(Frozen over Chukchi Sea)

Did it make you sit up and listen when you heard that particular little item of news? You could be fogiven if you missed it, hidden away in the business news somewhere. BP and the Russian state oil company Rosneft have signed an agreement which will let them join forces to exploit the oil and gas resources of Russia’s Arctic region – and the date envisaged is 2015.
With the Gulf of Mexico disaster just nine months past, I’d say there is every reason to be concerned about the fragile Arctic environment.
And the increasing interest, not just in this particular case, seems to me a clear indication that the climate is changing – and some of those changes are coming fast.
From this weekend onwards, I’ll be looking into the situation of the Arctic in particular at the Arctic Frontiers conference in Tromso, in Arctic Norway. I’ll keep you posted on what the politicians, scientists and environmentalists are saying.”Arctic Tipping Points” is the title of this year’s Arctic conference. It looks as if they might not be as far in the future as people once thought.

-Monitoring the permafrost and emissions from it at Zackenberg Station, Greenland, I took the photo in 2009-

„I hope I wasn’t too scary“, said Professor Andrej Grjbovski to me after our panel discussion in Bonn the other night. He works with the Norwegian School of Public Health in Oslo and the Northern State Medical University in his native Arkhangelsk in Russia.
Well I’m not for panic-mongering, but given some of the information our experts were coming out with, maybe you can’t be too scary.
Prof. G. was in Bonn both for the conference at the environment ministry and the public panel discussion. (See links on the Ice Blog 30.11.2010). Amongst other things, he’s involved in a WHO project to monitor the effects of climate change on health in a region of northern Russia.
He was referring in particular to the health dangers from melting permafrost. There are all sorts of dangerous things buried in the permafrost, which come to the surface as it melts. Not for nothing do some people refer to a “timebomb” in the Arctic. After outbreaks of diseases like anthrax, for instance, animals were buried in mass graves. The anthrax spores can survive in there and pose a new threat to health as they emerge again. Yes, Professor, that is definitely in the “scary” category.
But a changing climate poses all sorts of less “spectacular” but nonetheless crucial challenges to health care around the globe. The WHO says the 2003 heatwave killed 70,000 people in Europe. Heatstroke and heart attacks can be fatal to the particularly vulnerable, especially older people. Children and the homeless were also mentioned as amongst the vulnerable population groups.
Floods are another example. Apart from deaths from drowning, there’s the water pollution and fungus left over in the aftermath, which can result in the spread of infectious diseases, respiratory and digestive problems etc.
And of course species are moving to different areas – including, for instance, the mosquito types that are bringing illnesses like Dengue to Europe.
Needless to say – but I’m doing it anyway, sometimes we have to keep reminding ourselves of the obvious – it’s the people in poorer countries or areas who suffer most from the higher health risks through climate change. Germany has an adaptation strategy involving early warning systems for extreme weather events or the spread of infections and flood protection systems. The deputy director of the German meteorology office the DWD Paul Becker told me in an interview capacity building and passing on the necessary expertise to adapt to the health risks posed by a changing climate were the key issues in helping the developing world, whereby finding the necessary funding was probably the main challenge.
Incidentally, on the sidelines of the Cancun talks, Germanwatch published its latest Climate Risk Index. It says more than 650,000 people died in around 14,000 extreme weather events over the last two decades.

(Aerial view of Svalbard, one of my pics, iq 2007)

A lot of our information on the state of the ice cover in the Arctic and Antarctic comes from measurements from NASA. This week they invited journalists to a (climate-friendly internet-based) briefing on the progress of the IceBridge mission, which they describe as “an airborne mission for earth’s polar ice”.
A lot of it is about the technical procedures involved, so if you’re generally interested in how data gets collected by scientists flying over Antarctica (and the weather and work conditions down there) this is an interesting site to look at. There is also a blog from members of the team. They are in the Antarctic at the moment, but there is also info on the worrying state of the Arctic sea ice based on the latest measurements on the site.
Tomorrow (Thursday) they will be running a live chat on their findings so far, details on that website if you’d like to join in.

Ice blog regulars will remember my trip to Zackenberg station last summer, in high Arctic Greenland.

(Zackenberg station summer 2009)

The ecological monitoring station has been manned for the past few summer months as usual.
I’d like to recommend a look at the blog from deputy station leader Lars Hansen.

(Lars in the field at Zackenberg summer 2009)

You will find some of his stories fascinating and his pictures are fantastic.The latest entry is all about a polar bear visiting the station on Lars’ birthday, October 7th, so very recently. Belated many happy returns Lars, you have some unusual party guests!
Blog from deputy station leader Lars Hansen

I’m back! No more excuses, autumn is here and the extended summer break is definitely over.
But as expected, my trip to some of Switzerland’s beautiful alpine glaciers this summer provided some worrying evidence. Hiking in the Saastal or Saas valley, an area I first discovered in 1984 and have visited at irregular intervals since, the differences in the extent of some of the glaciers was striking.
Let me give you a few pictures. I’d like to show you some of the 1984 shots alongside, but since that was definitely the pre-digital age, they are not so easily available. And you can still see quite clearly how the glaciers are changing.

This is the area around Saas-Fee in Wallis or Valais, Switzerland. You can see the glaciers stop fairly high up. In 1984, the view was very different. Switzerland’s glaciers are melting rapidly as the earth warms.
Just over a year ago, more than 200’000 cubic metres of ice broke off the “Feegletscher”.

This is a popular walking trail above Saas Fee. The glacier to the right of the picture, used to be really close to the path.

Another shot of the retreating glacier.I have an old photo of trees against the background of white ice, taken very close to the path.

This is the “Bidergletscher”. It’s taken from a hiking trail. When we first walked this path, you could climb up to the glacier without too much effort. Now it’s high above.

This is the area around Mount Allalin, one of the impressive 4000 metre + peaks that make this area so special. Beautiful, but changing fast.

Isn’t ice beautiful? The formations here remind me of corals.

The idea of covering glaciers to protect them from summer sun seems to be quite widespread in the Alps at the moment. It seems to me like a very desperate measure. Some of the locals I talked to were not impressed. On the whole, though, people don’t seem to be as worried as you’d expect.

The average annual temperature in most areas of the Swiss apls has risen by one to two degrees over the last 100 years. A study by the University of Zürich (2006) suggest the alpine glaciers could lose 80% of their surface area if summer temperatures rise by 3 degrees.

More information on Swiss glaciers and environment

There is more information at Swiss glacier monitoring network