Alaska Melts, Fairbanks Buckles & Leans - Guardian

[hatrack]

EDIT

"I arrived in Fairbanks late one evening following a 12-hour train journey north from Anchorage. My companions and I bundled our gear into a taxi and found a cheap backstreet hostel. The proprietor, a young hunting enthusiast called Dale Curtis, watched us unpack. "You guys tourists or something?" He adjusted his baseball cap uneasily. "No, we're journalists. We're investigating climate change." He looked blank. "Global warming," I continued. "Asking people how the weather has changed and that sort of thing." He looked intrigued. "Well, the weather sure has got strange. It don't get cold enough fast like it used to, and then it warms up real quick." I encouraged him to continue. "What really struck me was watching ducks swimming on the river all winter. It was Christmas time, January even, and they were still swimming around. They're not supposed to be here at that time, they're supposed to be south already." He shook his head in amazement. "And the bears come out too early. They don't know whether to go into hibernation or to wake up. Folks round here are real worried about it. A couple of years ago at Christmas it rained and melted all the snow away. That just ain't right, you know?"

EDIT

In Fairbanks, the rising temperatures were having a dramatic impact. Much of the area is underlain by permafrost - permanently frozen ground - that now, for the first time in thousands of years, is beginning to thaw. As a result, houses are sagging, roads are collapsing and entire buildings are being swallowed up by holes in the ground. Weller gave us a lift to one of the worst-affected neighbourhoods, the aptly named Madcap Lane, where most of the wooden one-storey properties were distorted. On the righthand side one house was tilting sideways, the guttering at one end about one foot further from the roof than at the other. The wonky front steps barely fitted into the porch. I climbed them carefully and knocked on the door. "I work nights, and I've just gone to bed," complained the woman who opened it, Vicki Heiker, but she invited us in anyway. Her daughter Jessica smiled at us: "Here, look at this." She placed a pencil at one end of the kitchen table. It quickly rolled off the other end on to the floor. Her mother laughed. "When you spill something, it's like you don't have much of a chance. You've got to clean it up fast otherwise it'll get away from you."

EDIT

Roads all around Fairbanks are affected by thawing permafrost: driving over the gentle undulations is like being at sea in a gentle swell. In some places the damage is more dramatic - crash barriers have bent into weird contortions, and wide cracks fracture the dark Tarmac. Permafrost damage now costs a total of $35m every year, mostly spent on road repairs. Some areas of once-flat land look like bomb sites, pockmarked with craters where permafrost ice underneath them has melted and drained away. These uneven landscapes cause "drunken forests" right across Alaska. In one spot near Fairbanks, a long gash had been torn through the tall spruce trees, leaving them toppling over towards each other. Permafrost degradation is one of the clearest signals that something unprecedented is happening in the far north. In Siberian cities, hundreds of tall buildings have begun to subside and crack. In Alaska, whole sections of coastline are breaking off and falling into the sea, as the ice, which has kept cliffs solid for centuries, begins to melt. More than half a kilometre has eroded from some stretches of coastline over the past few decades. This may not matter too much when nobody lives there - but many of these coastal areas have been inhabited by indigenous peoples for centuries. And in Shishmaref, on the west coast of Alaska, the Native Americans who have made their home there now live in daily terror of the sea.

EDIT

Next day I was riding a snow machine, trying to keep up with Harold "Farmer" Vent, a Huslia old timer and councillor. Abruptly, he drew to a halt. "This is it," he announced. We were in a large bowl-shaped area, a kilometre or so across. Much of the snow had melted, leaving dusty grass and a tangled mat of dried-up pond weed. It was only then that I realised, with a jolt, that this had once been a lake. "The water's just draining out," Farmer said. "I don't know where it's going." The area around Huslia used to be covered with lakes; now they fill up with water in spring and then it all drains away. I asked what difference it made to the animals. He shook his head sadly. "Ducks, beaver, muskrat... We used to shoot muskrat off this hill right here, but everything is drying out, so we can't get nothing. With beaver it's the same thing. They're all moving someplace, I don't know where." We stood in silence as Farmer stared at the ground. "Every year it's getting harder and harder to live up here."

EDIT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1146859,00.html

[qb]

1. I'm afraid we'll have to wait until it affects a major corporation's

bottom line before anyone in the Bush misministration will take it seriously.

[Warpy]

2. The pipeline

That sucker is going to be ruptured at some point by the stress.

Maybe then they'll wake the hell up.

Either that or expect to be Raptured.

[Kool Kitty]

3. Good point about the pipeline.

What a mess. Why is it that the overseas press seem to be the only ones (in the media, that is) taking this seriously? I know-I've seen some talk about it here in the papers and here at DU, but basically nothing. Compared to the European press. Or maybe I'm just over-reacting because this scares me so much.

[Boomer]

4. American media is not a free press

Since the corporations that are exacerbating these environmental problems also happen to own most of our media, it's not surprising they don't get much air time.

Plus, Americans in general are not scientifically literate or curious. Since our media is now largely an entertainment entity, their "news" offerings are driven by ratings rather than an attempt to inform the pubic about important issues. Hard science isn't easily reduced to a sexy soundbyte and requires people to actually pay attention and think. The networks get better ratings by blathering on and on about Janet Jackson's bare breast or Scott Petersen's murder trial.