There are around 10,000 glaciers in the area around Whittier. All in all 29,000 square miles – 5% of the state of Alaska – are made up of glaciers. But with temperatures clearly on the rise, the ice is melting so fast that people here are talking of a boom in “climate change tourism”. – “See the glaciers before they’re gone”. Cynical? Bizzare? There is the old maxim that tourism destroys what it seeks. Climate change adds another factor. Some food for thought there. I talked to some of the young “climate ambassadors” about our own carbon footprint in doing this trip.
The background to the Climate Change College Arctic Field-Trip
Calculating your carbon footprint

(Erika, Aart and Cara “performing” for their project videos, linking climate protection at home to the melting of the Arctic ice. Check out Cara’s website:
Green “Do it yourself”
Start “Global WORMing by contacting Erika@ClimateChangeCollege.Org. Aart’s project info via Aart@ClimateChangeCollege.Org)

The organisers are paying into a fund to offset the emissions from travel. And the idea is that these youngsters will be doing such a lot to spread the word about what we’re doing to the planet with global warming – and what we can still do to cope with the changes and halt the trend – that it will be more than worth the trip. And after spending 10 days with them, I’m sure that’s very true. The projects they’re working in at home – some full-time, some alongside other jobs – show a deep commitment to finding solutions. Our Swedish ambassador Jakob Rutqvist in particular keeps reminding me that it’s not just about spreading the word but finding creative ways to tackle the problem and move forward. He’s involved in a very high-powered network, supported by WWF, aimed at encouraging innovation across the globe when it comes to reducing emissions and halting global warming.
The “Global Focus Network”
Jakob is currently planning a trip to China in June to meet potential partners in finding solutions to energy and other problems in a country that is crucial to safeguarding the future because of its huge population. He’s also the Swedish youth representative at a big gathering in Stockholm next weekend to discuss climate issues.
Jakob’s website
He’s invited Aart, the Dutch climate ambassador to go along. I’ve recruited them both to report on the conference for Deutsche Welle. This is a perfect story for our youth programme COOL. Anke and Laura, if you’re reading this, I think I’ve found you two new reporters.
Click here for the “coolest programme on the air”
Jakob and Aart are both keen to disprove the popular assumption that – unlike the 1968 generation being celebrated in the media at the moment 40 years on – today’s youth are not interested in activism or committed to change. They want to make a statement to demonstrate the opposite.

Aart told me he was really flabbergasted by our visit to the Begich Boggs glacier visitors centre.There’s a magnificent glass-walled viewing room. The trouble is that the Portage glacier has retreated so far that you can’t see it all from the centre. In less than 70 years, it has receded more than 2 miles. So there is an impressive view of Portage lake, iced over, and snowy hills, but definitely no glacier.
What bothered me just as much was that I wasn’t allowed to interview our guide through the centre or record any of her talk. – Because it was about climate change. She wasn’t authorized to speak officially on that. Melting Ice is clearly a “hot” topic.
The talk was informative, though, so thanks to our guide for that, even though she can’t be on the programme.
The glaciers in this area bear the names of famous authors –Byron, Shakespeare and – Robert Burns. Friends of Scotland please take note. Rabbie is definitely on the retreat in this area of Alaska. I hope it only applies to the glaciers.
More about Scotland and the network of Scots abroad
To get up close to the glaciers, we took a trip on a “landing boat”, loaded with kayaks for the ultimate and “otterly environment-friendly” approach to the ice wonders. (We met plenty of those “otterly laid-back” little sea “critters” on the way – and I enjoyed exchanging those otterly corny puns with Sebastian, a colleague on the trip. Thanks Seb.)

Our guide Andy is very experienced in minimum-impact camping, and made sure we didn’t disturb nature too much and just had the basics – but the right gear for the conditions.Sleeping in the vicinity of glaciers is an odd experience.

We had been prepared to sleep on thick snow, but our campsite was actually snow-free. Only the water was full of “ice cubes”.

Our three glaciers were rumbling so much during the night I thought I was in a thunderstorm. You frequently hear explosive crashes, and a bit closer up the ice crackles and pops away constantly.

“Sound-Rich Ice” (to be heard soon on Living Planet!)
The environment program you should be listening to every week. Podcast?

The ambassadors used the glacier background trip to film scenes for their “project movies”, linking their work at home to the dramatic ice melt in this very sensitive region. Ines from Spain braved the icy temperatures in her bikini and a rubber dingy.

The first half of her film had been shot in an empty outdoor pool at home, demonstrating the drought conditions which are causing desperate water shortages in Portugal. Her idea was to show that you might have to go a very long way to get water.
Unfortunately our trip was flawed when our expedition leader Marc Cornelissen – the mastermind behind the “Climate Change College” – got a message by satellite phone that his father was critically ill. Visibility was too poor for a helicopter to collect him, so Andy took him off in the “Zodiac” boat to meet another boat coming in from Whittier to take him back. This was very sad for all the group, as the field trip and Marc’s whole project was just coming to its highpoint. They all coped very well, including taking over the logistics of getting the group and all their equipment organised for the trip home afterwards.We hope things will work out OK for Marc.
Marc told his ambassadors as he left they had to see the project through. So the kayak trip went ahead.

We paddled through a field of mini ice-bergs. Now I know what it feels to be a slice of lemon in a glass of fizzy drink with ice cubes in it. I recorded as we went along – and even interviewed Marie Laure from kayak to kayak as we reached our destination – as close as safety would allow to the 3 glaciers.

She’s in love with snow and ice, but concerned that people looking to enjoy it on the ski slopes of Europe use up too many of our natural resources, with artificial snow and a huge amount of water in general. Her project is to save on water consumption in the ski resorts of her home in France by simple things like water-saving showerheads. She told me about it and her deep concern about global warming as we sat and marvelled at the glaciers – and the sound of them melting and breaking in the background.

That would be a good place to end this entry of the “Ice Blog”. The Climate College Field Trip has come to an end. But of course climate change is a never-ending story. Back in Bonn, Germany, we’re in a heat wave, with high summer temperatures, and it’s only early May. (The mosquitos were already out in Fairbanks, by the way, way too early, the locals said). I heard on the radio that the oil supply will “peak” as early as in 10 years. And the IPCC climate chief says the sea level increase through global warming definitely exacerbated the effects of the disastrous cyclone in Myanmar.
Watch this space for more Arctic pictures and climate news and views in the weeks to come.
– Not the End –

The Sermeq Kujualleq glacier discharges icebergs into the sea (I. Quaile, Ilulissat 2009)

It might sound like stating the obvious, but in fact it is not easy to find clear evidence that human behavior is behind the retreat of glaciers being monitored in different parts of the world. Hence my interest in a study just published in the journal Science.

The main problem is that it usually takes decades or even centuries for glaciers to adjust to climate change, says climate researcher Ben Marzeion from the Institute of Meteorology and Geophysics of the University of Innsbruck. He and his team of researchers have just published the results of a study for which they simulated glacier changes during the period from 1851 to 2010 in a model of glacier evolution. They used the recently established “Randolph Glacier Inventory” (RGI) of almost all glaciers worldwide to run the model, which included all glaciers outside Antarctica.

“Melting glaciers are an icon of anthropogenic climate change”, the authors say. However, they stress that the present-day glacier retreat is a mixed response to past and current natural climate variability and “current anthropogenic forcing”. Their modeling shows though that whereas only 25% of global glacier mass loss between 1851 and 2010 can be attributed to human-related causes, the fraction increases to around 69% looking at the period between 1991 and 2010. So human contribution to glacier mass loss is on the increase, the experts write.

Marzeion says the global retreat of glaciers observed today started around the middle of the 19^th century at the end of the Little Ice Age, responding both to naturally caused climate change of past centuries (like solar variability), and to human-induced changes. Until now, the real extent of human contribution was unclear. The authors say their latest piece of work provides clear evidence of the human contribution.

Once more I am happy to refer to the Climate News Network, in this case to Tim Radford, for an easy-to-read summary of the main research results and the background. There is no doubt that glaciers are losing mass, retreating uphill and melting at a faster rate, says Radford. He refers to some Andes glaciers and the the Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland, or Sermeq Kujualleq as I prefer to call it, using the indigenous name. Ice Blog followers may remember my own trip to Greenland and that particular glacier. I have also written on the speeding of the melt there on the Ice Blog and on the DW website.

Alpine glacier like these in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, have declined dramatically in recent decades. (I.Quaile)

Radford also refers to ascertaining the melting of alpine glaciers by comparing historic paintings and other documentation with the current ice mass. That decline is something I have observed at first hand in Valais in Switzerland during regular visits over the past 30 years. Look out for a comparative photo gallery of my own pics, when I get time to put it together. Since most of the shots are from the pre-digital era, that will be a time-consuming task.

I also remember a trip to the Visitor Centre of the Begich Boggs glacier in Alaska in 2008. The glacier has already retreated so far you can’t see it at all from the Centre built specially for the purpose of viewing it.

The question until now was how much of all this was caused by natural developments and how much to changes in land use and the emission of greenhouse gases? The latest study supported, among others, by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the research area Scientific Computing at the University of Innsbruck, has come up with some answers. Since the climate researchers were able to include different factors contributing to climate change in their model, they can differentiate between natural and anthropogenic influences on glacier mass loss

“While we keep factors such as solar variability and volcanic eruptions unchanged, we are able to modify land use changes and greenhouse gas emissions in our models,” says Ben Marzeion, who sums up the study: “In our data we find unambiguous evidence of anthropogenic contribution to glacier mass loss.”

As always, there is still need for further research – and a lot more monitoring. The scientists say the current observation data is insufficient in general to derive any clear results for specific regions, even though anthropogenic influence is detectable in a few regions such as North America and the Alps, where glaciers changes are particularly well documented.

With global glacier retreat contributing to rising sea-levels, changing seasonal water availability and increasing geo-hazards, the study’s conclusions should help put a little more pressure on the world’s decision-makers to get serious about emissions reductions.

Arctic terns in Ny Alesund, Svalbard

This weekend, bird and nature-lovers around the world will be marking “World Migratory Bird Day“. This is a relatively new annual event in the global calendar of “special days”. It has only been celebrated since 2006. You may well be sceptical about the value of yet another day of “xyz”, quite simply because of the sheer number of them. This one was the brainchild of, amongst others, Bert Lenten, who is currently deputy-head of CMS, the Convention on Migratory Species. I have interviewed him on bird-related issues a few times in recent years. CMS, which is part of UNEP, has its headquarters here in Bonn, close to my Deutsche Welle office. The CMS agreement is also known as the Bonn Convention.

When I talked to Bert this week, he told me the idea of having a World Migratory Bird Day came up when bird flu first hit Europe in 2005. There was such a lot of panic and so many negative reactions to migratory birds, wrongly suspected of being a main cause of the outbreak, that Bert and some colleagues had the idea of reminding people once a year that birds are actually something positive.

At Zackenberg, Greenland

Tern chasing off ice blogger, Svalbard!

Migratory birds, from large albatrosses, storks or geese to smaller terns, swallows or tiny sanderlings cover huge distances between their winter quarters and their breeding grounds every year. The Arctic is home to thousands of them every summer, when they fly up to breed. The Arctic tern is actually thought to hold the record for long-distance migration, flying between the Antarctic and the Arctic. I remember being attacked several times on Svalbard in spring when I advertently got too close to some of their nesting sites. No harm done, I hasten to add. I enjoyed watching their antics.

Now, with climate change affecting the Arctic much more drastically than the rest of the world, birds are finding conditions very different from they used to be. Ferdinand Spina is head of Science at Italy’s National Institute for Wildlife Protection and Research ISPRA, in Bologna, Italy. He is also in charge of the Italian bird ringing centre, and currently also Chair of the Scientific Council of CMS. I talked to him last week and he stressed that climate change is becoming one of the greatest threats to migratory birds. The Arctic is one of the most obvious illustrations.

“Birds are a very important component of wildlife in the Arctic. There are different species breeding in the Arctic. The Arctic is subject to huge risks due to global warming. It is crucially important that we conserve such a unique ecosystem in the world. Birds have adapted to living in the Arctic over millions of years of evolution, and it’s a unique physiological and feeding adaptation. And it is our duty to conserve the Arctic as one of the few if not the only ecosystems which is still relatively intact in the world. This is a major duty we have from all possible perspectives, including an ethical and moral duty, ” he says.

Listen to Fernando Spina

I couldn’t agree more, Fernando. We talked about the seasonal mismatch, when birds arrive too early or too late to find the insects they expect to encounter and need to feed their young. When I visited Zackenberg station in eastern Greenland in 2009, Lars Holst Hansen, the deputy station leader, told me the long-tailed skuas were not breeding because they rely on lemmings as prey. The lemmings were scarce because of changes in the snow cover.

Lars Holst Hansen is back in Zackenberg right now. He also takes some great wildlife photos, so I am happy to recommend a look at his site.

Jeroen Reneerkens is another regular visitor to Zackenberg, as he tracks the migration of Sanderlings between Africa and Greenland. A great project and an informative website!

Jeroen with sanderlings at Zackenberg

 Morten Rasch from the Arctic Environment Dept of Aarhus University in Denmark is the coordinator of one of the most ambitious ecological monitoring programmes in the Arctic. The Greenland Environment Monitoring Programme includes 2 stations, Zackenberg, which is in the High Arctic region and Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, in the “Lower” Arctic. Hansen and other members of Rasch’s teams monitor 3,500 different parameters in a cross-disciplinary project, combining biology, geology, glaciology, all aspects of research into the fragile eco-systems of the Arctic. At that time, he told me during an interview,  ten years of monitoring had already come up with worrying results:

“We have experienced that temperature is increasing, we have experienced an increasing amount of extreme flooding events in the river, we have experienced that phenology of different species at the start-up of their growing season or the appearance of different  insects for instance now comes at least 14 days earlier than when we started. And for some species, even one month earlier. And that’s a lot.  You have to realise the entire growing season in these areas is only 3 months. When we start up at Zackenberg in late May, or the beginning of June, the ecosystem is completely covered in snow and more or less frozen, and when we leave, in normal years – or BEFORE climate change took over – then we left around 1^st September and the ecosystem actually started to freeze up.  So the entire biological ecosystem only has 3 months to reproduce and so on. And in relation to that, a movement in the start of the system between 14 days and one month – that’s a lot.”

I can’t write about birds and climate change in the Arctic without mentioning George Divoky,  an ornithologist whose bird-monitoring has actually turned into climate-change monitoring on Cooper Island, off the coast of Barrow, Alaska. George looks after a colony of Black Guillemots and spends his summer on the island. In recent years, he has taken to putting up bear-proof nest boxes for the birds, because polar bears increasingly come to visit, as the melting of the sea ice has reduced their hunting options. He has also observed the presence of new types of birds which die not previously come this far north. His website is well worth following.

So, friends of the Arctic. Spare a thought for our feathered friends this weekend. They pollinate plants, control pests and insect populations – and give us that happy feeling of springtime we are enjoying in Bonn this weekend. I am reminded of a young “climate ambassador” in Alaska, flabbergasted to see that the glaciers we had come to observe were no longer visible from the Visitors’ Centre built for that purpose just a few years before. “Everything’s connected”, was his simple statement. Presumably that is why he has spent so much time developing low-carbon solutions for companies around the globe.