Can a global energy company be held responsible for melting glaciers? (Pic: I.Quaile)

For the first time ever in Europe, a company is being sued for causing climate change.

Essen, in Germany’s famous Ruhr area, once the centre of the country’s industrial development, is the scene of a very interesting court hearing today. A Peruvian smallholder and mountain guide Saúl Luciano Lliuya is suing the German energy concern RWE. He says the enormous amounts of greenhouse gases emitted by the company are jeopardizing his family, his property and a large area of his home town, Huaraz. A lake which is growing rapidly as climate warming melts the glaciers above, is posing a major risk for the town in the Andes and its 120,000 residents.

Climate justice

The ngo Germanwatch, which works to end the north-south divide and is particularly active in advocating climate justice, is advising the farmer from Peru and supporting the court case, which is unprecedented here in Europe and sends out a key signal just days ahead of the Paris COP21.

LLiuya says Huaraz is at risk from flooding. He and his lawyer Dr. Roda Verheyen argue that the Essen-based company is to a large degree responsible for the melting of glaciers in the Andes, and so for the risk to his home, which is located in the valley below.

They want RWE to contribute to the funding of protective measures for the town. And they argue that the energy company’s share should be in line with the amount of responsibility it bears for causing global warming. If the claimants can prove their case, that would presumably be rather a large share.

“Every day I see the glaciers melting and the lakes in the mountains growing”, says Lliuya, in a statement published by Germanwatch. “For us in the valley, this is a huge threat. We can’t just wait and see what happens. For me it is clear that those who are causing climate change should be held responsible: companies all over the world, that change the climate with their greenhouse gas emissions”.

Rising CO2 emissions – no part of the world is spared (Measuring station on Svalbard, Pic. Quaile)

A test case to watch

Luciano Lliuya’s lawyer, Dr. Roday Verheyen, told journalists the case was a test case, without precedent: “ RWE emits especially through its coal-fired power stations. These emissions result in rising temperatures worldwide, melting glaciers and so jeopardize the property of my client”, she said in a statement distributed by Germanwatch. She appealed to the court to assert that RWE bears responsibility for counter-measures.

In late April, the company rejected a claim submitted directly to them.

The idea that climate change is responsible for the melting of glaciers will come as no surprise to Iceblog readers. The IPCC clearly makes the connection. But attributing the cause and financial responsibility to an energy company is not so easy, hence the significance of this case.

In the shadow of a melting ice giant

The town of Huaraz in Peru lies a few kilometres below the Palcacocha glacier lake. Since 2003, it has grown four times as big as it was before. Climate change is also increasing the risk of giant blocks of ice breaking off and tumbling into the lake. That could cause a catastrophic flood wave and metre-high flooding of the settlements below.

The authority responsible for civil protection has warned that this could happen at any moment. It says this is the most dangerous glacial lake in the region. To provide lasting protection against this risk, a new system would have to be built to continually pump off large amounts of water. New barriers would also have to be built around the lake.

Dwindling ice… a reminder to COP21 (Pic: I.Quaile)

A message to Paris

The chairman of Germanwatch, Klaus Milke, stressed the importance of the court case as a signal to the energy sector and the world’s politicians in the run-up to the UN climate conference in Paris.

“Emissions have to drop, so that we do not have an ever-increasing number of people put at risk by climate change. And those who cause these risks must bear the cost of protecting the people affected”, he told journalists.

He stressed it could not be left to individual victims of climate change – who are often very poor – to go to court for assistance:“Ultimately, we need a political solution, to make those who caused the damage take on the responsibility”, Milke added.

According to Germanwatch, RWE describes itself as the biggest single emitter of CO2 in Europe. A survey conducted in 2014 says the concern is responsible for around half a percent of all the greenhouse gas emissions worldwide since the industrial revolution. Although the company is still just one of many responsible for CO2 emissions, Saúl Luciano Lliuya is claiming the company for a “fair share” of the cost of measures to protect his town, around 20,000 euro. This is probably “peanuts” to a global operator like RWE, but it would be an important step. It would involve accepting responsibility for the impacts of emissions-induced climate change, and have potentially huge financial implications.

An interesting one to watch. Will this smallholder from Peru set the ball rolling which could knock the Goliath that is the global energy industry reeling?

Melting ice in Alaska (I.Quaile)

At the swimming club last weekend, one of my fellow swimmers complained the water was too warm. She said she couldn’t swim at her usual speed when the temperature in the pool rose even a little bit. It left her feeling tired and lethargic. So how much more dramatic must it be for the tiny creatures at home in cold Arctic waters, when a warm influx changes their surroundings and living conditions.?

The warming of Arctic waters with climate change is likely to produce radical changes in the marine habitats of the High North. Data from long-term observations in the Fram Strait, which researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) have now analysed and published in the journal “Ecological Indicators”, confirms that even a short-term influx of warm water into the Arctic Ocean would suffice to fundamentally impact the local symbiotic communities, from the water’s surface down to the deep seas. They found that this happened between 2005 and 2008.

Arctic residents like it cool (Pic: I.Quaile, Svalbard)

The deep sea observatory

Over the past 15 years, researchers from Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute for polar and marine science (AWI) have been keeping an eye on the sensitive marine ecosystem in the Fram Strait, the sea lane between Greenland and Svalbard .The institute operates a deep-sea observatory there, known as “HAUSGARTEN”, which translates literally as house garden. It is actually a network of 21 individual mini research stations. Every summer, scientists pay them a visit and collect water and soil samples. Some of the stations have anchored systems that operate year-round, recording the water temperature and tides, collecting water and soil samples at regular intervals, and capturing the sediments that drift down to the seafloor from the upper water layers.

“This is the only observatory of its kind in the world. There’s no other project in which readings from the surface down to the ocean floor were taken in fixed positions over such a long time – let alone in the polar regions,” says AWI biologist Thomas Soltwedel.

For the current publication, the AWI researcher and his team analysed the first 15 years of the HAUSGARTEN dataset. The Fram Strait is especially interesting for Soltwedel and his colleagues because it represents the only deep juncture in the Arctic Ocean, allowing water masses from the Atlantic to flow into the Arctic to the west of Svalbard. In turn, water and ice floes find their way back out of the Arctic Ocean on the strait’s Greenland side.

Warmer water, melting ice, warmer water…melting ice (I.Quaile, Alaska)

Too warm for comfort

Until now, the scientists say it was unclear just how polar marine organisms were responding to the warming of the ocean and shrinking sea-ice cover. Now, the long-term observations show that arctic marine habitats could change radically if subjected to a sustained rise in temperature. The AWI researchers say their most surprising finding is that the thermally induced changes at the ocean surface can rapidly spread to affect life in the deep seas.

Normally the water near the surface, which flows north out of the Atlantic through the Fram Strait, has an average temperature of three degrees Celsius. With the help of their observatory, the AWI researchers were able to establish that from 2005 to 2008 the average temperature of the inflowing water was one to two degrees higher: “In that time, large quantities of warmer water poured into the Arctic Ocean. Since polar organisms have adapted to living in constant cold, this extra heat input hit them like a temperature shock,” Soltwedel explains.

He says the reactions in the ecosystem were correspondingly extreme: “We were able to identify serious changes in various symbiotic communities, from microorganisms and algae to zooplankton.”

Migrating sea creatures

One major change described in the article was the increase in free-swimming conchs and amphipods, which are normally found in the more temperate and subpolar regions of the Atlantic. In contrast, the number of conchs and amphipods in the Arctic dropped significantly.

The researchers also noted a decline in small, hard-shelled diatoms. Prior to the unexpected influx of warm water, they made up roughly 70 per cent of the vegetable plankton in the Fram Strait. But during the warm phase, the foam algae Phaeocystis took their place. A change with consequences, Soltweder explains: “Unlike diatoms, foam algae tend to clump and sink to the ocean floor, where they become a food source. But the sudden rise in available food led to major changes in deep-sea life, including a noticeable increase in the settlement density of benthic organisms.”

If you are not a marine biologist, you may be wondering what that means for the future of the Arctic and why we should be concerned about it. The problem is that all of this affects the Arctic food web.

The scientists can’t say exactly how at this point. But, as with so many other aspects of climate change: “Above all, we’re troubled by the simple fact that the changes have been so rapid, and so far-reaching.”

Melting ice in the waters off Spitsbergen. Already too hot for some? (I.Quaile)

New residents here to stay

Since the flow of warm water has subsided, the water temperature in the Fram Strait has stabilised – though it is still slightly above the average value from before 2005. Yet some of the changes appear to be there to stay. The conchs from the lower latitudes seem to have made a home for themselves in the Fram Strait.
As usual, the scientists are reluctant to say whether the warm-water influx they monitored is due to climate change or could be part of natural climate fluctuations. They say they need data covering several decades to be more certain.
But either way, the results of the ecological long-term studies clearly show that even short-term changes in ocean temperature can drastically impact life in the Arctic. So it looks like there will certainly be more to come, as the world continues to heat up.

The colours of the glacier in the Kongsfjord change when the spring thaw starts (I.Quaile)

On my first visit to the Arctic in 2007, I went out into the Kongsfjord at Ny Alesund, Spitsbergen, with some marine biologists working out of Koldewey station, run jointly by France and Germany. It was June, and the glaciers at the end of the fjord were just starting to thaw. While I was enjoying the blues, whites and greys of the sea, ice and sky, the researchers in the small boat got very excited when they saw the water turned brown, where sediment was flowing into the fjord from the retreating glacier.

Sediment flowing into fjord near Ny Alesund, Spitsbergen (I.Quaile)

“Who turned off the light up there”?

They had been waiting impatiently for the thaw to set in, because their research focus was on what that means for the life forms on the seabed, or benthos. Clearly, if you live down on the sea floor, the intrusion of brown mud and other sediment changes your surroundings. Not least, it means less light coming down from above. Now while a certain amount of that is going to happen naturally every year with the changing seasons, the question is: what happens if there is a big increase in sediment coming in because of increasing melt through climate change?

I was interested to hear about a study published this week in Science Advances, dealing with that same question in the Antarctic. The findings indicate that melting coastal glaciers are having an impact on the entire ecosystem on the seafloor, leading to a loss of biodiversity through sedimentation. The scientists were looking at the West Antarctic peninsula, where the temperature has risen almost five times faster than the global average in the last fifty years.

Global warming changes seafloor communities

The study, published by experts from Argentina, Germany and Great Britain, including the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI,) is based on repeated research dives. The scientists believe increased levels of suspended sediment in the water caused the dwindling biodiversity registered in the coastal region. They say it occurs when the effects of global warming lead glaciers near the coast to begin melting, discharging large quantities of sediment into the seawater.

Scientists set out to check impact of sedimentation, here from Spitsbergen (I.Quaile)

To find out exactly how and to what extent the retreat of glaciers is affecting bottom-dwelling organisms, researchers at the Dallmann Laboratory are now mapping and analysing the benthos in Potter Cove, located on King George Island off the western Antarctic Peninsula. The lab is operated by the Alfred Wegener Institute and the Argentine Antarctic Institute (IAA) as part of the Argentinian Carlini Station. Researchers have been monitoring benthic flora and fauna there for more than two decades.

In 1998, 2004 and 2010, divers photographed the species communities at three different points and at different water depths: the first, near the glacier’s edge; the second, an area less directly influenced by the glacier; and the third, in the cove’s minimally affected outer edge. They also recorded the sedimentation rates, water temperatures and other oceanographic parameters at the respective stations, so that they could correlate the biological data with these values. Their findings: some species are extremely sensitive to higher sedimentation rates.

Short sea squirts adapt better

Sea squirts are small invertebrate creatures that live on the sea floor and feed by filtering the water through their anatomies.

“Particularly tall-growing ascidians like some previously dominant sea squirt species can’t adapt to the changed conditions and die out, while their shorter relatives can readily accommodate the cloudy water and sediment cover,” says Dr Doris Abele, an AWI biologist and co-author of the study. She is worried that “the loss of important species is changing the coastal ecosystems and their highly productive food webs, and we still can’t predict the long-term consequences.”

Can Arctic marine biologists work fast enough to keep up with climate change? (Ny Alesund, Pic: I.Quaile)

As with so many aspects of our oceans, there is a lack of base data on how sediment from melting glaciers affects the numerous life forms on the seabed.

“It was essential to have a basis of initial data, which we could use for comparison with the changes. In the Southern Ocean we began this work comparatively late,” says the study’s first author, marine ecologist Ricardo Sahade from the University of Cordoba and Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council CONICET, who is leading the benthic long-term series. “Combining this series of observations, accompanying ecological research on important Antarctic species, and mathematical modelling allows us to forecast the changes to the ecosystem in future scenarios,” says co-author Fernando Momo from Argentina’s National University of General Sarmiento.

With scientists telling us the ice of the West Antarctic peninsula has already passed a tipping point, the question is whether scientific monitoring and research will be able to keep pace with the rapid rate at which climate warming is already having major impacts on our oceans. For many species of our seabottom-dwelling creatures, the slow pace of greenhouse gas emissions reductions may well come far too late.

See also: Antarctic glaciers retreat unstoppable

Marc Cornelissen on the sea ice at Barrow, Alaska, with CCC students, in 2008. (Pic: I.Quaile)

Ice Blog readers may remember the story of the two ice researchers and polar explorers who died when they broke through unexpectedly thin ice in the Canadian Arctic earlier this year. This week I had the chance to join friends and admirers of Marc Cornelissen and Philip de Roo at a ceremony held in their home country, the Netherlands. The unusually warm November weather, with people sitting out eating ice cream, seemed oddly apt for a tribute to two people who died doing climate research.