From our community:
Lake Hazen, located on northern Ellesmere Island in Canada’s far north is, by volume, the largest lake north of the Arctic Circle. Arctic indigenous people’s first arrived at Lake Hazen circa 2500 BC. At various times since then, a succession of arctic-adapted cultures, including the modern Inuit, have hunted muskox in the region and fished Lake Hazen’s plentiful population of Arctic Char.
Lake Hazen has a maximum depth of 867 feet, a surface area of 335 square miles and a catchment area of 4,260 square miles. “The NW half of its catchment is extensively glaciated, while the Hazen Plateau characterized by polar desert tundra lies to the SE. Lake Hazen is an ideal system for examining the impacts of recent climate change on Arctic freshwater ecosystems due to its large size, the variety of ecosystems found within its watershed (including glaciers, tundra, wetlands and other aquatic ecosystems), its location within protected Quttinirpaaq National Park”.
Researchers found that Lake Hazen is reacting rapidly to warming global temperatures in a once stable region of the Arctic.
University of Toronto news release on the newest horrors being discovered in the Arctic:
“Even in a place so far north, it’s no longer cold enough to prevent the glaciers from shrinking,” says the U of T Mississauga geographer and lead author of the study. “If this place is no longer conducive for glaciers to grow, there are not many other refuges left on the planet.
snip
“We showed that climate has many different impacts, and all components of the watershed are intricately connected,” he says. “The physical, biological and chemical aspects are responding directly to climate changes.”
snip
“The lake and the lake ecosystem have been in a relatively stable state for hundreds of years, but all it took was a one-degree increase in regional air temperature for it to enter a completely new state,” Lehnherr says. “The biological food web looks different, the biogeochemical cycles are accelerated, and we’re observing more organic nutrients, contaminants and carbon coming into the system.”
snip
“The glaciers typically melt a little during the spring and summer seasons, however we noticed that they began to lose more ice than they gained in the winter,” says Lehnherr. “We are now seeing the ice mass declining, which is surprising, because the lake is one of the most northerly of Canadian lakes. Water takes a lot of energy to warm up, and can store a lot of heat energy. A large lake, like Lake Hazen, theoretically should be more resilient to climate change relative to a pond or smaller body of water. If this lake is exhibiting signs of climate change, it really shows how pervasive these changes are.
From the study.
In this study, we investigate how a warming climate has impacted the Lake Hazen watershed from its glacier headwaters, all the way through to the Arctic Char at the top of the aquatic foodweb, using a combination of historical, contemporary, modeled and paleoliminological datasets. We hypothesized that, due to its large size and thermal inertia, Lake Hazen would be more resilient to Arctic warming (c.f. ref.12) than smaller aquatic ecosystems, a number of which have already undergone significant regime shifts13,14,15. However, we demonstrate that the Lake Hazen watershed was not resilient to even an ~1 °C relative increase in recent summer air temperatures. Accelerated melt in the cryosphere resulted in an ~10 times increase in delivery of glacial meltwaters, sediment, organic carbon and legacy contaminants to Lake Hazen and a reduction in summer lake ice cover. Changes to the physical and chemical components of the watershed caused an ecological reorganization of the algal (diatom) community assemblage and a decline in the physiological condition of Arctic Char.
How Canada Could Prevent Drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and Save the Porcupine Caribou
Caribou, like many large mammals, require huge tracts of relatively undisturbed land to thrive. The routes of migratory herds can be imperiled by development, such as pipelines or roads, that divides the landscape or gives easier access to predators. The area that could be opened to drilling is the Porcupine herd’s calving grounds, rich territory where the animals migrate each year to give birth.
It’s also the site of another kind of riches: the so-called “1002 area,” a potentially lucrative patch of land near Prudhoe Bay. It could contain more than six per cent of the total recoverable oil in the entire United States, at about 7.7 billion barrels.
Trump made the controversial decision to undo decades of conservation in the region, apparently, on a whim.
“I really didn’t care about it,” Trump told a congressional Republican retreat in early February. “And then when I heard that everybody wanted it, for 40 years they’ve been trying to get it approved, I said, ‘Make sure you don’t lose ANWR.’”
There may be something else Trump doesn’t know much about, though, and it could put the brakes on drilling in the refuge: a treaty, signed between the governments of Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan in 1987.
The treaty requires that the governments “take appropriate action to conserve the Porcupine Caribou Herd and its habitat,” including considering effects of activities (like, for instance, drilling), avoiding disrupting migration and considering cumulative effects on the landscape.
The mid-terms are coming.
RESIST THE TRUMP REGIME-MARK YOUR CALENDARS
March for Science: April 14
Earth Day 2018: End Plastic Pollution: Countdown to April 22.