Week 3
13 April 2006 Solutions for the first set of problems are posted below (under Essays and Problem Set Assignments)
12 April 2006 Maps...a good thing to spend some time with. We have mentioned the official Canadian website for maps, atlas.gc.ca. Visit also Athropolis, "a web site of all things cold, icy and Arctic".

11 April 2006 Today's web-searching lecture by Louise Richards of the Ocean and Fisheries Library gives us a lot of insight into literature about Arctic and environment. UW has an enormous number of electronic journals, and of traditional books, atlases and journals. The Arctic and Geobase databases turned up much of interest. It is good to see Knud Rasmussen's original works on his Thule expeditions available (translated into English). It is very challenging to use the Web creatively: the vast amount of information requires discipline for it to be used well. The worst aspect is that we can copy relevant-looking paragraphs relating to our work without either understanding them fully, or assessing their quality.

Free film: Saturday 8 April 6.00/7.30 pm
Ethnic Culture Center UW and UW Canadian Studies Center present
An Evening with Canadian 1st Nation Filmmakers


Two Worlds Colliding, by Tasha Hubbard
It's a bonechilling -20C when Aboriginal man Darell Night finds himself dumped on the city outskirts by police. Night survives, but is stunned to hear that the frozen body of an Aboriginal man has been discovered in the same remote area. The film chronicles the painful story of Saskatoon's infamous 'freezing deaths' and the schism between a fearful, mistrustful Aboriginal community and a police force that must come to terms with a shocking secret. This is recent history, and responsibility for these deaths is still largely unresolved.

Urban Inuk with director Jobie Weetaluktuk
This gripping story follows the lives of three Inuit in Montreal over the course of one hot and humid summer. Through their stories, the film explores the 'urbanization' of the Inuit psyche, as Inuit move farther and farther from a direct connection to the land that has sustained their culture for thousands of years. Scenes of their Arctic origins in the village of Igloolik contrast the streets of Montreal and their attempt to recover a sense of community there.
Reception at 6.00-7.00 in ECC lobby, film screening at 7.30 in ECC Theater, 3940 Brooklyn Ave., UW. Visit ECC.

Visit Igloolik.

More generally, visit the Atlas of Canada and look at maps of the physical environment, the distribution of villages and people. The adjacent picture shows the projected change in mean wintertime temperature for the period 2080-2100, compared with 1975-1995.

The red color refers to +9C (+16 degrees F), while black is greater than +25C, and yellow is 4 to 5C warmer temperatures. These numbers are big!

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Tom Toles cartoon from the Washington Post

To access important research journals while at UW go to the UW website, click on Libraries, then click on E-Journals. For Science magazine, then click on 'S' and scroll until you see Science (Highwire) 10/01/1995-present (there are many journal titles including the word 'science'). Once there, usually you will got to Previous Issues, and search on the author name or topic. For example, for this topic, go to Advanced Search and search on Greenland ice (Words in the title or abstract) and delimit the dates to 2006.

6 iv 2006 We looked in more detail at Time Magazine (3 iv 06 issue), which describe Seattle's Mayor, Greg Nickels, and leading a group of 218 mayors from 39 states in pledging to reduce CO2 emissions...if the federal government won't do it 'top down' let's do it 'bottom up'. Wal-Mart pledges to make their stores greener, and the world's largest carpet manufacturer works to 'climb Mt. Sustainability', that is to make his company have zero footprint on the ecology of the planet. We want to learn about Seattle's environmentally friendly buses too.

Greenland is melting, at least during the past 10 years. The figures below from Science Magazine (24 March 2006, by Ekstrom, Nettles and Tsai), show that small earthquakes, the rumbling of the glaciers as they scrape seaward over bed-rock, has become much louder. The glaciers have accelerated their flow by a factor of 2 to 3 since early 1990s. The GRACE satellites can actually weigh the ice mass from outer space and are showing several tens of cubic km of ice loss per year. In Antarctica the same satellites indicate 148 cubic km of ice loss from Greenland each year. These two sources provide a significant fraction (almost half) of the global rise in sea level.



1 iv 2006
Ian Joughin of Polar Sciences Center, UW shows this figure of the retreat of the Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland. Note the curves and dots showing the air temperature variation from 1880 to 2000+ which are very unusual: in the Arctic and particularly northern Atlantic region, there was a strong warming in the 1920s-1930s followed by slow cooling until the 1980s when warming took over again. The earlier warming is not well understood.

The past few weeks have seen frequent news releases on the melting of polar ice. Greenland particularly is in the news, as its outflowing glaciers have accelerated in the past few years: flowing fast enough that you can see them move if you are standing next to one. Visit ABC News at this link

Using new orbiting satellites in the 'GRACE' mission, which sense small changes in Earth's gravity caused by ice changes, the melting of the Antarctic ice sheets has been observed over the past 3 years.

Last week's Time Magazine has a major cover story on global warming, showing a distraught polar bear on the cover. If you are clever enough to figure out their website, you can read it here.

Upsala glacier in Andes Mountains of Argentina in 1928 (above) and 2004 (below). The glacier is retreating about 60m per year.

Also :
• a new posting on powers of ten
• the Thurs 30 March lecture, with three missing minus signs corrected in red on page 8.

posted Thurs 30iii06. Today we heard the beginning of The End of Nature by Bill McKibben, in which he argues that we imagine changes of the environment to occur very slowly, at the pace of mountains eroding and continents drifting, but we are wrong....in the sense that human civilization spans only 330 generations or so (10 or 12 thousand years). There are some trees that are that old (not species, but individual trees)! Rapid change has always been part of life--individual life or the life of a village or country--but now we are experiencing rapid change of the entire planet, and what he terms 'the end of Nature'.

"By the end of nature I do not mean the end of the world. The rain will still fall and the sun shine, though differently than before. When I say "nature," I mean a certain set of human ideas about the world and our place in it. But the death of those ideas begins with concrete changes in the reality around us--changes that scientists can measure and enumerate. More and more frequently, these changes will clash with our perceptions, until, finally, our sense of nature as eternal and separate is washed away, and we will see all too clearly what we have done."--McKibben, The End of Nature, Anchor Books, 1989.

• UW's Program on the Environment(check their 'What's Happening' section).
• The WorldWatch Institude

• 19 April (Weds) WORLD UNIVERSITIES NETWORK VIDEO SEMINAR - Dr Klaus Keller, Pennsylvania State Univ, "Abrupt climate change: Would we see it coming?", 9:00am, Weds. 19 April 2006, T-239 HSB. This room is on the lowest level of Health Sciences, near the South Campus Center.
  

"The world looks so different after learning science. For example, trees are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back to air, and in the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the sun which was bound in to convert the air into tree. And in the ash is the small remnant of the part which did not come from air, that came from the solid Earth, instead.
These are beautiful things, and the content of science is wonderfully full of them. They are inspiring and they can be used to inspire others." -- Richard Feynmann, physicist, California Inst. of Technology.

"We need a Manhatten Project for energy independence in the US." -- Dennis O'Brien, University of Oklahoma.

"We are living our lives as energy hunter-gatherers rather than energy farmers. The midwest is farmland for windpower and biomass; the southern states and California are farmlands for solar energy." -- Dan Kammen, Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, Univ. of California, Berkeley, on Talk of the Nation, Science Friday, 13 September 2002.

To this we should add: The World-wide Web marks the end of our 'hunter-gatherer' stage in dealing with information. Its effect on students and teachers is enormous. Having an ever increasing proportion of human knowledge at our finger-tips, it is possible to 'write' an essay on almost anything with a few cut-and-paste operations. Properly quoted and cited, this is fair enough, but what, now, does creativity mean, what is learning, and what should be our task as students and teachers? I believe we must make the best of this by moving on: solve problems, get out into the field, apply this huge information resource but do not be fooled into giving up your own, individual creative thought. Peter Rhines, 1iv2006

Click on the image for a larger one.

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Hurricane Bonnie, 1998
Storms large and small:

Hurricanes and their counterparts in the Indian Ocean (tropical cyclones) cause great financial loss in the US and great loss of life in the underdeveloped world. Patterns of global climate change affect hurricanes greatly, an example of the complexity of the environment. For example when el Nino is strongly active in the tropical Pacific, Atlantic hurricanes tend to disappear. The energy source for these whirling storms is the heat of the tropical ocean. In a warmer world these storms may become more intense.

Does the science of hurricanes matter? Obviously, satellite images help us prepare for them, and it costs about $1 million per mile of coastline to evacuate in anticipation of a storm, so prediction of the path of the hurricane is valuable. Loss of life in Bangladesh is enormous; the low-lying land is unusually prone to experience these storms (and vulnerable to them). Yet some economists argue that public health countermeasures following the storm, and rebuilding of jobs and infrastructure is more important than avoiding the immediate destruction by the storm.

Solar cookers are helping to reduce dependence on firewood for fuel in many countries; cooking and purification of water is carried out in units constructed very simply. This is an example of a soft technology, which we can replicate in the lab, and study its efficiency. Building a solar cooker project is an interesting blend of science, engineering and common sense. Go to this website and inspect the designs there (click on captions beneath the illustrations for more complete descriptions). image from http://www.solarcooking.org

In this course we will observe some of these processes, while investigating local and global aspects of fresh water supplies. About 40% of the cattle in the US once drank from underground water supplies from the High Plains aquifer, an underground 'river' that extends from Texas to North Dakota. Irrigation using this source peaked in the early 1980s, and has had to decline as the aquifer is depleted. Half the accessible water was gone by 1993, and it will be exhausted in the next 25 years or so.

There is some evidence that fresh water is moving through the global system more rapidly, because of global warming. This means more evaporation of ocean water in the tropics, more rainfall middle latitudes. Paradoxically, droughts can increase as well because climate change is full of patterns...it is not just a uniform warming or cooling of the Earth.

Click on the image to see the animation of a lab experiment illustrating the flow of ground water (made visible by red dots) toward the sea in a sandy coastal zone like Cape Cod.