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July 7, 2009 – At Sea, 64 14N 166 36W
by Herb McCormick
(July 7): These days, no matter what we’re talking about here on Ocean Watch, the conversation always circles back to it. The word is so small, but what it represents is so large (though by almost all accounts it used to be so much larger), that the disconnect between the two is practically complete. One of the primary reasons we set out on this adventure in the first place was to gain a better understanding of what’s happening to it, and in the next few weeks the very success (or, you know, failure) of the voyage itself will depend on how well we negotiate it. Its three small letters add up to one very big concern.
Ice.
After a week-long visit to the remote Alaskan city of Nome-look up the word “hardscrabble” in the dictionary for the full black-and-white illustration-Ocean Watch is again underway, having slipped out through the breakwater at 0900 and into the Bering Sea. The gritty boys on the gold-rush dredges were already at it, and we could see the
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| Gold-dredging barge, typical – sort of. |
first rustlings of human enterprise on the beachfront camps hard by the cold sea. In so many ways-the rusty, slapped-together dredges; the apocalyptic landscape; the general vibe of life on the very edge-Nome seemed like a cross between the movies Mad Max and Waterworld. In honor of the millions that preceded him, I slapped one last mosquito as its dusty streets faded in our wake. No question about it: Nome had me at good-bye.
Next Stop: Barrow
Frankly, we would’ve been out of there a few days ago, except for the – you guessed it – ice. In a nutshell: Our next stop is Barrow, first town on your right after you slip through the Bering Strait. Barrow has one small lagoon with tenable anchorage for a sailboat like Ocean Watch. There’s still winter ice in the lagoon, and the coast of Barrow is a lee shore in a northerly, and a very dangerous one if pack ice further north comes drifting down. So we’re taking it slow – we may even pull into the small settlement of Teller this evening, there aren’t many other places on this coast to hide or visit – and expect to arrive in Barrow in the next few days.
Aboard Ocean Watch, our resident ice guru is David Thoreson, who’s made two attempts at the Northwest Passage, the first (unsuccessful) run in 1994, the second (successful) transit in 2007. We’re guessing you can guess what stopped him in ‘94: It was cold and hard and impassable. In ‘07, those same waters were totally clear. David and his mates on Cloud Nine didn’t so much as nudge a cube as they sailed through a passage completely ice free.
Having seen both sides of the Passage, he’s been consistent with the message he keeps sending to the rest of the crew. “We need to be patient,” he says. “That’s the number one thing. Most people get in trouble because they become impatient. Impatient people don’t survive up here.”
Along with the excellent ice maps we’re downloading from the Canadian Ice Service, David has a collection of similar maps from the same months in 2007 and 2008. They make instructive viewing. The crucial stretch of the Passage is in the Eastern Arctic, well over a thousand miles from our current position. Once in Barrow, however, the first waters that will open are directly to the east. Again: Patience.
“If you get out there and you get into a northerly and the pack ice comes down and you get pressed against that shore, you’re toast,” he said. “It’s so wide and exposed that it’s just a dangerous run from Pt. Barrow eastward. The whole polar ice cap is sitting right on top of you. And now that we’ve been up here you’re getting a feel for how shallow that water is by now, right? It’s a dangerous combination.
“So you have to be real careful about that entry point east of Barrow. Otherwise, looking at the maps and ice synopsis so far, it looks like a normal melt season in relation to the last couple of years. We’ve had good weather and made good time, but that’s the problem with the Arctic. You arrive a little early and feel like you have to keep going. The ice schedule is the ice schedule. It will not be dictated by us.”
Ice and Science
Of course, though we’re taking all this rather personally, what’s happening to the Arctic sea ice has broad ramifications to our planet and the people who live on it. Satellite imagery shows without a shadow of a doubt that over the last several years the polar ice cap has disappeared to a shocking degree. Australian scientist Tim Flannery addressed this very topic in his book, The Weather Makers.
“At its current rate of decline, little if any of the Arctic ice cap will be left by the end of the century,” he writes, “and this will significantly change the Earth’s ‘albedo.’
(Albedo is Latin for ‘whiteness,’ and in this instance describes the mechanism through which solar energy is reflected back to space by white surfaces like the polar ice caps, an important factor in global climate control.)
“Remember,” he continues, “one-third of the sun’s rays falling on Earth is reflected back to space. Ice, particularly at the Poles, is responsible for a lot of that albedo, for it reflects back into space up to 90 percent of the sunlight hitting it. Water, in contrast, is a poor reflector. When the sun is overhead, it reflects a mere 5 to 10 percent of light back to space, though, as you may have noticed while watching a sunset by the sea, the amount of light reflected off water increases as the sun approaches the horizon. Replacing Arctic ice with a dark ocean will result in a lot more of the sun’s rays being absorbed at the Earth’s surface and reradiated as heat, creating local warming, which, in a classic example of a positive feedback loop, will hasten the melting of the remaining continental ice.”
Oh, dear.
One can understand why the entire topic raises some conflicting emotions aboard Ocean Watch. We need safe leads through the ice, but those very leads represent the Ace of Spades in a house of cards.
So, yes, as we head north we’re thinking a lot about ice. We’re starting to feel everyone should spend more time doing the same.
-Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson
This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Strato
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