Editor’s Note: Haley Smith Kingsland is an Earth systems master’s student at Stanford University specializing in science communication. For five weeks she’s in the land of no sunsets participating in ICESCAPE , a NASA-sponsored research cruise to in… [...]
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The year was 1944. World War II was showing signs of winding down, but predictions that the Japanese would fight to the bitter end had the Allies gravely concerned that they would run out of gasoline for the war effort. The 23-million-acre Naval Petroleum Reserve in northern Alaska was a prime location for finding new sources of oil, and the U.S. Navy decided to explore. But the navy had a problem: no maps. So it decided to take an exceptionally detailed set of aerial photographs. Basing out of Ladd Field, near Fairbanks, surveyors mounted a massive K-18 camera in the open door of a twin-engine Beechcraft. Over several years, flying low and slow, they took thousands of photographs of Alaska’s North Slope, extending from the Arctic Ocean south to the Brooks Range, and of the forested valleys on the south side of the range–itself a part of the boreal forest of evergreens and deciduous trees that stretches across a large swath of the Arctic. [More] “From the Arctic sea ice to the Antarctic interior and the mountainous peaks of Peru, Alaska, and Tibet, ice is melting at an alarming rate. The accelerating loss of ice sheets, sea ice, and glaciers is one of the most powerful and striking indicators of a warming climate,” says Alexandra Giese, Staff Researcher of the Earth Policy Institute, in a recent release, “Ice Melting Faster Everywhere” “The most notable ice loss in recent years has been the shrinking of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean.” From the beginning of the satellite record in 1979 through 1996, ice area decreased at a steady rate of 3 percent per decade in response to rising temperature. In the following decade, ice area decreased by 11 percent, reaching a dramatic minimum in 2007. In September of that year, sea ice occupied only 3.6 million square kilometers, an area 27 percent smaller than the previous record low (in 2005) and 38 percent smaller than the 1979—2007 average. Summer sea ice coverage has increased slightly in the last two years, but it is still far below the long-term average. [...] Satellites aren’t built to last forever, so it’s not a big surprise that the third and last laser on NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) quit working on October 11, outlasting its designed mission length by three and a half years. Since its launch in 2003 ICESat has been a critical instrument for continuously monitoring how much ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are contributing to the rise of the world’s oceans and how much the swath of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is thinning–both of which are occurring faster than projected. [More] Rapid ice loss found in survey supports trend to summer ice free Arctic within decade [...] Arctic Ocean may be polluted soup by 2070 [...] |
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