The Arctic is a barometer of the health of the planet. Its indigenous peoples, animals and plants are marvelously adapted to the harsh environment. Airborne toxins and global warming are rapidly altering life in the far North.
The area north of the 66th parallel is called the Arctic Circle. Eight countries -- Canada, Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Russia and the United States -- surround the Arctic. The Inuit, Denes, Metis, Inupiat (some still called Eskimos), Aleuts, Yup'ik, Chuckchi, Nenets, Saami and the Faroese -- all Arctic Peoples eat 194 different species of wild animals, most of them come from the sea.
Marine blubber is low in saturated fats and high in the Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids which significantly lower heart disease. Those fatty acids also reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease and perhaps more importantly Omega-3's nourish and stimulate brain development especially in the womb. In addition, meat from marine mammals is high in antioxidants which prevent cancers.
Beluga meat contains ten times the amount of iron compared to beef, five times more vitamins and 50 percent more protein. Six ounces of narwhal (whale) contains the same amount of vitamin C as a glass of orange juice or a cup of strawberries. The indigenous Peoples of the Arctic are able to nourish themselves despite the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables -- truly a remarkable feat.
Today, over 200 toxic pesticides and potent industrial compounds are found in very high concentrations in animals and the peoples of the far North.
Polychlorinated biphenyl compounds known as PCBs have leaked from electrical transformers into the environment. Although banned in the 1970s by most countries at least 21,000 old transformers exist in the U.S. alone, and they contain at least 99 million pounds of PCBs.
When PCBs enter the environment they circulate in the air, land on the ground, re-enter the air and eventually deposit on the snow and the ocean in the Arctic. Essentially, PCBs hop around the planet like the movement of grasshoppers.
About 62 tons of PCB gases arrive each year into the Arctic. Two thirds of them stay put, the rest continue to move.
PCBs are endocrine disruptors. They alter sex hormones, significantly impairing fetuses by damaging the development of the brain in addition to disrupting all vital organs.
In the Arctic they accumulate on the ocean sediments. They infiltrate the single celled plants which are eaten by copepods. Copepods are eaten by cod, cod are consumed by narwhals and in turn narwhals are eaten by Inuits. Moreover, ringed seals eat cod, and polar bears and humans eat seals.
As the PCBs pass each level on the rung of the food chain, their concentration becomes magnified -- a process called bio-magnification. Polar bears and people of the far North are carrying at least millions of times more PCBs than the waters where their food originates.
PCBs are stored in fat cells, clinging to the body rather than flushing through it. Female mammals pass doses of PCBs to their offspring through their milk. Milk of Arctic women has ten times more PCBs and pesticides than mothers from any of the major cities in Canada. Woman from Nunavik have 22 chemicals, 10 insecticides and 12 PCB compounds in their bodies at extraordinary high levels.
Two thousand polar bears near the Kara Sea contain the highest recorded levels of PCBs, twelve times more than Alaskan bears.
Each year between five and 10 tons of mercury are entering Earth's atmosphere. Between 50 and 75 percent of the mercury in the environment is human-induced. Coal fired power plant, currently the main energy source on the planet, and chemical factories are emitting mercury.
Mercury is a powerful neurotoxin. 93 percent of the woman tested from east Greenland and 68 percent of Nunavut's region exceeded the guidelines designated to protect the fetuses from neurological damages from mercury poisoning.
Each year 50 to 300 tons of mercury gas flow up into the Arctic. It's transported from thousands of miles away. In the spring when the first rays of light interact with the salt in the air and the mercury gas a photochemical reaction occurs -- mercury sunrise -- forcing mercury into the snow and ultimately into the ocean.
Global warming is occurring at least three but perhaps as fast at five times faster in the Arctic than anywhere else on the planet. Sea ice is disappearing at a record rate. A couple years ago the Arctic was forecasted to be ice-free in 2060. Today, it is predicted to be ice-free by 2020. Less ice translates into more toxins in the Arctic Ocean.
The sea surrounding Alaska's Aleutian Island's have been laid to waste by global warming.
One hundred and fifteen thousand sea otters are missing. And it only took four orcas or killer whales less than a decade to finish them off.
Orcas living near the Aleutian's traditionally ate Stellar sea lions and seals, both rich in blubber and loaded with calories.
In the early 1980s the Gulf of Alaska rose by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The sea lions and seals soon disappeared leaving just the sea otters. The orcas changed their diet and began to eat the otters. Once the otters vanished the number of sea urchins skyrocketed. The sea urchins have eaten most of the massive six metre tall kelp forests, formerly the otter's habitat.
Also, rising ocean temperatures killed off the plankton, which fed the copepods and krill, which in turn fed the shrimps and Alaska king crabs. Shrimps, crabs, capelin and herring are gone. A once brimming diversified ecosystem has today been reduced to just sea urchins, cod, Pollack and sharks.
The lightning speed in which all these species have been lost has been likened to that of the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Dr. Reese Halter is a Science Communicator: Voice for Ecology, conservation biologist at California Lutheran University and public speaker. Reach him through http://DrReese.com
Follow Dr. Reese Halter on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DrReeseHalter
Those of you misguided individuals who want to talk about "increasing Antarctic ice extent" or that "the Antarctic ice sheet is growing" please note that you are being put on notice for spreading misinformation and distortion. The Grace satellite measures mass, eliminating the need to guess about ice thickness.
If there is more ice area, but it is thinner, is the ice sheet actually growing?
If there is more ice area, but it is because more ice is flowing from the land into the ocean, what does that prove?
Nice try from the Koch pom pom wavers, but I am not buying your nonsense.
No, Reese. It's 'islands'. That you don't know the difference, and that I left this for two days and no one else mentioned it in the interim gives me pause.
you can't be an expert on ANYTHING????
who knew.
I guess the author missed the story that the ice is melting half as slow as originally thought and there is difficulty in measuring the depth of the ice. In addition, the Antarctic ice sheet is GROWING. This is incosistent with the statement above.
The author probably missed the story about the moon being made of green cheese, too. It's always nice to link your stories so we can dispute them intellectually. I'll start.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
Quite frankly, one has to wonder how there is ANY life on this planet. The earth has been through many warming and cooling periods.
Creationists don't worry about any of this, they are what God intends them to be. Polar bears, obviously incapable of surviving warming or cooling, are proof that they are a recent creation and did not evolve in times of global warming or cooling.
Evolutionists also don't worry -- the existence of polar bears is proof they adapt to warmer (and cooler) climates and might even have required such changes to become what they are now.
What disturbs me is that good, sensible environmental concerns have been poisoned by hysteria and wealth redistribution schemes. At this moment in time it may be very difficult to persuade this nation to build massive solar power generating and distribution systems, necessary precursors to using electric vehicles everywhere.
Never mind climate change; the oil *will* run out sooner or later.
I do seem to recall a whole lot of bankers who got free tax payer money recently, to band aid up their own wrong choices.
Other than that, I see your point.
If that were true it would be called the Arctic disk, not the Arctic Circle. The circle is exactly and only that latitude north of which can see the sun for 24 hours at the summer solstice, and which never sees the sun for 24 hours at the winter solstice.
This is a "nit" somewhat irrelevant to your point, but when you label yourself as a doctor, these kinds of nits ought not to exist, the kind of nit that the IPCC is having to retract from its reports.
We see hysteria all the time -- "These scientists and their many accomplices in the media claimed that the Earth’s temperature is rising more than expected, sea level is rising ominously and the Arctic is dangerously close to melting."
Really? It's cooler than usual where I live, the sea level looks pretty much the same to me as it did forty years ago -- Colman Dock in Seattle is still there and works just fine.
For several hundred years shippers have been *waiting* for arctic ice to melt, hoping and praying for it. What about it makes it "dangerous"?
Rapid ecological change results in extinction rather than adaptation by all but those species that can thrive on decline. That affects ecological productivity and the corresponding carrying capacity for all species, including humans.
I know, but I can't tell you...at least not in 250 words. I believe I have explained it at my blog if you have ten minutes to spare. This is a contribution to my post-doc group which I decided to post among my daily rants:
http://drtom.posterous.com/is-there-anything-we-can-do-about-peak-oil-an
Another solution might be to vote for Ron Paul
as 3rd party Libertarian or vote Sarah Palin
b/c she's a mommy on the Tea Party slate.
The only purpose they will have in 2012 is to draw votes
from mocrats so the RNC can sneak in the back way.
I'm sitting opposite a Lincoln Center building
named after David H Koch of Big Oil, Coal,
& the Tea Parties. He tries to compensate for
& destroying the country and the planet by donating
$100 million to LC which means he also has a big
influence over PBS.
His father Fred Koch built 15 oil plants in Russia
just in time for Stalin. To overcome the guilt and bad
PR he helped form The John Birch Society.
That's progress?
Finally some good news. Right?
I happen to like this dream where we all sit at computers reading the Huffington Post. I cannot imaging what awaits awakening from this dream. Perhaps we really are just human batteries hooked up in a giant "matrix". (reference to the movie "The Matrix").
on HuffPo and YT that oppose climate change
and it's implications could care less about any of
this stuff. They and their families work for the BP's,
Big Oil, Big Chemica, coal. They know that if society
breaks down the military, the cops and the corporations
will be running things just like they ran the BP disaster.
They want to see their congressmen like Bob Barton
(who worked for a subsidiary of BP back in the day)
down on his knees apologizing to BP.
This means he's their man.
They cut and paste all their anti-climate change
propaganda from the Inhoffe, Exxon, Koch, Philip
Morris web sites and they use the same subprime
"scientists" as Big Tobacco used to use and weathermen with
degrees in *Broadcast Meteorology*. They use the
same PR ppl as the RNC, the anti-evolution fundamentalists,
anti-carbon dating, anti-stem cell research, pro-PCP,
pro-DDT, Pro-coal. We are up against all these
conservative backward elements not to mention
the PR departments in all these corporations.
Not to mention that these areas depend big time on
Big Government handouts in the form of military contacts
which leads them to feel entitled to hold office and
hide MASSIVE wasteful behind the fog
of perpetual war and at the same time
be anti-government. HA!
These are the ppl who will take over in Nov?
These are the "winners" Jeb Bush talks about?
Winners my ass.
The thought occurs that it is the LEFT that is opposed to climate change and believes it is possible to stop climate change.
Employees of BP probably could *not* care less (signifying a care level of zero, thus making it impossible to care less) about climate apart from the risk of hurricanes on drilling rigs.
The correct phrase is "could NOT care less" to signify a lack of care. If a person "could care less" that signifies care, making it possible to care *less*.
On the other hand, someone who has ignored climate change but is standing at attention, or perhaps doing hand-stands or some other thing, do not earn your displeasure? What is it about standing with arms crossed that you find interesting?
False. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1309490/Ice-caps-melting-half-speed-predicted.html?ITO=1490
A DIFFERENT LOCATION.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.arctic.png
What's really startling is that this year, both the NE and the NW passages are completely open. This animation tells the story
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/CT/animate.arctic.color.0.html
Typically, shipping through the NE passage relies on Russian icebreakers. Not this year.
Source: cryosphere today
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
Maybe "dramatic" means different things to different people. Would I actually notice if ALL the arctic sea ice was gone? I have no way of knowing but I suppose we'll find out soon enough.
She must invoke global warming, or she receives no funding for her research on real pollutants. It was likely a requirement on the grant application.
Some people don't care and maybe you are 'one of those', but personally I would not need to know what the differnce in risk is to make my decision. I would be perfectly comfortable assuming that my chances were 10 times more likely to get lung cancer in one of the offices.
The irony is that one of these smokers made a comment about Alaska's fresh air and how wonderful it is, and I replied he had no idea what was fresh air since by the time it reached his lungs, it was no longer fresh.