Dozens of Words for Snow, None for Pollution

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...Despite living amid pristine ice and glacier-carved bedrock, people like Mamarut, Tukummeq, and Gedion are more vulnerable to pollution than anyone else on earth. Mercury concentrations in Qaanaaq mothers are the highest ever recorded, 12 times greater than the level that poses neurological risks to fetuses, according to U.S. government standards. A separate study has linked PCBs with slight effects on the intelligence of children in Qaanaaq. Although most of the village's people never leave their hunting grounds, the world travels to them, riding upon wintry winds.


THE ARCTIC has been transformed into the planet's chemical trash can, the final destination for toxic waste that originates thousands of miles away. Atmospheric and oceanic currents conspire to send industrial chemicals, pesticides, and power-plant emissions on a journey to the Far North. Many airborne chemicals tend to migrate to, and precipitate in, cold climates, where they then endure for decades, perhaps centuries, slow to break down in the frigid temperatures and low sunlight. The Arctic Ocean is a deep-freeze archive, holding the memories of the world's past and present mistakes. Its wildlife, too, are archives, as poisonous chemicals accumulate in the fat that Arctic animals need to survive. Polar bears denning in Norway and Russia near the North Pole carry some of the highest levels of toxic compounds ever found in living animals.

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The first evidence of alarming levels of toxic substances in the bodies of Arctic peoples came from the Canadian Inuit. In 1987, Dr. Eric Dewailly, an epidemiologist at Laval University in Quebec, was surveying contaminants in the breast milk of mothers near the industrialized, heavily polluted Gulf of St. Lawrence, when he met a midwife from Nunavik, the Inuit area of Arctic Quebec. (Across the Hudson Bay, the Inuit also have their own self-governing territory, Nunavut, or "our land.") She asked whether he wanted milk samples from Nunavik women. Dewailly reluctantly agreed, thinking they might be useful as "blanks," samples with nondetectable pollution levels.


A few months later, glass vials holding half a cup of milk from each of 24 Nunavik women arrived. Dewailly soon got a phone call from his lab director. Something was wrong with the Arctic milk. The chemical concentrations were off the charts. The peaks overloaded the lab's equipment, running off the page. The technician thought the samples must have been tainted in transit. <more>

http://www.mercuryexposure.org/index.php?article_id=383

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/01/12_402.html

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1. What do you call permafrost once it melts? n/t

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2. I don't know...

This is a great article about permafrost, etc., though:


"Romanovsky estimates that most of it (permafrost) in Alaska probably dates back to the beginning of the last glacial cycle. This means that if it thaws it will be doing so for the first time in more than a hundred and twenty thousand years. <snip>

In most parts of Alaska, the permafrost has warmed by three degrees since the early nineteen-eighties. In some parts of the state, it has warmed by nearly six degrees....

It is now known, or at least almost universally accepted, that glacial cycles are initiated by slight, periodic variations in the earth’s orbit. These orbital variations alter the distribution of sunlight at different latitudes during different seasons according to a complex pattern that takes a hundred thousand years to complete. But orbital variations in themselves aren’t nearly sufficient to produce the sort of massive ice sheet that moved the Madison Boulder.

The crushing size of that ice sheet, the Laurentide, which stretched over some five million square miles, was the result of feedbacks, more or less analogous to those now being studied in the Arctic, only operating in reverse. As ice built up, albedo increased, leading to less heat absorption and the growth of yet more ice. At the same time, for reasons that are not entirely understood, as the ice sheets advanced CO2 levels declined: during each of the most recent glaciations, carbon-dioxide levels dropped almost precisely in synch with falling temperatures. During each warm period, when the ice retreated, CO2levels rose again. Ice cores from Antarctica contain a record of the atmosphere stretching back more than four glacial cycles—minute samples of air get trapped in tiny bubbles—and researchers who have studied these cores have concluded that fully half the temperature difference between cold periods and warm ones can be attributed to changes in the concentrations of greenhouse gases. Antarctic ice cores also show that carbon-dioxide levels today are significantly higher than they have been at any other point in the last four hundred and twenty thousand years.

While I was at crrel, Perovich took me to meet a colleague of his named John Weatherly. Posted on Weatherly’s office door was a bumper sticker designed to be pasted—illicitly—on S.U.V.s. It said, “I’m Changing the Climate! Ask Me How!” For the last several years, Weatherly and Perovich have been working to translate the data gathered on the Des Groseilliers expedition into computer algorithms to be used in climate forecasting. Weatherly told me that some climate models—worldwide, there are about fifteen major ones in operation—predict that the perennial sea-ice cover in the Arctic will disappear entirely by the year 2080. At that point, although there would continue to be seasonal ice that forms in winter, in summer the Arctic Ocean would be completely ice-free. “That’s not in our lifetime,” he observed. “But it is in the lifetime of our kids.”


http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050425fa_fact3