe all of Bykovsky, too, under ever-longer periods of assault by open water. "It is eating up the land," said Innokenty Koryakin, a member of the Evenk tribe and the captain of a fishing boat. "You cannot do anything about it."
To the east, Fyodor V. Sellyakhov scours a barren island with 16 hired men. Mammoths lived here tens of thousands of years ago, and their carcasses eventually sank deep into sediment that is now offering up a trove of tusks and bones nearly as valuable as elephant ivory.
Mr. Sellyakhov, a native Yakut, hauls the fossils to a warehouse here and sells them for $25 to $50 a pound. This summer he collected two tons, making him a wealthy man, for Tiksi. "The sea washes down the coast every year," he said. "It is practically all ice permafrost and it is thawing."
For the four million people who live north of the Arctic Circle, in remote outposts and the improbable industrial centers built by Soviet decree, a changing climate presents new opportunities. But it also threatens their environment, their homes and, for those whose traditions rely on the ice-bound wilderness, the preservation of their culture.
A push to develop the North, quickened by the melting of the Arctic seas, carries its own rewards and dangers for people in the region. The discovery of vast petroleum fields in the Barents and Kara Seas has raised fears of catastrophic accidents as ships loaded with oil and, soon, liquefied gas churn through the fisheries off Scandinavia, headed to markets in Europe and North America. Land that was untouched could be tainted by pollution as generators, smokestacks and large vehicles sprout to support the growing energy industry.
But the thaw itself is already causing widespread anxiety. In Russia, 20 percent of which lies above the Arctic Circle, melting of the permafrost threatens the foundations of homes, factories, pipelines. While the primary causes are debated, the effect is an engineering nightmare no one anticipated when the towns were built, in Stalin's time.
Coastal erosion is a problem in Alaska as well, forcing the United States to prepare to relocate several Inuit villages at a projected cost of $100 million or more for each one.
Across the Arctic, indigenous tribes with traditions shaped by centuries of living in extremes of cold and ice are noticing changes in weather and wildlife. They are trying to adapt, but it can be confounding.
Take the Inuit word for June, qiqsuqqaqtuq. It refers to snow conditions, a strong crust at night. Only those traits now appear in May. Shari Gearheard, a climate researcher from Harvard, recalled the appeal of an Inuit hunter, James Qillaq, for a new word at a recent meeting in Canada.
One sentence stayed in her mind: "June isn't really June any more."
Changing Traditions
In Finnmark, Norway's northernmost province, the Arctic landscape unfolds in late winter as an endless snowy plateau, silent but for the cries of the reindeer and the occasional whine of a snowmobile.
A changing Arctic is felt there, too. "The reindeer are becoming unhappy," said Issat Heandarat Eira, a 31-year-old reindeer herder and one of 80,000 Samis, or Laplanders, who live in the northern reaches of Scandinavia and Russia.
Few countries rival Norway when it comes to protecting the environment and preserving indigenous customs. The state has lavished its oil wealth on the region, and Sami culture has enjoyed something of a renaissance. There is a Nordic Sami Institute, a Sami College, a state-sponsored film festival and a drive-in theater where moviegoers watch from snowmobiles.
And yet no amount of government support can convince Mr. Eira that his livelihood, intractably entwined with the reindeer, is not about to change. Like a Texas cattleman, he keeps the size of his herd secret. But he said warmer temperatures in fall and spring were melting the top layers of snow, which then refreeze as ice, making it harder for his reindeer to dig through to the lichen they eat. He worries, too, about the encroachment of highways and industrial activity on his once isolated grazing lands.
"The people who are making the decisions, they are living in the south and they are living in towns," said Mr. Eira, sitting inside his home made of reindeer hides. "They don't mark the change of weather. It is only people who live in nature and get resources from nature who mark it."
Other Arctic cultures that rely on nature report similar disruptions. For 5,000 years, the Inuit have lived on the fringe of the Arctic Ocean, using sea ice as a highway, building material and hunting platform. In recent decades, their old ways have been fading under forced relocations, the erosion of language and lore and the lure of modern conveniences, steady jobs and a cash economy.
Now the accelerating retreat of the sea ice is making it even harder to preserve their connections to "country food" and tradition. In Canada, Inuit hunters report that an increasing number of polar bears look emaciated because the shrinking ice cover has curtailed their ability to fatten up on seals. In Alaska, whale hunters working in unusually open seas have seen walruses try to climb onto their white boats, mistaking them for ice floes.
Hank Rogers, a 54-year-old Inuvialuit who helps patrol Canada's Far North, said the pelts of fox, marten and other game he trapped were thinning. As for the flesh of fish caught in coastal estuaries of the Yukon, "they're too mushy," he said. Slushy snow and weaker ice has made traveling by snowmobile impossible in places.
"The next generation coming up is not going to experience what we did," he said. "We can't pass the traditions on as our ancestors passed on to us."
Even seasoned hunters have been betrayed by the thaw, stepping in snow that should be covering ice but instead falling into water. And on Shingle Point, a sandy strip inhabited by Inuvialuit at the tip of the Yukon in Canada, Danny A. Gordon, 70, said it was troubling that fewer icebergs were reaching the bay. It has become windier, too, for reasons people here cannot explain.
"In the summer 40 years ago, we had lots of icebergs, and you could land your boat on them and climb on them even in summer," Mr. Gordon said. "Now in the winter they are tiny. The weather has changed. Everyone knows it. It's global warming."
Sinking Cities
Vorkuta, a coal-mining city of 130,000, is crumbling.
Many of the city's homes and factories were built not on hard rock, but on permafrost, a layer of perpetually frozen earth that covers 65 percent of Russia's territory. If the permafrost underneath melts, the ground turns to mush.
"Everything is falling apart," said Lyubov I. Denisova, who lives in a cramped apartment on Lokomotivnaya Street. The ceiling has warped, the walls cracked, the window frames splintered. Some buildings have been declared unsafe and abandoned.
Vorkuta lies on the edge of Russia's permafrost boundary, and some scientists predict that continued warming could advance that border hundreds of miles northward, weakening the earth beneath the vast infrastructure built during the days of the Soviet Union's industrialization of the Arctic. According to the Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk, the average temperature of the permafrost has already increased a degree or two.
While most Arctic climate experts say the warming trend is driven by heat-trapping emissions and is unlikely to reverse, many scientists and officials in Russia predict the warming of the last 30 years will give way to a new period of cold. Vorkuta's mayor, Igor I. Shpektor, hews to that line. He said the damage in the city 80 percent of all buildings show signs of it, one study found resulted from faulty construction or maintenance, not a general thaw.
Still, Mr. Shpektor acknowledged, "the permafrost is unforgiving."
Any significant warming, said Anatoly A. Chumashov, the city's chief engineer, would leave officials like him scrambling to save the city. "It is an example of how fragile it is and how careful we should be," he said. But he added: "If the permafrost melts, this city will not collapse overnight. There is time to adjust, but it requires very serious investments in labor and money."
Spills and Depredation
"One oil spill would be the end of us," said Borge Iversen, a fisherman on the Lofoten Islands, a striking archipelago north of the Arctic Circle in the Norwegian Sea.
As recently as 2000, Russian tankers were rarely spotted passing the jagged peaks and sheltered inlets, surrounded by seas with the world's largest stocks of cod and herring, as well as killer and sperm whales. So far, there has not been a major accident, but the ships appear more and more, a harbinger of Russia's expanding efforts to extract oil and, increasingly, gas in the Arctic.
As much as a quarter of the world's remaining oil and gas resources are believed to exist in the Arctic. And as technology improves, oil prices rise and the seasonal ice cap retreats, countries like Norway and Russia are acting with startling speed.
Oil shipments from the White Sea and the coast of the Barents Sea have soared, said Mikhail M. Kalenchenko, director of the World Wildlife Fund's branch in Murmansk, the Russian port.
"It was supposed to increase over the next 10 years, up to 20 million tons of oil," he said. "It's 20 million this year," or 146 million barrels. At this rate, he said, "we can expect up to 100 million tons, over 10 to 20 years, to be transported through our area."
Russia's history of environmental protection is a poor one. The Soviet drive for industrial development paid little heed to the natural spaces around its mines, factories and ports. Its disregard is evident in the poisoned wasteland around the nickel smelter in Monchegorsk, south of Murmansk, where hundreds of square miles of what was once forest is now almost entirely devoid of life.
Western countries have paid millions to help Russia dismantle its aging fleet of nuclear submarines in the area and safely store the nuclear material aboard them, but Mr. Kalenchenko said far less attention had been paid to the environmental risks of expanding oil shipments in the same area, most in single-hull tankers.
"What has never happened before is a big accident in the high seas in the Artic," he said. For the entire Barents region, he said, Russia has only two bases with the equipment necessary to fight an oil spill. "In Norway, they have at least 50 bases of this kind," he said.
David Dickins, an engineer from San Diego who has spent 30 years studying how to clean up oil spills in icy waters, said that while the ice impeded the use of tools like booms that hold a slick in place, the ice also naturally contained the oil, giving response teams more time to act before environmental damage occurred.
"People ought not paint the Arctic in some sort of raving sense where a spill is somehow going to be catastrophic," he said.
But he added: "A spill is always serious. In the Arctic it will naturally take longer to clean up because there is less wave action, and breakdown is slower in colder temperatures."
That is what worries Mr. Iversen, who sails each morning from the village of Ballstad, into the coastal waters around the Lofoten Islands. The village's history, islanders say, reaches back to the Vikings, and fishing is central to the region's social and economic life.
"We've fished these waters for centuries, and while it's a hard life, we've survived in doing so," he said.
Although the fishing industry accounts for less than 1 percent of Norway's gross domestic product, as against the nearly 18 percent brought in by oil and gas, the fisheries are Norway's second-largest earner of foreign exchange and are viewed as a more sustainable resource.
"We need a policy for the Arctic that considers the next 100 years, not just the next 10 years," Mr. Iversen said.
Such sentiment goes far in Norway, where fishing is still part of the oil-rich nation's soul. On Oct. 13, a new leftist coalition upheld a ban on drilling in the waters around the Lofoten Islands until 2009, while allowing exploration to proceed further north in the Barents Sea. As for the tanker traffic, Oslo is looking at other ways of advancing its concerns.
Norway and the seven other Arctic nations have started to discuss ways to protect the environment they share in a forum called the Arctic Council, established nine years ago. In 2002, the council issued guidelines for offshore oil drilling, calling for drilling projects to be preceded by studies on environmental effects and the availability of cleanup equipment.
The guidelines come with no enforcement powers, but several experts say they think they will have some effect, particularly because Russia is preparing for entry into the World Trade Organization and seeking closer ties with the European Union.
A Less Wild Future
One day last summer, the 1,200 residents of Pangnirtung, a windswept outpost on a fjord in Nunavut, Canada's Inuit-administered Arctic territory, were startled to see a 400-foot European cruise ship drop anchor unannounced and send several hundred tourists ashore in small boats.
While small ships have stopped in the Canadian Arctic, visits from large liners are increasing as interest grows in the opening Northwest Passage, said Maureen Bundgaard, chief executive of Nunavut Tourism, a trade association.
Ms. Bundgaard has been training villagers how to stage cultural shows, conduct day tours and sell crafts and traditional fare without being overrun. "We're not prepared to deal with the huge ships, emotionally or in other ways," she said.
Inuit leaders say they are trying to balance tradition with the inevitable changes that are sweeping their lands. The Inuit Circumpolar Conference, which represents 155,000 Inuit scattered across Canada, Greenland, Russia and the United States, has enlisted lawyers and movie stars like Jake Gyllenhaal and Salma Hayek to draw attention to its imperiled traditions.
The group's leaders hope to submit a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in December, claiming that the United States, by rejecting a treaty requiring other industrialized countries to cut emissions linked to warming, is willfully threatening the Inuit's right to exist.
The commission, an investigative arm of the Organization of American States, has no enforcement powers. But legal analysts say that a declaration that the United States has violated the Inuit's rights could create the foundation for a lawsuit either against the United States in international court or American companies in federal courts.
But some Inuit question the wisdom of the petition. They ask, how can they push countries to stem global warming when the Inuit's own prosperity in places like Nunavut is tied to revenues from oil and gas, which are sources of greenhouse gases when burned?
Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the elected chairwoman of the group, said the goal was not to stop development but to make sure that native cultures had a say in how development was carried out.
"It's how we do the business that's more important," she said. "There are more environmentally friendly ways in which we can do development and still live a certain way, with a way of life and business that can balance both." While it is the people of the Arctic who will feel the melt and the rush for development most directly, the world, too, will have to give up something its treasured notion of the Far North as a place of wilderness, simplicity and unspoiled cultures.
In a report on Arctic development, the United Nations Environment Program estimated that 15 percent of the region's lands were affected in 2001 by mining, oil and gas exploration, ports or other industrial incursions. But that figure is likely to reach 80 percent in 2050, it said. The Arctic, then, is probably making the same transition that swept the coastal plains of the North Slope of Alaska starting 38 years ago when the first oil was struck in Prudhoe Bay, said Charles Wohlforth, an Alaskan and author of "The Whale and the Supercomputer," describing Arctic climate change.
Since then, a lacework of pipelines and wells has steadily spread west and east from that central field, ending the sweeping sense of emptiness that defined the Arctic landscape through the ages.
"Even if you support oil development and think it makes sense, there's a point at which it becomes West Texas or the Gulf of Mexico and is not really the Arctic any more," Mr. Wohlforth said.
Craig Duff contributed reporting for this article.
source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/20/science/earth/20arctic.html 20oct2005
Correction Appended
In 1969 Roy Koerner, a Canadian government glaciologist, was one of four men (and 36 dogs) who completed the first surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean, from Alaska through the North Pole to Norway.
Now, he said, such a trek would be impossible: there is just not enough ice. In September, the area covered by sea ice reached a record low. "I look on it as a different world," Dr. Koerner said. "I recently reviewed a proposal by one guy to go across by kayak."
At age 73, Dr. Koerner, known as Fritz, still regularly hikes high on the ancient glaciers abutting the warming ocean to extract cores showing past climate trends. And every one, he said, indicates that the Arctic warming under way over the last century is different from that seen in past warm eras.
Many scientists say it has taken a long time for them to accept that global warming, partly the result of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, could shrink the Arctic's summer cloak of ice.
But many of those same scientists have concluded that the momentum behind human-caused warming, combined with the region's tendency to amplify change, has put the familiar Arctic past the point of no return.
The particularly sharp warming and melting in the last few decades is thought by many experts to result from a mix of human and natural causes. But a number of recent computer simulations of global climate run by half a dozen research centers around the world show that in the future human influence will dominate.
Even with just modest growth in emissions of the greenhouse gases, almost all of the summer sea ice is likely to disappear by late in the century. Some of the simulations, including those run on an advanced model at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., show much of the summer ice disappearing by 2050, said Marika Holland, a scientist there who is working on the sea-ice portion of that model.
Of the various simulations, all done for an international scientific report on climate trends to be issued in 2007, the only ones that retain much summer sea ice in the Arctic by 2100 are those that assume global greenhouse-gas emissions are held constant at rates measured in 2000 something that only five years later is already impossible.
The other models all produce an Arctic Ocean in summer akin to the "open polar sea" that was sought by oceanographers and explorers in the mid-1800's. "There would definitely be shipping along the Eurasian coast, and the polar bears would have some serious issues," Dr. Holland said.
The models are, of course, impressionistic views of a far more complicated Arctic reality, so their projections are uncertain. But what worries field scientists, who form their opinions based on empirical clues embedded in ice or recorded by thermometers, is that observations of change and evidence pointing to past patterns are agreeing with the models.
David Barber, an Arctic expert at the University of Manitoba, said emissions needed to be cut quickly to avert even greater damage. Skeptics who use the uncertainties to justify delaying such actions forget that uncertainty cuts both ways, and things could be far worse than forecast, Dr. Barber and others say.
"I wish we would have started 50 years ago, but to not start now would be a real tragedy," Dr. Barber said.
But, he added, it is important to accept that shrinking summer sea ice over the next century is inevitable and that humans need to adapt.
That inevitability presents a sticky problem for environmental groups, many of which have suggested that cutting greenhouse gases could save the polar bear and Eskimo traditions, both dependent on sea ice.
"Even if you would stop every engine right now, there is no escape unless you physically take the CO2 out of the air again," said Henk Brinkhuis, an expert on past Arctic ecosystems at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He added that this would have to be done on a vast scale, far beyond simply planting trees or the like.
"You may argue for a long time whether this process will take 20, 50 or 100 years, but it doesn't change the fact that it will happen," Dr. Brinkhuis said.
A Work in Progress
The emerging picture of great Arctic changes ahead comes from the interlaced efforts of the modelers in their climate-controlled computer rooms and field scientists with numb toes and frosted beards. It will long remain a work in progress. But the underlying trends are robust, many Arctic scientists say.
Field work suggests that past Arctic warm spells, like a stretch through the 1920's and 1930's, were limited to certain regions, while the recent warming has largely progressed in concert with rising temperatures around the Northern Hemisphere a sign of large forces at work, climate scientists say, not regional variability.
Field studies have also provided information on how energy flows from air to ocean and into melting ice, how melting ice freshens water and growing ice makes it saltier all dynamics that have helped modelers refine their programs.
Recent expeditions on icebreakers have started building the first detailed picture of the communities of algae, plankton, small cod, seals and polar bears that form an ice-based ecosystem as tenuous as the ice itself.
In the virtual Arctic of computer simulations, thousands of lines of computer code mimic how ice, oceans and the atmosphere interact and are components of larger global models of earth's climate and oceans.
The models are the only way to test how the planet may react to various human actions. Because there is only one earth, there are no other options for such studies, given that the real earth is already well along in an unintended experiment the rapid buildup of long-lived greenhouse gases.
Those who work in that realm have steadily improved their simulations. A decade ago, for instance, most depicted sea ice just as static reflective slabs, and almost all now replicate how ice is tugged by wind and ocean currents, Dr. Holland said.
The inevitability of summer ice retreats, she and other Arctic experts say, is a result of the nature of the climate system, which is something like a heavy flywheel. Once started, flywheels tend to keep going. Within a few decades, say many scientists focused on the region, the insulating power of greenhouse gases will dominate natural climate fluctuations, possibly for centuries.
And the flywheel in the Arctic moves faster than in other areas because the region amplifies change. The most obvious mechanism is the difference in how bright white sea ice and the dark sea act under sunlight. Ice reflects most of the solar energy striking it back into space. Water absorbs most of it.
A result is that each area of ocean exposed by melting ice soaks up heat, melting more ice, exposing more sea, soaking up even more heat and so on, until the annual marathons held each spring on the floating ice near the North Pole are replaced by boat races.
Saving Greenland
Warming has already caused anger and confusion among native peoples on one hand and enthusiasm for new shipping routes among entrepreneurs on the other. But scientists are still grappling to describe what is going on. "You might call it the temperatization of the Arctic; we haven't really invented a word for it yet," said Charles Vφrφsmarty, the director of the Complex Systems Research Center at the University of New Hampshire and one of 21 co-authors of a recent article in Eos, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, about the changes.
The article grew out of several gatherings of Arctic scientists organized by the National Science Foundation over the last two years.
Titled simply "Arctic System on Trajectory to New, Seasonally Ice-Free State," it says, "There seem to be few, if any, processes or feedbacks within the Arctic system that are capable of altering the trajectory."
Those authors and many other experts have settled on the same picture of the region late this century: tundra retreats and forests spread; most sea ice disappears in late summer; coastlines wear away under the assault of wind-driven waves on waters that previously were sheathed in ice; permafrost turns to bogs; and ancient lakes that once sat atop permanently frozen ground drain like unplugged bathtubs.
Climatologists say the effects eventually could extend far beyond the sparsely populated north, contributing to climate and ocean shifts that could dry the American West and possibly slow north-flowing warm currents in the Atlantic Ocean that keep northern Europe milder than it would otherwise be.
The effects could also include a sharp increase in the rate at which seas are swelled by melting glacial ice and far greater warming as even more greenhouse gases, locked in permafrost and the Arctic seabed, are liberated by warming.
For example, American and Russian scientists studying lakes in northeastern Siberia recently reported that the melt of permafrost is generating methane, a potent greenhouse gas. In spots, so much methane is being released that roiling streams of bubbles prevent the surface from freezing even in the depths of the Siberian winter.
The most that can be expected, some climate scientists say, is to limit the human contribution to warming enough to forestall the one truly calamitous, if slow motion, threat in the far north: the melting of Greenland's ice cap.
Rising two miles high and spreading over an area twice the size of California, this vast reservoir essentially the Gulf of Mexico frozen and flipped onto land contains enough water to raise sea levels worldwide more than 20 feet.
In recent years, the ice sheets of Greenland have been building in the middle through added snowfall but melting even more around the edges in summer. Many Greenland experts say the melting is already winning out.
James E. Hansen, a scientist for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who has been designing simulations of earth's climate for nearly four decades, is among those who say prompt cuts in emissions can avert a Greenland meltdown.
Dr. Hansen said that while the Arctic's amplifying effects, like the transition from white ice to dark water, are substantial, they still occur only when the region is feeling some big external warming influence, like the transport of heat from the rest of a greenhouse-warmed planet.
If prompt action is taken to slow growth in carbon dioxide releases, and other, easier efforts are begun to cut emissions of methane, soot and other sources of warming, he said, then it may be possible to retain some summer sea ice and prevent rapid deterioration of the Greenland ice sheet.
"It is physically and technologically possible, but there has to be a will to achieve it," Dr. Hansen said.
Other scientists are not as optimistic.
Fresh studies of ancient glacial ice and sea-floor sediments show that, if anything, the computer simulations projecting strong warming and ice retreats in the region over the long run may be substantial underestimates, Dr. Brinkhuis said.
"Everything we are seeing shows things can move more and faster than we think," he added, referring to geologic and glacial records of past Arctic changes.
The current increase in greenhouse gases, he continued, is similar to past natural changes that profoundly altered the world.
"We have not seen such fast carbon dioxide rises as we have now other than in extreme cases in the past," Dr. Brinkhuis said, including periods like one about 50 million years ago that turned the Arctic Ocean into a warm, weed-covered lake.
Confounding Turbulence
Dr. Brinkhuis and many other veteran Arctic researchers caution that there is something of a paradox in Arctic trends: while the long-term fate of the region may be mostly sealed, no one should presume that the recent sharp warming and seasonal ice retreats that have caught the world's attention will continue smoothly into the future.
"The same Arctic feedbacks that are amplifying human-induced climate changes are amplifying natural variability," explained Asgeir Sorteberg, a climate modeler at the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research in Bergen, Norway.
Indeed, experts say, there could easily be periods in the next few decades when the region cools and ice grows.
The natural Arctic variability is shaped by basic geography and physics.
Near the Equator, climate is as predictable as the age-old trade winds that blow there, fueled by steady streams of sunlight and shaped by the planet's rotation. But toward the poles and particularly the North Pole everything gets stirred up, said David Atkinson, an atmospheric scientist at the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
The region has just about the most turbulent climate on earth, he said, one in which conditions are shaped by slow cycles of temperature changes in the Pacific Ocean, pulsing shifts in areas of high and low barometric pressure over the pole and North Atlantic, and fundamentally chaotic flutters in the atmosphere.
The North Pole climate is even more variable than that at the other end of the earth in part because the Northern Hemisphere is a mix of continents and islands topped by the small but dynamic Arctic Ocean, which is partly ice covered.
The Southern Hemisphere is mostly ocean with a permanently ice-sheathed continent at the pole.
Because of that natural turbulence, a significant camp of Arctic specialists say they are not convinced that humans are driving the changes in the North.
"It's definitely true that the level of variability in high-latitude regions is huge, and trying to separate this from a human-induced trend is very difficult," said Igor Polyakov, another expert at the school's Arctic research center.
In the short run, the natural fluctuations will most likely sustain those on both sides of the debate over how to respond to global warming, with cool years embraced by skeptics and hotter ones by proponents of cutting the heat-trapping gases, said Dr. Richard B. Alley, a geoscientist at Pennsylvania State University.
But he and other scientists say it is clear that in the long run, the Arctic will get warmer, a conclusion at the heart of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a report commissioned by the eight Arctic nations and released last year.
Dr. Koerner, the Canadian glaciologist, pointed out on time scales of millenniums, the recent warming has even trumped a long cooling trend.
"The warming trend is even more significant," he said, "because it's not on a flat background but something that maybe should be getting colder."
For now, the modelers and field researchers continue to work at least in parallel, if not in tandem.
For example, Dr. Holland, a modeler, has never seen the real Arctic. She said a colleague who spends most summers slogging through ponds of meltwater on Arctic Ocean floes recently proposed creating a program called "Take a Modeler to the Arctic." The proposal was only half in jest, she said.
Just two weeks ago, she and that researcher, Donald Perovich, renewed the discussion, with fewer chuckles.
"I'd like to see what it's like before it actually disappears," Dr. Holland said.
Craig Duff contributed reporting from Churchill, Manitoba, for this article.
Correction: Oct. 27, 2005, Thursday:
A map in Science Times on Tuesday showing projected warming in the Arctic over the next century, with an article about scientists' assessments of the trend, reflected erroneous temperature conversions. The Fahrenheit figures shown on the key should have gone from 0 to 10.8 degrees (0 to 6 degrees Celsius), not from 0 to 3.3.
source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/science/earth/25arctic.html?ei=5070&en=c35dad2ed84f93c9&ex=1135918800&pagewanted=print 28dec2005
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