Word: arctics
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...August, a wisp of flame suddenly appeared in the Arctic twilight over the Barents Sea, bathing the low clouds over the Norwegian port of Hammerfest in a spectral orange glow. With a tremendous roar, the flame bloomed over the windswept ocean and craggy gray rocks, competing for an instant with the Arctic summer's never-setting sun. The first flare-off of natural gas from the Snohvit (Snow White in Norwegian) gas field, some 90 miles (145 km) offshore, was a beacon of promise: After 25 years of false starts, planning and construction, the first Arctic industrial...
...place where the aurora borealis normally provides celestial beauty, Snow White's luminous apparition also signals caution. What will a new era of exploitation bring to the Arctic, one of the earth's last great uncharted regions? The vast area has long fascinated explorers, but it has just as long been the site of folly and exaggerated expectations. Over centuries, hundreds died in the doomed search for an ice-free Northwest Passage between Asia and Europe, many of them victims of ill-fated stabs at national and personal glory...
This summer, however, saw something new: for the first time in recorded history, the Northwest Passage was ice-free all the way from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The Arctic ice cap's loss through melting this year was 10 times the recent annual average, amounting to an area greater than that of Texas and New Mexico combined. The Arctic has never been immune from politics; during the Cold War, U.S. and Soviet submarines navigated its frigid waters. But now that global warming has rendered the Arctic more accessible than ever - and yet at the same time more fragile...
This was a week for warnings. U.S. government scientists announced that the Arctic ice cap is melting even more rapidly than they had feared; by 2050, 40% of the ice cover in the Arctic Ocean could be gone, a loss that wasn't supposed to happen for 100 years. One scientist called the news "astounding." Since greenhouse gases linger for decades, even drastic reductions in emissions won't be enough to prevent further decline...
...Like receding glaciers in the Arctic, coral reefs are a canary in the global-warming coal mine. "They are a sensitive species that are affected first," says C. Mark Eakin, coordinator of the Coral Reef Watch program of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA). Though climate change awareness is up, the public has a short attention span when it comes to ecosystems it can't see. So do policymakers. Bruno says more coral data is being gathered today by NGOs than universities or national programs, particularly in developing nations. But even in the U.S., NOAA's satellite-data...