Fixing the hole in the North Pole
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** Fixing the hole in the North Pole**
Copyright © 2000 Nando Media
Copyright © 2000 Scripps McClatchy Western Service
By DOUG O'HARRA, Anchorage Daily News
(September 4, 2000 2:48 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - "The North Pole is melting," The New York Times declared in a lead story two weeks ago.
In a story that surprised readers across the nation, the Times
reported that "an ice-free patch of ocean about a mile wide has opened at the very top of the world, something that has presumably never before been seen by humans. ... The last time scientists can be certain the pole was awash in water was more than 50 million years ago."
The paper characterized the observation, made by scientists and tourists on a July trip to the Pole aboard a Russian icebreaker, as evidence of global warming's relentless acceleration in the Arctic.
Not exactly, the paper admitted a week later.
Open water at the North Pole isn't that unusual. And the condition of the Arctic Ocean's ice cap and its relationship to global climate change are more complex than the Times first reported. A later story, published Aug. 29 in the Times' Science section, admitted as much and went into extensive details with satellite photos.
The original Times story was based on interviews with internationally respected scientists who saw the open water but who do not study the Arctic Ocean full time. That caveat frustrated some Alaska and Washington researchers, who say the journalist and the scientists, while well-meaning, overreacted.
Not only has open water been observed at or near the North Pole many times, said Doug Schneider, public information officer of the Alaska Sea Grant College, but the prevalence of open leads in the polar ice cap has far more to do with ocean currents and wind patterns than global warming.
Still, it's true that the ice cap thinned as much as 40 percent between the 1960s and the 1990s, according to researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Washington. In addition, average temperatures have risen in the Arctic over the past decades. But local scientists say it's not clear whether these changes are natural cycles or a consequence of global warming.
The whole issue began with the Aug. 19 story by noted science journalist John Noble Wilford. His story was based on accounts by several scientists who had just returned from the North Pole. They included oceanographer James McCarthy, director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and a leader of a United Nation's panel on climate change.
McCarthy and other scientists didn't see thick ice on their route north, which surprised them, a feeling he expressed Aug. 25 on National Public Radio.
Among those amazed at the thinness of the ice was the captain of the icebreaker, who was making his 11th visit to the region.
When the group found the lead of open water over the Pole, they were stunned.
"I don't know if anybody in history ever got to 90 degrees north to be greeted by water," Malcolm McKenna, a paleontologist at New York's American Museum of Natural History, told the Times.
McKenna's photograph of the slate-gray lead, rimmed by thin pale ice, graced the cover of the Times. The story went on to link the open water to global warming.
But Alaska scientists and others quickly called the interpretations premature, if not wrong.
Arctic Ocean ice thickness appears to be governed by a 60- to 70-year cycle that may be triggered by a complex process in the North Atlantic Ocean, according to Igor Polyakov, a physical oceanographer at the International Arctic Research Center in Fairbanks.
So what about the report of open water?
On any summer day, as much as 15 percent of the Arctic Ocean remains ice-free, according to UAF physical oceanographer Mark Johnson. Johnson told Schneider that the 6-mile-long lead reported by the polar excursion was normal for midsummer.
Contact Doug O'Harra at the Anchorage Daily News in Alaska, http://www.adn.com.
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