In 2019, Donald Trump claimed he was considering buying Greenland from Denmark. And in Greenland, vanishing ice is unearthing a wealth of uranium, zinc, gold, iron and rare earth elements. The Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago could soon yield another shortcut. China is heavily investing in the increasingly ice-free Northern Sea Route over the top of Russia, which promises to cut shipping times between the Far East and Europe by 10 to 15 days. Melting ice has made the region’s abundant mineral deposits and oil and gas reserves more accessible by ship. Yet some find opportunities in the crisis. Warmer winters have forced many of them to change how they conduct their livelihoods, for example by providing supplemental feed for their reindeer. In Europe and Russia, the Sami people herd thousands of reindeer across the tundra. Inuit use all parts of the caribou: sinew for thread, hide for clothing, antlers for tools, and flesh for food. Such losses have devastated the indigenous people whose culture and livelihoods are interwoven with the plight of the reindeer and caribou. Overall, the global population of reindeer and caribou has declined by 56% in the last 20 years. Disastrous rain-on-snow events have also increased in frequency, locking the ungulates’ preferred forage foods in ice between 20, an estimated 61,000 animals died on Russia’s Yamal peninsula due to mass starvation during a rainy winter. This hurts the millions of reindeer and caribou who eat mosses, lichens, and stubbly grasses. In recent summers, infernos have torn across the tundra of Sweden, Alaska, and Russia, destroying native vegetation. The soaring heat leads to raging wildfires, now common in hotter and drier parts of the Arctic. This thawing permafrost releases two potent greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, into the atmosphere and exacerbates planetary warming. This spring, one of the fuel tanks at a Russian power plant collapsed and leaked 21,000 metric tons of diesel into nearby waterways, which attributed the cause of the spill to subsiding permafrost. In Siberia, giant craters pockmark the tundra as temperatures soar, hitting 100F (38C) in the town of Verkhoyansk in July. “Even if we keep warming to less than 2C, it’s still enough to lose that summer sea ice in some years.”Īt outposts in the Canadian Arctic, permafrost is thawing 70 years sooner than predicted. “The latest models are basically showing that no matter what emissions scenario we follow, we’re going to lose summer ice cover before the middle of the century,” says Julienne Stroeve, a senior research scientist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center. Photograph: Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket/Getty Images A new study predicts that summer sea ice floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean could disappear entirely by 2035. A walrus rests on an ice floe near Svalbard, Norway.
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