Located at

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/articles/0,3266,53418,00.html

Time/International. SEPTEMBER 4, 2000 VOL. 156 NO. 10

The Big Meltdown

As the temperature rises in the Arctic, it sends a chill around the planet
BY EUGENE LINDEN/CHURCHILL

Here's a tip for anyone trying to figure out when and whether global warming
might arrive and what changes it will bring: hop a plane to the Arctic and
look down. You'll see that climatic changes are already reworking the
far-north landscape. In the past two decades, average annual temperatures
have climbed as much as 7[degrees]F in Alaska, Siberia and parts of Canada.
Sea ice is 40% thinner and covers 6% less area than in 1980.
Permafrost--permanently frozen subsoil--is proving less permanent. And even
polar tourists are returning with less than chilling tales, one of which was
heard around the world last week.

Back from a cruise to the North Pole aboard the Russian icebreaker Yamal,
tourists told the New York Times that a mile-wide lake had opened up at
90[degrees] north, with gulls fluttering overhead, and they had the pictures
to prove it. The newspaper declared that such an opening in polar ice was
possibly a first in 50 million years, though that claim was dismissed by
scientists who nonetheless see other serious signs of Arctic warming (see
box, page 56).

On a less cosmic level, Mike Macri, who runs nature tours in Churchill, on
the western shores of Hudson Bay in Canada's Manitoba province, has had to
rewrite his brochures. The old ones encouraged tourists to arrive at
Churchill in mid-June to see beluga whales, which migrate up the mouth of
the Churchill River following the spring ice breakup. The new brochure
encourages visitors to arrive as early as May.

The ice also forms as much as two weeks later in the autumn than it used to
in Hudson Bay, creating a bewildering situation for some of the local
wildlife. Polar bears that ordinarily emerge from their summer dens and walk
north up Cape Churchill before proceeding directly onto the ice now arrive
at their customary departure point and find open water. Unable to move
forward, the bears turn left and continue walking right into town, arriving
emaciated and hungry. To reduce unscheduled encounters between townspeople
and the carnivores, natural-resource officer Wade Roberts and his deputies
tranquilize the bears with a dart gun, temporarily house them in a
concrete-and-steel bear "jail" and move them 10 miles north. In years with a
late freeze--most years since the late 1970s--the number of bears captured
in or near town sometimes doubles, to more than 100.

Humans are feeling the heat too. In Alaska, melting permafrost (occasionally
hastened by construction) has produced "roller coaster" roads, power lines
tilted at crazy angles and houses sinking up to their window sashes as the
ground liquefies. In parts of the wilderness, the signal is more clear:
wetlands, ponds and grasslands have replaced forests, and moose have moved
in as caribou have moved out. On the Mackenzie River delta in Canada's
Northwest Territories, Arctic-savvy Inuit inhabitants have watched with
dismay as warming ground melted the traditional freezers they cut into the
permafrost for food storage. Permafrost provides stiffening for the
coastline in much of the north; where thawing has occurred, wave action has
caused severe erosion. Some coastal Inuit villages are virtually marooned as
the ground crumbles all around them. And as the ice retreats farther from
the coast, Inuit hunters are finding that prey like walrus has moved out of
reach of their boats.

These isolated dramas play out far from the mid-latitudes of the planet,
where the vast majority of people live, but they could soon have serious
implications for all of us. What is really at risk in the Arctic is part of
the thermostat of the earth itself. The difference in temperatures between
the tropics and the poles drives the global climate system. The excess heat
that collects in the tropics is dissipated at the poles, about half of it
through what has been nicknamed the ocean conveyor, a vast deepwater current
equivalent to 100 Amazon Rivers. Much of the rest of the heat is conveyed as
energy in the storms that move north from the tropics. If the poles continue
to warm faster than the tropics, the vigor of this planetary circulatory
system may diminish, radically altering prevailing winds, ocean currents and
rainfall patterns. One consequence: grain production in the breadbaskets of
the U.S. and Canada could be in jeopardy if rainfall becomes less steady and
predictable. Already, severe and unpredictable storms across the northern
hemisphere may be a sign that the global system is changing.