George Noongwook, the lanky, bespectacled Yupik Alaskan, who is the chair of Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, was a recent guest of the Peary MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center at Bowdoin College, along with a half dozen other native Alaskan leaders. Collectively these visiting Yupik and Inupiat leaders have contributed invaluable local knowledge to the management of all the important marine mammal populations of the high Arctic on which their communities have depended for approximately two millennia. The purpose of these leaders’ visit was to provide first-person accounts of the effects of rapid melting of the Arctic sea ice on their communities.
A week earlier I was a guest of another local leader; a lanky, occasionally bespectacled, New Englander from New Bedford, John Bullard. Bullard is descended from a traditional New England whaling family, and has recently been given the unenviable task of directing the Northeast Office of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Fisheries Service, which controls fishing (among other natural resources) between Maine and North Carolina. Almost as soon as Bullard took over, NOAA officially declared the New England commercial fishery for cod and a host of other groundfish to be a disaster. Then hard on the heels of the federal fisheries disaster declaration, NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center published a report that found that ocean temperatures between Cape Hatteras and the Gulf of Maine from January to June of 2012 had been the highest ever recorded. Let me repeat that: region-wide sea surface temperatures and a host of other temperature measurements—from deep basins to near shore estuaries—along a 1500-mile section of the Atlantic Coast out to 200 miles offshore, have never been higher.
What are our oceans telling us?
To most of us, the frozen expanses of the Arctic ocean seem to be among the earth’s most desolate and forbidding regions. In fact, the Arctic’s terrestrial ecosystems are devoid of trees and nearly lifeless in winter; but its oceans are actually teeming with life. Tiny particles of bacteria attach to the undersides of translucent sheets of sea ice, which are grazed by swarms of phytoplankton, which become meals for krill-like crustaceans and so on through intricate food webs to sustain populations of large whales, walrus, seals and polar bears year round. Take away the sea ice and guess what happens. Guessing what happens is the correct way to phrase the question because no one knows what is going to happen—only that we are in the midst of a giant experiment. The last time the Arctic Ocean was ice-free was 55 million years ago during the Eocene.
According to George Noongwook and his fellow subsistence hunters, whatever long-term effects the rapid melting of Arctic sea ice may hold for marine mammal populations, the immediate effect is a new gold rush—a black gold rush. During the past few years, major oil and gas companies have leased vast new areas of Alaskan waters that used to be too choked with sea ice to explore and hundreds of commercial vessels are steaming into the newly ice free waters to harvest its riches.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that under Alaska’s once-frozen oceans there may be 75 billion barrels of oil, 1.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 37 billion barrels of natural gas liquids. One third of these totals are on Alaska’s outer continental shelf and, if accurate, would be equivalent to the reserves of the United Arab Emirates, the sixth largest member of the Organization of Petroleum Producers. It seems ironic, to say the least, that the fossil fuel industry, which is financing ads discounting the science of climate change, is in the vanguard of the stampede into recently ice-free waters of the Arctic. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds—but not to worry, these are not small undertakings. Shell Oil, for instance, which recently shut down oil explorations in the Beaufort Sea for the season, has already invested about $3 billion for the permits to begin exploratory drilling.
But back to the disaster closer to home. The huge cutbacks proposed in fishing effort for Gulf of Maine cod and other species have hit New England fishermen like a tsunami. Part of the reason for fishermen’s disbelief that cutting the harvest of cod and other species by more than 70 percent is necessary is that just two years ago, surveys indicated that cod and other groundfish populations were rebuilding. There are two scenarios for why such radically different results could be obtained from surveys just two years apart. The first explanation is that government scientists do not know how to count fish. The second explanation is that something important has become unhinged in the marine ecosystem.
To get a big year class of cod “recruited” into the population that can be fished two to three years down the road, requires not just an adequate number of spawning adults, but also the exquisitely tuned timing of the appearance of phytoplankton and zooplankton blooms upon which their tiny larval fish can feed. Not only do the plankton need to be at the right place at the right time, but they need to be the right size for the larval fish to eat. If they are too big, the fish starve; too small, they cannot find them.
When this finely tuned system is interrupted, we end up with a “recruitment failure,” fish-speak for a year class failure. Mismatches between plankton blooms and fish hatches occur in nature, if not all the time, at least frequently enough for multiple redundancies to have evolved in the system. Mostly this involves older fish that spawn their millions of eggs more slowly over longer periods of time, which helps compensate for such mismatches. But sadly, we have taken virtually all the older fish out of New England groundfish populations and rely on teenage fish spawning for the first or second time to maintain populations. A much less resilient system.
The message in these events is unmistakable: the ocean is warming with unknown effects, not just in the entire Northeast Atlantic and the Arctic Ocean, but through other remote areas of the earth’s oceans, where there are very few people to provide first-hand accounts and precious few temperature records beneath the sea surface. But where we have both human observers and sophisticated and comprehensive ocean temperature measurements, the changes appear to be profound.
Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen; the roulette wheel is spinning.
Philip Conkling is president and founder of the Island Institute based in Rockland, Maine.