A Journey in the Arctic

The Arctic has lost more than a third of its ice during the past 30 years. A record meltdown in summer 2007 shrank its sea ice down to 4.2 million square kilometers, from 7.8 million in 1980. If melting continues at this rate, some scientists predict that the Arctic summer could be ice-free by 2013.

Raghida Haddad, Executive Editor of Al-Bia Wal-Tanmia magazine, was among 14 journalists invited by the World Federation of Science Journalists to join an international scientific expedition onboard the Canadian research icebreaker Amundsen. In July-August 2008, she took a two week voyage in the Arctic Ocean to get first hand experience of global warming where it is unfolding the fastest, and relay this experience to readers throughout the Arab region. She was the first Arab journalist to go this far north and field-report about meltdown and global warming. These are some of her sightings and reflections.

Raghida Haddad aboard the Amundsen
Credit: Luc Michaud/CFL

The Arctic, 24 July 2008

Last night I slept in a swing. That was how it felt on the Canadian research icebreaker Amundsen, floating in the rough Arctic Ocean. But there is no ice to break, just open blue water. The ship trotted on submerged ice blocks, but there were barely traces of ice floating in the Beaufort Sea were we navigated. Most sea ice has melted in the Arctic, save the "permanent" polar icecap and ice masses adherent to Greenland, Alaska and the Northern territories, shrinking at an unprecedented rate.

I arrived yesterday by helicopter from Banks Island, off Canada's Northwestern coast, after a long 8-flight journey from Lebanon. On that barren freezing island, I could imagine how life on the moon would be. Surprisingly, 120 natives still live there in the coastal community of Sachs Harbor.

A young Inuit (commonly known as Eskimo) came to the air strip where we were waiting for the helicopter to fly us to the icebreaker. I asked him how living on the island was.

"My people live on fishing and hunting caribou, musk ox and snow geese that land in hundreds of thousands," he said. Summer is very short on this 250-mile island, just two months. So the Inuit cannot grow vegetables and fruits. The villagers also have an annual quota to hunt 28 polar bears which they sell for their hides, "but we have not filled our quota in the past years. Fewer bears are showing up."

"There is so much open space and outdoor living," he added. "I will not trade my life in the village for anything in the world. This is where I grew up, hunting and fishing. This is home."

Home, sweet home, even on a remote moonlike island in the Arctic!

Life has changed, however, for the Inuit who have lived here for thousands of years. They rely on freezing seawater in the straits to move about and cross to other islands for hunting. With an unprecedented temperature rise in the Arctic, sea ice starts to melt sooner in spring and surface water starts to freeze later in autumn. Thinning ice is not favourable for the Inuit way of life.

This is also the main concern of some fifty international scientists on board the research icebreaker, who are studying climate change where it is claiming its heaviest toll: in the Arctic.

Voices of the deep

"Ms. Haddad, there are whales out there. Come up to the bridge."

I jumped out of my bed at the Captain's call, put on my thermal pants and jacket and hit the bridge. A family of three whales was diving about one kilometre away. The blowing out of air and water after each dive was spectacular. Several species of whales navigate these Arctic waters, though the populations of some are much reduced.

Walking round the Amundsen one is constantly amazed. On my way back, I saw two technicians working with a cylindrical tool: a hydrophone. What's that? "Well," one explained, "it's an instrument to detect and hear the songs of whales." Flocks of whales dwell in the Arctic Ocean at this time of the year.

Detection and sampling instruments are lowered into the water almost every day. Two specialists on a motor boat dragged them away from the ship. They will come back next year to search for the instruments and data.

24 hours of daylight

Lowering two giant nets to bring up sea organisms
Credit: Samuel Lauzon/CFL

Spider from the deep
Credit: CFL

We are cruising through the Beaufort Sea. Looking from the upper deck, I found myself at the center of a blue circle. I finally saw how the earth is round.

It is never too late to do anything in the Arctic summer, with 24 hours of daylight. One "night" I went out to watch the midnight sun, hovering above the horizon. Four researchers on a motorboat were inspecting buoys that define the location of immersed equipment in the ocean. Three others were on deck, carrying water samples from the Rosette, a huge apparatus with 24 computer-controlled cylinders that collect water at different depths, reaching down to some 900 meters.

Cristina Romera, from Spain, guided me to some of the 12 labs on the Amundsen. She is collecting water samples for the Instituto de Ciencias del Mar in Barcelona, to study their contents of chlorophyll, bacteria, viruses and other Arctic micro-organisms. Some of these samples will be stored in freezers under temperatures as low as -80˚C using liquid nitrogen.

Heike Link, a German researcher, was inside a lab with trays of starfish, clams, worms and other creatures from the Arctic seafloor. She documents their diversity and abundance and the role they play in the ecosystem. I left her inspecting a dragon fish and spectacular worms dwelling inside tubes that they build with slime and mud.

We also met Dr. Hayley Hung, a chemical engineer from Environment Canada. She is the lead researcher of an international study to measure persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and mercury in air around the pan-Pacific area, using computer models to describe their movement and assess the impact of climate change on their deposition in the Arctic. These contaminants have been found at high levels in some Arctic marine mammals, consumed by Northern people, where they accumulate and stay in the body for a long time.

An acidic ocean

Scientists testing ice and water
Credit: Haakon Hop/CFL

We are navigating in Beaufort Sea. Looking from the upper deck, I found myself at the centre of a blue circle. I finally believed the Earth is round.

It is never too late to do anything in the Arctic summer, with 24 hours of daylight. One "night" I went out to watch the midnight sun, hovering above the horizon. Four researchers on a motorboat were inspecting buoys that define the location of immersed equipment in the ocean. Three others were on deck, carrying water samples from the Rosette, a huge apparatus with 24 computer-controlled cylinders that collect water at different depths, reaching down to some 900 meters.

Cristina Romera, from Spain, guides me to some of the 12 labs on the Amundsen. She is collecting water samples for the Instituto de Ciencias del Mar in Barcelona, to study their contents of chlorophyll, bacteria, viruses and other Arctic micro-organisms. Some of these samples will be stored in freezers under temperatures as low as -80˚C using liquid nitrogen.

Heike Link, a German researcher, was inside a lab with trays of starfish, clams, worms and other creatures from the Arctic seafloor. She documents their diversity and abundance and the role they play in the ecosystem. I left her inspecting a dragon fish and spectacular worms dwelling inside the tubes they build with slime and mud.

We also met Dr. Hayley Hung, a chemical engineer from Environment Canada. She is the lead researcher of an international study to measure persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and mercury in air around the pan-Pacific area, using computer models to describe their movement and assess the impact of climate change on their deposition in the Arctic. These contaminants have been found at high levels in some Arctic marine mammals, consumed by Northern people, where they accumulate and stay in the body for a long time.

The shrinking of Earth's air conditioner

Polar bear swimming in the open ocean
Credit: Nancy/CFL

The Arctic has lost more than a third of its ice since satellite measurements started 30 years ago. This amounts to some 3.8 million square kilometres, with a present rate of about 70,000 square kilometres annually. A record meltdown in summer 2007 fully opened the Northwest Passage to navigation. If melting continues at this increasing rate, scientists project that the Arctic summer could be ice-free as soon as 2013.

"Over two million square kilometres of polar ice pack has disappeared over the 5-year period 2003-2007," said Gary Stern, chief scientist on the Amundsen. The minimum sea ice extent is seen in September.

Described as Earth's air conditioner, the Arctic helps cool the planet with its white sun-reflecting sea ice. This ice melts in spring and summer and the surface water refreezes in fall and winter. With the Arctic warming about twice as fast as the rest of the globe in the last decades, the overwhelming melting will reduce this cooling process. It will also disrupt marine ecosystems and devastate wildlife, including polar bears and seals.

Here's a sad story about polar bears. They use ice floes as a means of transportation to hunt seals. With ice increasingly melting, they sometimes get stuck on an ice floe in the middle of the water with no others to jump to. So they dive to hunt, sometimes so far away that they get too tired trying to return to land more than two hundred kilometres away. Finally, they drown.

The second cold war

"Yes, the Arctic is warming now, but it will be cooling again within three years," said my friend Andrej Rubchenya, a Russian oceanographer and assistant professor at St. Petersburg State University. "There are eras of warming and eras of cooling. Natural forces are too strong to respond to the human factor. Carbon emissions could be a slight factor in the process of global warming, but unless a thousand nuclear bombs are detonated, I can't imagine any human force able to encounter the mighty powers of nature."

"Climate change is a political issue," he concluded.

In August 2007, two Russian legislators in a small submarine planted a Russian flag on the seabed of the North Pole. This was another act in Russia's claim to 1.2 million square kilometres, about half the floor of the Arctic Ocean.

In response, Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced plans to build two new military bases in the Canadian Arctic. With ice melting faster than ever, the issue now is who will own the possible huge mineral deposits buried under the Arctic floor. According to some geologists, the Arctic could hold about 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and natural gas. Arctic countries that would claim rights include Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark and Norway. This might pave the way to a new kind of cold war.

According to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, coastal nations can have economic sovereignty over up to 200 nautical miles off their shores. The rest is considered international waters. However, a nation can claim territory beyond this limit if the edge of its continental shelf extends further.

The Convention also governs navigation rights, especially after the first recorded complete opening of the ice-blocked Northwest Passage in the summer of 2007. With global warming and ice thawing, it could become a commercial navigation channel. Canada claims rights over this passage. In May 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised to empower Canadian Forces to "protect Arctic sovereignty and security."

However, other maritime countries insist that the Northwest Passage should be open to international traffic, just like other strategic waterways.

Former US Coast Guard Lt. Commander Scott Borgerson warned that "unless Washington leads the way toward a multilateral diplomatic solution, the Arctic could descend into armed conflict."

Where has the ice gone?

Thinning ice
Credit: CFL

Summer 2007 set a meltdown record of one million square kilometres, shrinking the Arctic sea ice down to 4.2 million square kilometres, from 7.8 million in 1980.

Many scientists believe that global warming is caused by human actions, mainly burning fuels for industry, transportation, electricity and other purposes. Others insist that this is a stage in a natural cycle, when the Earth's atmosphere warms up, but will cool again in years to come. Numerous people even believe this is God's wrath, punishing humanity for its disobedience and abuse of nature.

Could expectations of an iceless Arctic summer turn out to be right? Voyaging in the Arctic for two weeks without seeing floating ice was unbelievable. Whatever the cause might be, global warming is a fact and the meltdown is an ongoing process. We all ought to do something about it, as individuals, institutions, governments and global community. However small or big the human factor is, kicking the carbon habit by reducing burning fuel and energy consumption will help any way. If it does not reduce global warming, it will surely reduce pollution and depletion of natural resources.

When my 6-year old niece heard I was going to the North Pole region, she asked: "Will you see Santa?" Well, I don't believe in Santa anymore. But if he really lives there, I hope that in a few years he will not be rowing a boat instead of riding a reindeer-pulled sleigh.