Hot Times in Alaska the latest episode of Scientific American Frontiers

Submitted by Ann Dowdy
Phone: (907} 474-1890
06/07/04

"Alaska has warmed up about four degrees Fahrenheit on average over the last 150 years--glaciers really are melting," says Alan Alda in Hot Times in Alaska, the latest episode of Alan Alda in Scientific American Frontiers on KUAC TV.

Scientists tell Alda that what’s happening in Alaska is the canary in the coal mine--a harbinger of things to come for the rest of the world. The program, airing Tuesday, June 15, 8-9 p.m. on KUAC TV 9 Alaska One, examines what happens when the climate heats up and why rising temperatures are cause for alarm.

Alaska’s own canaries may be the seabirds on Cooper Island, a few miles from Barrow, the northernmost town in the United States. George Divoky, an Institute of Arctic Biology research associate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, has spent the last 28 summers studying guillemots on the island. Since the 1990s, the colony has been in steep decline--down more than a third from its peak. Divoky says a warming climate is to blame.

The guillemots depend on small, oily fish called Arctic cod, which live near the sea ice of the Arctic Ocean. But in recent decades the sea ice has been receding farther offshore every summer, making it harder for the guillemots to find food.

Native hunters and many animals from whales to polar bears, depend on arctic sea ice; climate change threatens their future. Meteorologist John Walsh of UAF shows Alda computer climate models that predict an Arctic Ocean completely ice-free in summer by century’s end.

Disappearing sea ice is one reason the Arctic is warming more than lower latitudes; white Arctic ice normally reflects the sun’s heat into space, whereas dark, open water absorbs heat. This change has more than local significance, however, because the cooling provided by the earth’s polar regions is now being reduced, adding to the global warming.

Alaska’s glaciers are also melting. A University of Alaska group has been keeping track of 100 glaciers by taking precise height measurements from a specially equipped light plane. The glaciers have been thinning for 50 years, and at an increasing rate. Their surfaces are now dropping an average of six feet a year. The result is a staggering volume of water added to the oceans--900 trillion gallons in the last 50 years from Alaska and western Canada alone, raising sea levels by about a quarter of an inch worldwide.

Taken together, the changes now apparent in Alaska have profound implications not just for the north, but for the climate of the globe. Right now scientists can’t say exactly where things are headed, but it’s clearly to somewhere new in human experience.

Serving Interior Alaska, KUAC 89.9 FM Alaska One TV 9/KUAC-DT 24, public radio and public television, is a multiple-media organization with a mission to provide quality noncommercial programming and services that enlighten, inspire, educate and entertain. KUAC is licensed to the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Contact: Ann Dowdy at (907} 474-1890 or fnajd@uaf.edu.