Arctic Meltdown

Sledding at the North Pole isn't likely to be an option much longer. The ice cap is thinning, glaciers are melting, and the process seems to be accelerating. In 2005 scientists of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment team, led by Robert Corell, predicted that the Arctic ice sheets would be gone by the end of the century. At the time some critics charged that Corell and his team were alarmist. But since then scientific predictions have grown more dire. What can the world do to slow or stop the process? Delegates from 187 countries reached agreement in Bali last week to begin two years of intense negotiations on a new climate treaty, but the talks produced no concrete targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Corell, director of the Climate Change Program at the H. John Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization in Washington, D.C., believes greater urgency is needed. He spoke to NEWSWEEK's Jeffrey Bartholet. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: When did you first go to the Arctic, and what did it look like then?
Robert Corell: I started going to the Arctic in the late '60s, when we were starting to ask questions about climate change in high-latitude areas. We were coring beneath the sea ice to obtain a long-term climate record. At that stage we were not aware that there were likely to be the big changes we see today. We were taking sediment cores beneath the ice to document the climate record for much of the past million years. I've been going back ever since.

How has it changed since then, just in terms of what you see when you go there?
In the '70s I was going to Greenland and places across the Arctic region, but there was no substantial evidence of melting at that time. I was there for four months on one trip, and we never saw any melting of the Greenland ice sheet. We might have seen a little mushiness here and there, but not any serious melting. We had two C-130 aircraft and flew all over. The difference between then and now is incredible. Now, if you fly all along the coasts of Greenland, there's lots of blue melt water, with rivulets of water going into the moulins [wide holes in the ice], draining down. It's really dramatic.

You've said you can actually see the glaciers slipping into the sea "like toothpaste squeezing from a tube." How fast are they moving?
The Ilulissat Glacier is "oozing like toothpaste" from the Greenland glacial ice sheet at a rate of about 15 kilometers per year. At that rate the front of the glacier is calving about two meters an hour. The melt water of this one glacier over one day would supply the water needs of a large city like New York or London for a whole year.

If current trends continue, when do you expect the North Pole to be marked by a buoy?
A scientific paper by Dr. Jay Zwally at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, published only a few days ago, suggests that not only is the aerial extent shrinking, but also the ice is thinning much more rapidly than we had previously thought. He's suggesting that the Arctic oceanic ice sheets will likely be gone [in the summer] somewhere between 2012 and 2015. Other scientists are projecting [that this will happen] between 2020 and 2030. But it's increasingly clear that on the current trajectory, we're going to have an ice-free Arctic in the summertime within a decade or two.

The predictions have been getting more dire by the year. In 2004 a panel of eminent scientists—yourself included—warned that the Arctic ice cap could be gone by the end of the century. And then a year later, in '05, the prediction was midcentury. Then a report issued by the U.N.Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) earlier this year made new predictions that were even more dire, which have since been overtaken again with new reports that melting accelerated again this summer. What's going on?
It's happening so rapidly that we just haven't been able to get all the experimental data and papers out fast enough to track reality. My own opinion is that the feedback mechanisms in the Arctic are accelerating. For example, ice is a mirror to the sun and reflects almost all the sun's energy back into space. When it melts, it is replaced by water—which looks like a black-body radiator, which absorbs 80 percent of the sun's energy. So as the ice gets smaller, there's this feedback process that's accelerating. A good way to think about it is this: In 2005 the area of sea-ice melt in the Arctic Ocean equaled about the size of the eastern United States, from Ohio east. By 2007, that area of sea-ice melt was already equivalent to the eastern U.S. out to Kansas and the Dakotas. That's a huge amount of ice that's being melted. The amount of sea ice left now in the summer months is half of what it was in 1979.