EDITORIAL: Around the Arctic February 28, 2011 – 3:04 pm

Divided they stand

NUNATSIAQ NEWS

Though the Inuit Circumpolar Council billed the event as an exercise in collective unity, the circumpolar Inuit summit held in Ottawa this past week isn’t likely to fool anyone.

On the big question, offshore drilling for oil and gas, individual Inuit within each national region hold a variety of opinions and prejudices, just like citizens of all other advanced industrial societies. So do their elected officials.

This is as it should be, because honest disagreement is a sign of vigour, not weakness. So members of the ICC need not be disappointed that last week’s gathering produced no coherent consensus.

“Right After Sunset, 2009, coloured pencil on paper, by Itee Pootoogook.

In mature societies, the manufactured expression of “unity” and “collective vision” are exercises in futility that ought to be regarded with deep suspicion. The notion that any single organization can speak as a single voice for all members of any given group is absurd on its face. Human beings form opinions as individuals, not as members of a collective hive-mind.

Besides, oil and gas drilling in the waters of Baffin Bay off Greenland raises legitimate transboundary issues for Nunavut. In that regard, last week’s summit was a useful exercise.

The ICC fought for years to gain a voice at the Arctic Council and other international forums. Now that they’ve accomplished this, the organization’s members have a legitimate need to air out their conflicting positions to best make use of that hard-won status.

But make no mistake. Greenland, a young, optimistic country now ready to embrace modernity and independence, will drill for crude oil. When they find it, they will produce and sell as much of it as they can, as rapidly as they can.

Kuupik Kleist, the premier of Greenland and the leader of a political party that enjoys strong support among young people, made this clear in a forthright set of statements made to reporters near the start of the summit.

“We are now a full part of the global economy. We cannot hide away or shy away from looking at what’s happening on the rest of the globe,” Kleist said Feb. 23.

That is the voice of confidence, the voice of a country prepared for an independent future built on the extraction of oil and gas. Kleist’s message is that Greenland will do what Greenland must do to achieve this. Though they understand the environmental risks, Greenlanders, he said, are willing to accept those risks in exchange for political independence and economic self-sufficiency.

On the other hand, there are the voices of fear.

Within the three largest entities that comprise the ICC — Canada, Greenland and Alaska — the Nunavut territory likely suffers the most from poverty and underdevelopment.

So it’s ironic that the strongest anti-development voices should emerge from Nunavut, especially in Qikiqtani, perhaps the territory’s poorest region, where at least eight of 13 communities fall into the “have-not” category.

“In Canada, we should not have the position that our social and living [conditions] will change because of oil and gas. It should be in spite of it,” Okalik Eegeesiak, the president of the Qikiqtani Inuit Association, said Feb. 23.

In saying this, Eegeesiak expresses the honestly-held fears of those who elected her: the fear of those who have been sorely wounded by rapid change, the fear of those who long for an Eden that will never return, and the fear of those for whom land, sea and wildlife are to be protected at all cost.

“Carving With an Axe,” 2006, coloured pencil & graphite on paper, by Itee Pootoogook. The inscription reads: “Carving with an axe. Those are the soapstones on the left hand side. Cloudy day.”

But Inuit residents of Nunavut and other regions of the Canadian Arctic do not think with one mind on the question of oil and gas extraction and other resource development issues.

The Government of Nunavut, for example, believes the absence of oil and gas exploration in Nunavut waters is rather a big problem. To that end, they sponsored a workshop in Iqaluit this past November to drum up interest in the territory’s undersea oil and gas reserves.

There are many Inuit in the Kivalliq, Kitikmeot and Western Arctic regions who do not fear resource extraction. When he ran for cabinet in 2008, Nunavut’s economic development minister, Peter Taptuna, spoke fondly of the days when he worked with an all-Inuit crew on a Beaufort Sea drilling project in the early 1980s.

Seismic testing? In 2010, a two-day seismic project sent the people of North Baffin into unreasoning fits of rage.

But in and around the Inuvialuit region, eight companies conducted 11,000 kilometres worth of seismic tests using dynamite and airguns, for months on end, in the Beaufort Sea and Mackenzie Delta regions between 2000 and 2003. No one went to court to stop it.

As for mining, most Nunavut Inuit groups have spent most of the past 20 years declaring the territory open for business. Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. even bought into a uranium exploration firm, a move they may one day come to regret. By calling for a review of NTI’s four-year-old support for uranium, Cathy Towtongie, the organization’s president reveals this still remains an unresolved issue in Nunavut.

It’s no surprise, then, that ICC’s resource development summit failed to achieve a strong consensus. On the question of balancing resource development and environmental protection, no such consensus exists. Like every other modern society, Inuit and other Arctic residents must accept the reality of conflicting values.

This means a willingness to listen to the other side, and, whenever possible,  a continual search for balanced compromise. Screaming matches and black-and-white thinking will not achieve this. JB

Info

NSF gives company Raytheon extended contract for Antarctica

From various articles: Raytheon Technical Services Company LLC, a subsidiary of Raytheon Company, has received a one-year extension to its contract with the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Dr Helen Findlay gathering water samples with a Niskin bottle

If you want to understand how ocean acidification might impact some marine creatures you need to do two things. First go to the seaside and find a seashell. Then go to a shop and buy a fizzy drink, any brand will do. Put the seashell in the fizzy drink and leave it for a few days. You will see that it is starts to dissolve away.

A similar process is happening in the oceans today. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is being absorbed into the ocean. When carbon dioxide dissolves in water it forms carbonic acid. Fizzy drinks are carbonated – they have carbon dioxide bubbled into them and this makes them acidic. Carbon dioxide is taken up into cold waters more rapidly and so the process of ocean acidification affects the coldest seas, such as the Arctic Ocean, the most.

Sampling bottles

On the pH scale the oceans are actually basic – the current average pH level of the oceans is about 8.2 (compared to freshwater which is pH 7). By continually adding more carbon dioxide, and increasing the amount of hydrogen ions, the ocean is becoming more acidic – the pH level is dropping. The pH level will continue to decrease into the future as long as carbon dioxide keeps being absorbed by the oceans.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, there has been already been a 0.1 drop in pH level. Models predict that the pH level will continue to lower (become more acid) to 7.8 in the next 100 years and to 7.4 in 300 years.

This may seem like a small amount but the impact can be quite large. All organisms need to regulate their internal pH and marine creatures are no exception. The difference is that many marine organisms are more dependent on the ocean to act as a pH regulator. It is also important for those organisms that have shells made of calcium carbonate – they find it difficult to maintain their shells, which start to dissolve as the pH decreases (just like in a fizzy drink, only much slower).

The Arctic acts as a bellwether for acid levels in our seas and their impact on the marine ecosystem. Acidification is thought to happen here faster than anywhere else but there is still a lot we don’t understand about how the sea ice and associated processes affect how carbon dioxide is taken up into the Arctic Ocean. The research being carried out here at the Catlin Arctic Survey Ice Base is trying to find out more about the transfer of carbon dioxide through sea ice, what this means in terms of ocean acidification and how acidification, or changes in these processes, might affect the organisms that live in and under the sea ice.

Dr Helen Findlay and Dr Victoria Hill

“Put on your sunscreen”—damaging air mass could drift far south.

Main Content

Stratospheric clouds in the Arctic (file picture) worsen ozone loss, experts say.

Photograph from Picture Press/Alamy

Christine Dell’Amore

National Geographic News

Published March 22, 2011

Spawned by strangely cold temperatures, “beautiful” clouds helped strip the Arctic atmosphere of most of its protective ozone this winter, new research shows.

The resulting zone of low-ozone air could drift as far south as New York, according to experts who warn of increased skin-cancer risk.

The stratosphere’s global blanket of ozone—about 12 miles (20 kilometers) above Earth—blocks most of the sun‘s high-frequency ultraviolet (UV) rays from hitting Earth’s surface, largely preventing sunburn and skin cancer.

But a continuing high-altitude freeze over the Arctic may have already reduced ozone to half its normal concentrations—and “an end is not in sight,” said research leader Markus Rex, a physicist for the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany.

Preliminary data from 30 ozone-monitoring stations throughout the Arctic show the degree of ozone loss was larger this winter than ever before, Rex said.

Before spring is out, “we may even get the first Arctic ozone hole … which would be a dramatic development—one which would make it into coming history books,” he said.

“It’s too early to call, but stay tuned.”

Atmospheric chemist Simone Tilmes, who wasn’t part of the study, agreed.

“We do not know at the moment how large the ozone hole in the Arctic will grow, because the thinning of the ozone layer is happening right now,” said Tilmes, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.

Full confirmation may require computer simulations and satellite measurements, which study leader Rex said would “be very useful to provide an independent view of the ozone loss this year.”

An ozone hole is an area of the ozone layer that is seasonally depleted of the protective gas—such as the well-known hole over Antarctica.

(See “Whatever Happened to the Ozone Hole?”)

“Beautiful” Clouds Harbor Ozone-Fighting Chemicals

In the 1980s scientists realized chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other ozone-depleting chemicals—then widely used in aerosol hairsprays and refrigerants, for example—were degrading the ozone layer.

The 1987 Montreal Protocol initiated a global phase-out of CFCs, replacing them with alternatives that don’t destroy ozone. However, CFCs can persist for decades in the stratosphere—the Antarctic ozone hole is still there, though it’s expected to grow smaller in coming decades.

Once in the upper atmosphere, CFCs break down into chlorine atoms, which, when activated by sunlight, destroy ozone molecules.

Cold temperatures speed up this process through polar stratospheric clouds (see picture), “beautiful” and still little understood formations that occur once stratospheric temperatures drop to at least -108 degrees Fahrenheit (-78 degrees Celsius), Rex noted.

The clouds provide “reservoirs” for inactivated byproducts of chlorine. On the surface of the cloud, these byproducts react with each other and release “aggressive” chlorine atoms that attack ozone molecules.

The whole process stops as soon as it gets warmer and the so-called Arctic polar vortex breaks up, Tilmes said.

At about 6 million square miles (15 million square kilometers), or 40 times the size of Germany, the Arctic polar vortex is a frigid air mass that circles the North Pole in winter.

Warming Link to High-Altitude Cold Snap?

The cold snap is no coincidence, research leader Rex added.

“This is the continuation of a long-term tendency that the cold Arctic winters have become colder,” Rex said.

And global warming may drive this trend, he added. As greenhouse gases trap heat in the lower levels of the atmosphere, the higher levels tend to cool, he said.

Of course, the “process is more complicated than this simple explanation”—there may be many ways in which greenhouse gases influence high-altitude temperatures, he added.

Low-Ozone Air to Fly South for Spring?

Any spike in UV radiation can impact both the Arctic ecosystem and human health, research leader Rex noted. For instance, more sunlight can slow the growth of certain species of ocean algae that provide food for larger organisms—and whose absence can have reverberations up the food chain.

(See “‘Crazy Green’ Algae Pools Seen in Antarctic Sea.”)

More worrisome, Rex said, is that ozone-depleted air can catch a ride south to more highly populated areas with the Arctic polar vortex.

Low-ozone air is often pushed southward to 40 or 45 degrees latitude by natural atmospheric disturbances, Rex said.

A low-ozone air mass’s southern “excursions” can take it as far as northern Italy in Europe or New York or San Francisco in the United States, he said.

The rapidly shifting vortex might last into April, when people are starting to spend more time outside, NCAR’s Tilmes noted.

“A good message for people [is] to just be aware that this is a year where ozone will be likely thinner this spring.

“You should watch out for your skin and put on your sunscreen.”

Rex noted that, however, that since the mass is constantly moving, low-ozone episodes would only last a few days in a given region.

Rex also said this winter’s decline in ozone doesn’t mean that the Montreal Protocol isn’t doing its job.

“People could mistake that and say we have banned CFCs and [it] doesn’t seem to work,” he said.

“That’s not the case. It’s just the timescale—CFCs take so long to disappear from the atmosphere.”