Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

BEGINNINGS

Turning points in life are seldom recognized until they have already passed. In my case, that turning point was in 1981. After a series of aimless years, I finally landed on a track toward a bachelor's degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in physical geography. I'd started out in 1978 as an astronomy and physics major, but for a number of reasons, none of which bear especially close scrutiny, I decided to go in a different direction. On the plus side, it was clear that a bachelor's in geography was better than no degree at all. On the minus side, I hadn't yet learned enough hard science to be employable, only enough to be irritating to my friends.

Lucky for me, the decision panned out. I ended up being in the right place at the right time to seize an opportunity and see part of the world where, at the time, few had ventured. Six months later, I found myself in a ski-equipped Twin Otter headed to northeastern Ellesmere Island in the Canadian High Arctic to begin a detailed study of two little ice caps. I became enchanted with the North and decided to become an Arctic climatologist. By 2016, those ice caps had almost completely melted away, victims of the Arctic meltdown. I could never have imagined this at the time. I could not have known that in becoming a climate scientist, I was to earn a front-row seat to observe how, in fits and starts, it first began to be noticed that the Arctic was changing. Nor could I have known that I'd also become part of the growing cadre of scientists who first struggled with conflicting evidence to try and make sense of what was happening, then finally had no recourse but to yield to the conclusion that a radical transformation was underway. I could not have foreseen that Arctic climate research, once the domain of a small community of scientists with love for snow and ice, would become a centerpiece in the quest to understand the impacts of global climate change that would involve collaboration between thousands of scientists from around the world.

CHARTING A COURSE

It was a rainy afternoon when I learned that Dr. Raymond Bradley, an associate professor at the Department of Geology and Geography, was teaching upper-division courses in both climatology and paleoclimatology — climates of the past. This sounded like interesting stuff, so I signed up for both.

Since elementary school, I had been aware that the earth's climate had varied in the past, but until taking Ray's courses I had no real idea how these variations related to things like periodic changes in earth-orbital configuration, atmospheric greenhouse gas composition, volcanic eruptions, solar variability, and climate feedbacks. Ray drew in part from his own research, which focused on the past and present-day climate of the Arctic. Ray wrote his first research paper in 1972 while still a graduate student. He found that a global warming trend starting in the 1880s, particularly notable during the winter season and in the Arctic, changed to a cooling trend in the 1940s. He later documented a rather abrupt further cooling in the Canadian High Arctic starting right around 1963/1964, which he suspected might relate to a massive injection of dust into the upper atmosphere from the 1963/1964 eruption of Mount Agung, a rather ill-tempered and still active volcano located in Bali, Indonesia. The cooling noted by Ray and others turned out to be a temporary thing, but for a time it helped to foster speculation, greatly overstated by the media, that the planet might be entering a long-term cooling phase. Reflecting my fondness for big snowstorms and seeing commerce grind to a halt, I found the idea of a cooling planet quite appealing. While part of the climate class also covered the already quickly growing counterpoint that because of the observed rise in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory, the planet should start to warm up, and most strongly in the polar regions, deep down I was hoping for an ice age.

I was friendly with Mike Moughan, a fellow a few years older than me who was one of Ray's graduate students. Making full use of the university's CDC Cyber Systems mainframe computer, Mike was processing temperature and precipitation data from weather stations across the Canadian Arctic (with enchanting names like "Resolute Bay," "Alert," and "Eureka") to better understand variability and recent trends in the region's climate. His work doing real climate research seemed so cool, and he looked so scientific walking down the hall of the Morrill Science Center with computer printouts or toward the Computing Center carrying a 9-track magnetic tape of valuable data.

I wanted to be part of it. The opportunity came when Mike decided that he was not up for graduate school. This left Ray in a lurch. Upon Mike's suggestion, Ray agreed to take me on as an hourly student, at a seemingly princely wage of five dollars per hour, to finish the work that Mike had started. Mike showed me how to log onto the CDC Cyber Systems mainframe, and how to edit the SPSS routines that he had been using. After climbing a steep learning curve, I became competent enough to supply Ray with data plots. Now I was the cool dude walking down the hall and to and from the Computing Center.

In early 1982, Ray inquired about my future plans and said that if I was up for it, he needed a field assistant for the upcoming summer's work in the Arctic. I enthusiastically volunteered. He also emphasized that I ought to apply to graduate school and take Mike's place. I applied.

Ray's project was to reconstruct the past glacial history of the Queen Elizabeth Islands, which is a part of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. At the time, this area was a part of the Northwest Territories; it is now part of Nunavut. The project involved recovering and analyzing sediment cores from Arctic lakes, including a series of small freshwater bodies called the Beaufort Lakes, near the northeastern coast of Ellesmere Island. Ray had been coordinating his research with Dr. John England from the University of Edmonton.

Via a well-written proposal, Ray convinced the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to support a modest additional project on and around a pair of nearby small, stagnant ice caps at about 1000 m elevation on the Hazen Plateau (fig. 1). The NSF, as I quickly learned, is the key federal agency supporting fundamental research and education in the non-medical fields of science and engineering; its counterpart in medical fields is the National Institutes of Health.

The objective of this side project was to shed light on an idea advanced in 1975 by Jack Ives of the University of Colorado Boulder regarding how the great continental ice sheets of the Pleistocene might have formed. It had long been known that the past 2 million years or so had seen a series of major ice ages, separated by warm interglacials, like the one we live in today. Ives's thinking was that the past great ice sheets of North America, the most recent being the Laurentide Ice Sheet, at its biggest about 25,000 years ago, initially formed through the accumulation of snow on the extensive Labrador-Ungava plateau of Canada. If the climate cooled for some reason, then the snow line would drop below the altitude of much of the plateau surface. Temperatures tend to decrease the higher one goes in altitude, and above a certain altitude, it is cold enough that the snow that falls during winter survives the summer melt season. This elevation determines the snow line.

The drop in the elevation of the snow line below the level of the plateau surface would raise the reflectivity of the surface (that is, its albedo), reducing how much of the sun's energy is absorbed, further cooling the climate over the plateau, fostering the survival of even more high-albedo snow the next summer, and so on. The snow would eventually compress into ice, forming glaciers that would then coalesce, eventually growing to an ice sheet. Because the initial snow cover would quickly expand via this albedo feedback mechanism, the process was dubbed, with considerable exaggeration, instantaneous glacierization. As early as 1875, James Croll, in his book Climate and Time in Their Geological Relations: A Theory of Secular Change of the Earth's Climate, had recognized albedo feedback as an important climate process. He saw that the whole thing could work in reverse as well — warm conditions lead to less snow and ice, lowering the albedo and favoring more warming.

The roughly cyclical timing of past ice ages and interglacials implied a climate force that was itself cyclic. Using ocean core records, in 1976, James Hays, John Imbrie and Nick Shackleton presented convincing evidence that the major ice ages and interglacials of the Pleistocene had been "paced" by variations in earth orbital geometry called Milankovitch cycles. Named after the Serbian geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milankovitch, these cycles refer to variations in the earth's orbital eccentricity (departure from circular), its obliquity (tilt), and the timing of the equinoxes (precession) that affect how much solar energy reaches the top of the atmosphere at different latitudes and at different times of the year. Although astronomical theories to explain climate change had been around since the 19th century, they had not been verified by observation. The view of Milankovitch cycles as a pacemaker also recognized that orbital conditions favoring ice sheet onset (in particular, cool summers over the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere) would then kick in various climate feedbacks to hasten the cooling, albedo feedback being but one of them. It is now known that carbon feedback is a biggie — as it cools, carbon dioxide comes out of the atmosphere and is stored in the oceans, and further cools the climate.

While Milankovitch effects had nothing to do with the temporary change toward Arctic cooling that Ray discussed in his 1972 paper, the cooling, through its potential link with albedo feedback, was one of the key science themes driving the ice cap study. "How misguided that looks nowadays," recalls Ray regarding the cooling phase, "though at the time it was pretty accurate — cooler and wetter winters on Baffin Island, and colder summers, so upland snow cover was indeed expanding."

The strategy of the NSF-sponsored ice cap study was to set up a weather station on top of the bigger of the two ice caps to measure air temperature, solar energy fluxes, albedo, and other variables. We would compare these to other measurements collected at stations set up at different distances beyond the edge of the ice cap at a similar elevation. Looking at the differences would tell us how the ice cap was affecting the local climate and how far the effects extended beyond its margins. It amounted to a local evaluation of some of the ideas encapsulated in instantaneous glacierization. In the spring of 1982, I invested a lot of time testing the instruments and the state-of-the art data loggers (called Microloggers) from the Campbell Scientific company.

OFF TO THE ARCTIC

We left for Ellesmere Island in May 1982. Beforehand, we'd shipped the major equipment to Resolute Bay in the care of the able government-run Polar Continental Shelf Program that handles logistics in the Canadian far north, directed for many years by Canadian scientist George D. Hobson. I left first, accompanied by Mike Retelle, another of Ray's graduate students, and his assistant, Dick Friend, who would be staying with Mike at Beaufort Lakes for the coring work. We flew from Bradley Field outside of Hartford, Connecticut, to Montreal, and boarded a lumbering 737-200 to Edmonton, Alberta, operated by Pacific Western ("Piggly-Wiggly") airlines. We spent two boozy nights in Edmonton with one of John England's graduate students; we spent days visiting various stores, getting lastminute supplies together. Ray flew into Edmonton a day or so later. He informed me that although I had forgotten to ship the portable generator, a rather severe oversight, I had been accepted into the graduate school.

The next morning, we boarded the twice-weekly Piggly-Wiggly flight to Resolute Bay with a stop in Yellowknife. The specially equipped 737-200 C landed at Resolute Bay in a cloud of dust and gravel. The plan was to be ensconced for a few days at the ugly yet functional Polar Continental Shelf Program building, then head to Beaufort Lakes and the ice caps in a ski-equipped Twin Otter. Aircraft time is expensive. To save money, we would coordinate logistics with John England's group from Edmonton; they would be doing work on and around Polaris Promontory, Greenland, just across the Robeson Channel, which is the narrow ocean channel separating northeastern Ellesmere Island from northwestern Greenland (fig. 1).

Because of bad weather, a few days at Resolute Bay turned into almost a week. We spent the days eating, reading, eating, reading, eating, and moseying down to the weather station to look at the forecasts. We spent evenings at the Resolute Bay Bar. The bar, patronized by the local Inuit, base personnel, civilian and military pilots (Royal Canadian Air Force), and whoever else was around, was something right out of a Robert Service poem — dingy, dark, smoky, raucous, sexist, and not entirely safe.

Finally, the weather started looking better, and we headed out. Twin Otters fly low and slow, and we were looking at about three hours to our destination. However, the weather shut down again, and we diverted to Eureka, lying to the west. The routine over the next few days was pretty much the same as that at Resolute Bay, including nightly visits to the somewhat more upscale RCAF bar. A rule at the RCAF bar was that anyone caught wearing a hat, as I unwittingly did when first entering, was required to buy a round of drinks for everyone. Only by repeatedly pleading ignorance as an American civilian did I escape the sentence, which was very fortunate, given my limited bankroll.

The weather settled again, and Ray and I flew out ahead of the rest of the team. The Twin Otter landed on the ice cover of the largest of the Beaufort Lakes (a pond, really), and the gear was unloaded in short order. The plane headed back to Eureka, picked up Mike and Dick and the rest of the gear, and safely landed on the ice-covered lake a second time. We spent the next two days setting up camp for the Beaufort Lakes party and organizing. The weather continued to hold. The same Twin Otter returned from Eureka, picked up Ray and me with our gear, and made the short hop to the Hazen Plateau and the larger of the two ice caps. It was a rare cloudless, windless day. The temperature was probably 5F or so, and the fresh snow on the plateau sparkled. The pilot dropped us off with our food, gear, white gas for the stove, regular gas for the generator, and a two-way radio, and then roared off.

It took about a week to set up camp and the weather stations. We had a large aluminum-framed igloo-style tent for sitting and cooking, and a couple of smaller tents for sleeping (fig. 2). A Coleman stove in the igloo tent served for cooking and melting snow for drinking water, and as a source of heat. Potential death by carbon monoxide poisoning never entered our minds. The sleeping tents were unheated, but we had warm sleeping bags.

Once everything was up and running, attention turned to a detailed survey of snow conditions on the ice cap. The Hazen Plateau, like almost all of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, is a very dry environment, classified as a polar desert. The average total annual precipitation is on the order of only 20 centimeters (less than 8 inches), but because it is such a cold environment, evaporation is also quite low. Hence, in summer, it can be an oddly damp desert. Snow depths on the ice cap were typically in the range of 30–50 cm, representing almost all of the precipitation that had fallen since the end of the previous summer. Every so often, we measured the water equivalent of the snowpack. This required sticking a snow-coring tube through the snowpack to its base, recording the depth of the snow, extracting the coring tube along with its sample of snow, dumping the snow sample in a plastic bag, and then weighing the bag of snow. Knowing the snow depth and cross-sectional area of the tube, we could determine the snow volume. By measuring the weight (more properly, the mass), we could also get the snow density and water equivalent of the snow — that is, how much actual water is contained in the snow. These numbers told us how much accumulation there had been on the ice cap through the previous autumn and winter.

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "Brave New Arctic"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Princeton University Press.
Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---