Hamlet in Canada's north slowly erodes

[Newsjock]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3119-2003Sep12.html

By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 13, 2003; Page A14

TUKTOYAKTUK, Northwest Territories -- Gordon Anaviak lives in a house by the deep, black, cold Beaufort Sea, a sea that is eating away at the shoreline and causing the ground to melt.

Anaviak, 72, a fisherman, looks out his window at the waves and is worried. With each wave, he knows the sea is taking away a little more of Tuktoyaktuk, until one day this hamlet may dissolve like salt in water.

Nobody knows for certain why the sea is eroding this spit of land, exposing the permafrost upon which Tuktoyaktuk, a town of just less than 1,000 people, is built. But Anaviak, an elder of the Inuvialuit community, was born on the land and has his own theory. It boils down to global warming.

... "The cause of the permafrost melting," Anaviak said, "is because we don't get that cold anymore. Under the ground, it don't get too hard nowadays. Just like ice cream. Ice cream is cold, but not hard. You can poke it with a spoon. This is like ice cream."

more

[JohnyCanuck]

1. Tuktoyaktuk, I've been there.

About 20 years ago I was working for an oil company in Calgary and got to hitch a ride on the company plane (a Grumman G1 for you aeronautical types) to Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk just to say I really had been to the Great White North (however it was summer time, or what passes for summer up there so it really wasn't truly the Great White North when I visited, no snow and the temperature was about 55 degrees F). I rode in the jump seat just behind the two pilots and I remember how short the gravel strip at Tuktoyaktuk looked as we were coming in on final - deffinitely added a hightened pucker factor to the approach.

Too bad the Tuktoyaktukers are having problems now with the erosion of their land. The ones I met seemed to be really nice, friendly people mostly all native inuit with a few southern types who made tons of money working for the oil company, but I don't think you could ever convince me that it would be a great place to move to.

[Newsjock]

2. I've been as far as Inuvik

... which is why this particularly interested me.

Drove up there last August. Temperatures were near 90F. The arctic truly is the canary in the coal mine on global warming, and many Americans are just too damned ignorant of geography to see this going on in their own back yards.

[JohnyCanuck]

3. Wow 90F seems really high for that far North.

I know I've heard stories about the summertime temperatures in the far north noticeably increasing over the last 15 years or so, but if they are approaching the 90F mark its no wonder the permafrost is starting to soften and melt.

The problem is that when these significant changes in weather patterns have the capability of effecting a noticeable change in the environment, so far it appears to do so mostly in isolated communities like Inuvik, Tuktoyaktuk etc.

If cities like Toronto, or Detroit were built on permafrost and the buildings and city infrastucture designed on the basis that the permafrost would always remain solidly frozen, It's an easy bet there'd be way more notice taken of global warming when the good citizens of these cities noticed the ground was melting away underneath them.

Like you said it really is a canary in the coal mine scenario but unfortunately it's so easy for us in the south to ignore the canaries flopping over when it is not happening right outside our own front door. By the time something does happen to really wake us up, presumably the situation overall will have deteriorated even more significantly. I'm wondering if the record BC forest fires this summer just might be one of the signals that are now coming through to us in the south that things are changing and we better get ready for it.

[treepig]

4. accepted wisdom seems to be high latitude areas

are most susceptible to the effects of global warming. however, a recent paper in Science magazine (or journal if you wish to consider it that) shows that tropical areas have been impacted more than commonly thought:

Ecological Consequences of a Century of Warming in Lake Tanganyika

Piet Verburg,1* Robert E. Hecky,1 Hedy Kling2

Deep tropical lakes are excellent climate monitors because annual mixing is shallow and flushing rates are low, allowing heat to accumulate during climatic warming. We describe effects of warming on Lake Tanganyika: A sharpened density gradient has slowed vertical mixing and reduced primary production. Increased warming rates during the coming century may continue to slow mixing and further reduce productivity in Lake Tanganyika and other deep tropical lakes.

1 Department of Biology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada. 2 Algal Taxonomy and Ecology, c/o Freshwater Institute, Winnipeg, MB R3T 2N6, Canada.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Evidence for global climate warming is accumulating, and most of the data that are relevant to inland waters are coming from long-term monitoring records on temperate lakes and glacial and high-latitude systems (1, 2). Tropical ecosystems, including lakes, are less frequently analyzed quantitatively. Consequently, recorded impacts of climatic change on tropical terrestrial and inland water ecosystems are rare. The stratified water column and the large volume and low flushing rates of deep tropical lakes allows them to store heat and furnish a record of long-term trends. Lake Tanganyika records a century-long warming trend, and the impacts on its pelagic ecosystem are evident.

Science, Vol. 301, Issue 5632, 505-507, July 25, 2003

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/301/5632/505

[david_vincent]

5. Current ish of Smithsonian

has an article on some lakes in Cameroon that produce remarkable, and deadly, phenomena in large part because of a lack of mixing. Wonder if it might start happening in other African lakes now?