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openspace4lifeThe northern polar ice cap, averaging seven million square kilometers of sea ice, is melting. In about 50 years it will start to vanish completely in midsummer. How could such a massive change happen so quickly? Well, as Al Gore explained in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, as the ice cap melts, reflective ice is replaced by dark, heat-absorbent water. This leads to more rapid warming and a continual acceleration in the melting rate.
But that's not the only vicious cycle the Arctic has to contend with. The region currently covered in floating ice, much of it still year-round, is home to an estimated 25% of the world's remaining oil and gas reserves. So based on widely accepted assumptions, here's another feedback loop: Oil and gas are mined, then burned, releasing carbon dioxide that warms the atmosphere, which leads to some melting of the polar ice cap, which eventually exposes some of the Arctic oil and gas reserves to convenient exploitation. Companies will naturally rush to start exploiting them, not only because other reserves are running out, but because the Arctic will be a welcome respite from the extreme political volatility of the Middle East, Africa, and (to a lesser extent) Latin America. (Still, this "new gold rush" is already bringing a form of political struggle to the region, with the five adjacent nations squabbling over slices of a pie that will also include the fabled Northwest Passage, a convenient sea route between the Atlantic and the Pacific.)
In his movie, Gore also described how different forms of ice meltage can have completely different impacts. Sea ice, because it already displaces its own weight in sea water, does not directly raise the level of the world's oceans when it melts. However, there are two indirect impacts. First, more open and increasingly warm water around Greenland will probably contribute somewhat to the melting of that island's vast ice sheets, which could eventually raise sea levels worldwide by six meters (twenty feet), drowning most coastal cities. Second, as Kim Stanley Robinson describes in his novel Forty Signs of Rain, icebergs and fresh meltwater will ride the currents south to a crucial point just off Greenland's southern tip, where they could disrupt the global ocean-current conveyor. Over a period of as little as a few decades, this would plunge the northern hemisphere into a Day After Tomorrow-style Little Ice Age.
Vicious cycles are very hard to fight. The more the ice melts, the more companies and governments will rush to take advantage of the upsides, incidentally accelerating the melting further through continued exploitation of fossil fuels, and bringing the downsides closer. Clearly, though, we have to do something about all this. As a start, I propose a political campaign whose signature image is Santa's workshop, picked up and crammed into a little corner of a huge oil rig that stands in open water, amid the broken and scattered remnants of the ice sheet that once covered the North Pole.
But that's not the only vicious cycle the Arctic has to contend with. The region currently covered in floating ice, much of it still year-round, is home to an estimated 25% of the world's remaining oil and gas reserves. So based on widely accepted assumptions, here's another feedback loop: Oil and gas are mined, then burned, releasing carbon dioxide that warms the atmosphere, which leads to some melting of the polar ice cap, which eventually exposes some of the Arctic oil and gas reserves to convenient exploitation. Companies will naturally rush to start exploiting them, not only because other reserves are running out, but because the Arctic will be a welcome respite from the extreme political volatility of the Middle East, Africa, and (to a lesser extent) Latin America. (Still, this "new gold rush" is already bringing a form of political struggle to the region, with the five adjacent nations squabbling over slices of a pie that will also include the fabled Northwest Passage, a convenient sea route between the Atlantic and the Pacific.)
In his movie, Gore also described how different forms of ice meltage can have completely different impacts. Sea ice, because it already displaces its own weight in sea water, does not directly raise the level of the world's oceans when it melts. However, there are two indirect impacts. First, more open and increasingly warm water around Greenland will probably contribute somewhat to the melting of that island's vast ice sheets, which could eventually raise sea levels worldwide by six meters (twenty feet), drowning most coastal cities. Second, as Kim Stanley Robinson describes in his novel Forty Signs of Rain, icebergs and fresh meltwater will ride the currents south to a crucial point just off Greenland's southern tip, where they could disrupt the global ocean-current conveyor. Over a period of as little as a few decades, this would plunge the northern hemisphere into a Day After Tomorrow-style Little Ice Age.
Vicious cycles are very hard to fight. The more the ice melts, the more companies and governments will rush to take advantage of the upsides, incidentally accelerating the melting further through continued exploitation of fossil fuels, and bringing the downsides closer. Clearly, though, we have to do something about all this. As a start, I propose a political campaign whose signature image is Santa's workshop, picked up and crammed into a little corner of a huge oil rig that stands in open water, amid the broken and scattered remnants of the ice sheet that once covered the North Pole.
