Ice that freezes during the winter
is not freezing out as far as
it used to. It goes back to the 1960s. Ice used to go out about
maybe twenty plus miles in
late sixties and the ice
used to stay there for quite a time.
Now these days it doesn't stay that long
and the icebergs aren't that big when the spring time comes.
The ice is gone. It doesn't stay as long as it used to.
I recall one time my father saying the ice used to stay there
to June sometimes. Well there's some
icebergs out there they used to see when they'd head out to their fish camp.
Nowadays you don't see that.
The ice is deteriorating much faster and the platform is thinning.
Which makes it dangerous. You won't be able to see it from the surface until you
walk through it or traverse over it. Then you
find these soft spots that are created from the current underneath the ice
thawing the ice and melting the ice.
This makes it very dangerous to be out on in the later part of the
spring and early summer. The Arctic
is warming at a faster rate than most of the world.
Every summer when light returns and the days lengthen
there is some ice retreat in Alaska's high Arctic.
But now things are different. The entire polar ice cap is melting.
In 2007, 2008 and 2009,
we saw the most extreme ice retreat since the 1970s
when satellite records were first collected. It takes multiple years to
grow this
multi-year ice. So if you had
10 really cold years in a row again,
you could regrow that multiple year
ice, but that's very unlikely. We might have one or two
cold years. Then with global warming
every year it's less likely that you will have
a really cold year. We are losing so much
old multi-year ice that scientists
at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Lab estimate the Arctic will be
ice-free in summer within a matter of decades.
Conditions are not as favorable as they used to be. The ice is thin.
New ice coming on is not multi-year ice.
It's the new ice that's formed over the season, which is much thinner.
It's very unstable. It's not as heavy as the multiyear ice, which makes it
susceptible for breaking off or calving
right off the edge at different times. That multiyear ice is much
safer to be on. In comparison to ice that's only a
couple feet thick, multiyear ice is 3 to 5 feet thick you know.
That's the differences that we're dealing with nowadays.
A combination of factors made this happen in the high Arctic.
Basically what we had was a perfect storm.
The weather was really unusual with a lot of winds
from the south in the last 10
years. So that carried more heat north.
When you had that extra heat
from just random weather combined
with a global warming signal, that was enough to melt
a lot of the ice in the summer. And once you melt that
ice in the summer it changes from being white
and reflective to a dark ocean surface.
The solar heat goes into the ocean
rather than reflecting out, and so that heat then
is stored there in the ocean. Then in the fall its given back to the
atmosphere. The Bering Sea
is also changing, but interpreting scientific and local observations
year to year is difficult. A lot of interactions with
ecosystem and supplying the base of the ecosystem which is the physical
and chemical type of information to
try and understand how that influences
the ecosystems and how the ecosystem responds to different changes in climate,
to changes in simple physical forcing, to
changes in a variety of those type of things.
The Bering Sea is a perfect example
of this climate variability
where you can have warm periods and cold periods. The main reason
is the Bering Sea is the
transition ground between
really cold dry air in the Arctic
and really moist warm air from the Pacific Ocean.
So the boundary of those can really shift back and forth and have a
big
effect when it shifts one way or another.
The ice in the Bering Sea is influenced by the winter.
It will still have large variability in warm periods
and cold periods and it's affected by the Pacific Ocean as well as the Arctic.
The Bering Sea is an ice dominated
system in the winter. Some time
in the late fall usually November you begin to form sea ice in the north.
As the year progresses it becomes very cold and the wind blows out of the north.
You'll always form it in the
north. It blows ice southward. To know
where the ice edge is is very important and the best way to tell that is with
satellites. On the face it if you look at these
satellite images there is more area covered by ice
than there was last year, but that's a very two dimensional view.
The key is the thickness of the ice which
tells you how much is out there. What's happening as a result of the north winds
is that the ice that's forming farther north
is drifting south in response to the winds so some newer thinner ice forms
in the area that
was just evacuated. That ice is thin enough that it's going to melt out
relatively easily when the spring warming begins in March and April.
It's a very fragile and deceptively extensive
ice cover. The ice volume is not what it appears to be.
There's thinner ice covering a larger area. Sea ice
comes in a myriad of forms. There are 99 words in the Saint
Lawrence Yupik language
that describe sea ice conditions.
For the Yupik
and Inupiaq peoples reading the ice conditions
is a matter of survival. The ice condition
as of today versus back then is lot thinner.
Now we do get ice, but because of the thickness of the ice
versus back then it doesn't stay there long enough.
It does have an effect on the
safety going out during springtime
when it starts to melt.
We used to harvest
walrus during springtime and during fall.
It's been about 3 or 4 years now.
No one in the village has harvested because
the ice breaks. They move with the ice.
At Koyuk freeze up starts
around September or October and then May and
maybe first part of June but we're seeing a lot less of the
ice. The thickness of the ice has changed.
The movement of the ice on the
ocean it
doesn't stay stable anymore as much as it used to.
There are a lot of times when the bays open. As years go
we see different changes and we adapt to them. We've seen a lot of
difference in the ice thickness. Since I was a
little boy it's changed to where we've seen
rain in November and odd things that
are not normal at the time when I was growing up. Loss of shorefast ice has exposed the
coast to storm surges
and rapid erosion. Houses are falling into the sea.
People are preparing to move their villages
to new locations. Native peoples have always been resilient
in the things that are made available to them, although
these times and changes are harder
and more profound. It's difficult to really understand how
we're going to deal with it never having gone through this. We've gone through great
deaths
to epidemics and others but not through weather. The changes going on
in the Arctic are really scary how fast they are happening.
The loss of sea ice, the warmer temperatures, the impact it's already having on
polar bears, seals, worms and
clams as well is already a major change.
These are changes I didn't think I would see in my lifetime.
Knowing the resiliency of our people and the ability to adapt to the
environment around them,
I think it will be very difficult.
I feel that it will be. Being as resilient
as we are I believe we will be able to survive.