Hannah Hoag

Category: environment

  • Arctic dogsledding culture is slipping through the cracks

    Arctic dogsledding culture is slipping through the cracks

    Kunuk Abelsen’s sled dogs, blond, brown, and almost black, stood on the bright white snow outside his home and pulled on their chains. It was January, but the sea ice surrounding his island village in eastern Greenland still wasn’t firm. Abelsen and his dogs were eager to get out on the ice, but they were marooned.

    “I really wanted good ice conditions, but nature is the boss,” says the 26-year-old hunter.

    Most years, the sea ice arrives in the inlets along the east coast of Greenland in November. As its frozen expanse grows throughout the winter, it connects rocky islands and remote villages, and helps pave the way for hunters and their dog teams to reach the seals that congregate beneath the ice. But last year, the sea ice didn’t take shape the way people in Kulusuk had expected it to.

    .::. Keep reading at Hakai magazine.

  • Europe’s triumphs and troubles are written in Swiss ice

    Europe’s triumphs and troubles are written in Swiss ice

    Pollen frozen in ice in the Alps traces Europe’s calamities, since the time Macbeth ruled Scotland

    NEW YORK TIMES

    As plague swept through Europe in the mid-1300s, wiping out more than a third of the region’s population, a glacier in the Alps was recording the upheaval of medieval society. While tens of millions of people were dying, pollen from the plants, trees and crops growing in Western Europe were being swept up by the winds and carried toward the Alps.

    They became trapped in snowflakes and fell onto the region’s highest mountain, the Monte Rosa massif. Over time, the snow flattened into ever-growing layers of ice, storing a blow-by-blow record of regional environmental change.

    Centuries later, the crop pollens trapped in the ice reveal the collapse of agriculture associated with the pandemic, as bad weather led to poor harvests and fields lay fallow because there was no one left to work them.

    For more than 50 years, scientists have drilled ice cores in the Arctic and Antarctica to reconstruct uninterrupted records of climate change over hundreds of thousands of years. But these glaciers can be difficult to get to and they are far from where most people on Earth live.

    Mid- to low-latitude glaciers, on the other hand, tend to be more accessible and lie at the heart of thousands of years of human activity. The Colle Gnifetti glacier, sitting near the Swiss-Italian border, and with a central location on the continent, has put it on a crash course with Europe’s dust for roughly 10,000 years.

    Sandra Brügger, a climate scientist at the Institute of Plant Sciences and the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Bern, developed a technique to study the pollen, fungal spores, charcoal and soot locked in an ice core drilled from this Swiss glacier. She is aiming to disentangle the ways extreme weather, innovation, crop failures and pollution have shaped Europe since 1050, when Macbeth ruled Scotland.

    … read more

  • High stakes in the High North

    High stakes in the High North

    BIOGRAPHIC

    A stiff wind buffeted the helicopter as it set down near the gravel shore of Wrangel Island, a remote spot of land 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Russia’s extreme Far East. After flying two and a half hours from Pevek, Russia, mostly over open water, the aircraft smelled of vodka and gasoline from the extra fuel cans secured inside. Joel Berger peered up at the white hills that rose around him and spotted several black flecks on the slopes: his quarry, muskoxen.

    These shaggy, horned creatures are one of the many archetypal Arctic species that thrive on Wrangel Island, a little-known hotspot for polar biodiversity. Berger, a wildlife biologist at Colorado State University, came to Wrangel as part of a joint Russian-American project to understand how climate change and other factors, such as predation by polar bears, might be affecting the island’s roughly 900 muskoxen. The island’s isolation, along with its cold, dry polar climate, have created a unique and surprisingly biodiverse ecosystem. Despite the harsh conditions, more than 400 varieties of plants persist here—twice the number found on any other similarly sized piece of Arctic tundra—as well as hundreds of mosses and lichens. Some of them are not found anywhere else on Earth.

    .::. Read the rest of this story at bioGraphic.

  • Global warming is threatening Alaska’s prized wedding flower

    Global warming is threatening Alaska’s prized wedding flower

    THE ATLANTIC

    A little more than a decade ago, Ron Illingworth and his wife, Marji, planted 25 peony roots on their family farm in North Pole, Alaska. They did it on a whim, really, curious whether the bright, ruffled blossoms would thrive alongside the runner beans, peas, and tomatoes they sold at the local farmers market. A horticulture-professor friend of theirs had planted some test plots on the grounds of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and she was looking for some more data on their hardiness in subarctic conditions. Could peonies become a commercially viable export crop?

    The next year, Ron and Marji had 50 roots. A year later, 100. Now, the couple has 15,000 roots in ground, with the goal of reaching 18,000. Their company, North Pole Peonies, will ship close to 30,000 stems to the continental United States this year for hotel floral displays and showy wedding bouquets. “We started with just a few back here, and now everything you see is peonies,” says Marji.

    Alaska is home to 200 commercial peony farmers, clustered in the three hot spots around its center and south-central coast. The state isn’t known for its agricultural exports, but peonies have quickly become a cash crop for its entrepreneurial farmers. Last year, these growers shipped more than 200,000 stems to local, state, and international markets, including Taiwan, Canada, and Korea. Ron Illingworth, who is also president of the Alaska Peony Growers Association, expects it will be closer to 1 million by 2020.

    But as average temperatures in Alaska increase due to greenhouse-gas emissions, the state’s peony farmers are left wondering if their new enterprise may be nipped in the bud. Peonies are grown around the world in a variety of climates, but they’re typically available only for a short time, from late spring to early summer. That gives Alaskan growers a competitive advantage: While peony farms in Chile, the Netherlands, and Canada have generally peaked by May and June, Alaska’s late summers and midnight sun means near-Arctic farmers have peonies available in July and August. This advantage could disappear, however, if climate change shifts the Alaska season so that it overlaps with growers in the other parts of the world.

    “The biggest thing that we’re worried about right now is what’s happening with global warming,” says Illingworth.

    Read more at The Atlantic.

  • Saving the Arctic’s natural heritage

    Saving the Arctic’s natural heritage

    The Arctic Ocean may look inhospitable, but it teems with life along its coasts and within the unexpected, ice-free oases brimming with seabirds gorging on plankton and krill. Despite the anchor these places provide for many of the planet’s birds, whales and marine mammals, almost none have a spot on the World Heritage list, a jaw-dropping catalogue of wonders maintained by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

    Now a group of global scientists want to fix that oversight. On Tuesday, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, made up of more than 170 countries, government agencies, and more than 1,000 conservation groups, singled out seven Arctic marine sites that could potentially qualify for UNESCO World Heritage status.

    More than 1,000 sites around the world have earned the UNESCO designation, based on their “outstanding universal value,” including the Grand Canyon and the Great Barrier Reef, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and China’s Great Wall. Yet only five sites are found within the limits of the Arctic Circle, and only one of them, Russia’s Wrangel Island Reserve, is a marine site, frequented by hundreds of thousands of Pacific walrus and serving as the summer feeding grounds for some visiting humpback whales from Baja California, Mexico.

    → Keep reading this story over at The Atlantic