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> Global Warming, NYT articles on global warming in Alaska
Judy Fenwick
post Jun 27 2005, 02:59 PM
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Max and Amy: You left the Lower 48 the same day that the New York Times Sunday travel section had a three-page spread cover story, entitled "The Race to Alaska Before It Melts: Is the state's icy beauty under threat from global warming? Many tourists aren't waiting to find out." The article focuses on the glaciers of southern Alaska from the Exit Glacier near Anchorage all the way east to the Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau.
How is your research this summer on rivers in the Arctic related to global warming and climate change?

Judy Fenwick (co-worker of Max Holmes)
Woods Hole Research Center
jfenwick@whrc.org
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Max_Holmes
post Jun 28 2005, 11:26 AM
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Hi Judy,

Thanks for alerting us to the New York Times article about warming in Alaska. I actually saw someone reading it on the airplane Sunday as we were flying from Boston to Seattle, so we entertained ourselves during our 10 hour ordeal in the Seattle airport by looking for used copies of it laying around (we found 2).

You asked a very good question about how our work on arctic rivers relates to global warming. I’ll give a short answer and then point you to a couple of links on the web that will give more detailed information.

In brief, as the Earth warms more atmospheric moisture moves from the tropics to the Arctic. This leads to increased precipitation in the Arctic, which causes river discharge to increase. For example, discharge from the major arctic rivers in Russia has increased more than 7% since the 1930’s, and we expect that increases will be much greater over the coming decades. We are measuring lots of different chemical compounds found naturally in river water, in order to chemically “fingerprint” the different rivers so that we can follow their freshwater as it circulates in the Arctic Ocean. This is important because increasing freshwater inputs to the Arctic Ocean and North Atlantic Ocean have the potential to impact ocean circulation and global climate, but we need to understand how freshwater is transported through the Arctic Ocean in order to better predict how circulation in the Atlantic Ocean may be impacted. So by “fingerprinting” the major rivers of the Arctic, we’ll be able to learn more about how river water is mixed into and transported through the Arctic Ocean, which are critical processes for understanding how increasing river discharge will impact ocean circulation and climate.

If you want to learn more about this, I have two publications and a website to suggest. The first publication is a scientific paper that documents increasing river discharge in the Russian Arctic and discusses potential implications for ocean circulation. The second publication is a newspaper article that discusses our project in general terms but focuses on the involvment a 13 (now 14) year old girl in Siberia. The publications are attached and our project website is at http://ecosystems.mbl.edu/partners.

Again, thanks very much for the excellent question.

Max


Attached File(s)
Attached File  Increasing_Arctic_River_Discharge_SCIENCE_2002.pdf ( 335.97k ) Number of downloads: 22
Attached File  News_Story_about_Anya_Suslova.pdf ( 1.45mb ) Number of downloads: 21
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