From San Francisco, the latest news of the world
SAN FRANCISCO—Thanks to my employers at UAF’s Geophysical Institute, I’ve spent the last week at the annual American Geophysical Union conference, where more than 11,000 scientists gathered on the San Andreas Fault. Those people—which would turn Shaktoolik into Alaska’s fourth largest city if they met there—had much to say about Alaska and our warming planet. Here’s some details from the notebook:
• Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland, the fastest-moving glacier in the world, recently doubled the speed at which it’s flowing into the sea, reported Waleed Abdalati of NASA. Using satellites, Abdalati and other scientists determined that the west Greenland glacier sped up from about four miles per year during the first half of the 20th century to 10 miles per year during the last four years. “It’s a phenomenal event,” Abdalati said.
• Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Patagonia, and other areas with melting glaciers are putting three times the fresh water into Earth’s oceans than the .2-.4 millimeters per year that scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently estimated, according to Abdalati and other panelists during a press conference on disappearing ice.
• Ice cores from Eclipse Icefield about 30 miles east of Mt. Logan in the Yukon Territory showed trapped ammonium from forest fires from the Yukon and Alaska back to the 1750s. According to Kaplan Yalcin of the Climate Change Research Center in Durham, New Hampshire, the highest level recorded in the last 250 years was in the 1890s through early 1900s, coinciding with the arrival of thousands of goldseekers heading to the Klondike.
• World oil production will peak on Thanksgiving Day, 2005, according to Kenneth Deffeyes of Princeton University. “After the peak, the world’s production of crude oil will fall, never to rise again,” Deffeyes wrote in an abstract. “If the predictions are correct, there will be enormous effects on the world economy. Even the poorest nations need fuel to run irrigation pumps. The industrialized nations will be bidding against one another for the dwindling oil supply. The good news isthat we will put less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The bad news is that my pickup truck has a 25-gallon tank.”
• People feel Alaska earthquakes the most in May, June and July, according to a study by Linda Hafner of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. Hafner studied the times that people called, emailed, or otherwise alerted the Alaska Earthquake Information Center or the National Earthquake Information Center that they had felt Alaska earthquakes. Hafner and her advisor, Steve McNutt of the Geophysical Institute, surmised that people reported more earthquakes in summer because Alaska’s tourists roughly double the population in summer and more remote lodges and other businesses are open, spreading people across the state. “It’s basically more seismometers, but not all in one spot,” McNutt said.
• Okmok Volcano in the western Aleutians inflated at a velocity equal to 31 centimeters per year from March to August 2004. The volcano was already rising at a fast rate, due to large pulses of magma coming into the system, said Tom Fournier and Jeff Freymueller of the Geophysical Institute, who track the bulging of the volcano with precise GPS receivers.
• Using the Terrestrial Ecosystem Model, Qianlai Zhuang of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and colleagues including the University of Alaska’s Dave McGuire projected that emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas released as permafrost thaws, will almost double by the end of the century in response to high-latitude warming, and that Alaska will be a net emitter, rather than an absorber, of greenhouse gases by the end of the 21st century.
