Here's a tip for anyone trying to figure out when and whether global warming might arrive and what changes it will bring: hop a plane to the Arctic and look down. You'll see that climatic changes are already reworking the far-north landscape. In the past two decades, average annual temperatures have climbed as much as 7[degrees]F in Alaska, Siberia and parts of Canada. Sea ice is 40% thinner and covers 6% less area than in 1980. Permafrost--permanently frozen subsoil--is proving less permanent. And even polar tourists are returning with less than chilling tales, one of which was heard around the world last week.
Back from a cruise to the North Pole aboard the Russian icebreaker Yamal, tourists told the New York Times that a mile-wide lake had opened up at 90[degrees] north, with gulls fluttering overhead, and they had the pictures to prove it. The newspaper declared that such an opening in polar ice was possibly a first in 50 million years, though that claim was dismissed by scientists who nonetheless see other serious signs of Arctic warming (see box, page 56).
On a less cosmic level, Mike Macri, who runs nature tours in Churchill, on the western shores of Hudson Bay in Canada's Manitoba province, has had to rewrite his brochures. The old ones encouraged tourists to arrive at Churchill in mid-June to see beluga whales, which migrate up the mouth of the Churchill River following the spring ice breakup. The new brochure encourages visitors to arrive as early as May.
The ice also forms as much as two weeks later in the autumn than it used to in Hudson Bay, creating a bewildering situation for some of the local wildlife. Polar bears that ordinarily emerge from their summer dens and walk north up Cape Churchill before proceeding directly onto the ice now arrive at their customary departure point and find open water. Unable to move forward, the bears turn left and continue walking right into town, arriving emaciated and hungry. To reduce unscheduled encounters between townspeople and the carnivores, natural-resource officer Wade Roberts and his deputies tranquilize the bears with a dart gun, temporarily house them in a concrete-and-steel bear "jail" and move them 10 miles north. In years with a late freeze--most years since the late 1970s--the number of bears captured in or near town sometimes doubles, to more than 100.
Humans are feeling the heat too. In Alaska, melting permafrost (occasionally hastened by construction) has produced "roller coaster" roads, power lines tilted at crazy angles and houses sinking up to their window sashes as the ground liquefies. In parts of the wilderness, the signal is more clear: wetlands, ponds and grasslands have replaced forests, and moose have moved in as caribou have moved out. On the Mackenzie River delta in Canada's Northwest Territories, Arctic-savvy Inuit inhabitants have watched with dismay as warming ground melted the traditional freezers they cut into the permafrost for food storage. Permafrost provides stiffening for the coastline in much of the north; where thawing has occurred, wave action has caused severe erosion. Some coastal Inuit villages are virtually marooned as the ground crumbles all around them. And as the ice retreats farther from the coast, Inuit hunters are finding that prey like walrus has moved out of reach of their boats.