Essential Question: How are Arctic sea-ice, climate and culture all connected?
Sea ice is ocean water, or in other words, salt water that freezes. Sea ice shouldn’t be confused with icebergs, which are pieces of glaciers or ice shelves that break off into the ocean and are made of fresh water. Sea ice is found in the Arctic and Antarctic, and spreads over a larger area in the winter and melts in the summer. Some sea ice can be found year around. The world’s oceans are covered with 15% of sea ice during part of the year.
Sea ice and global climate are intricately connected. The surface of sea ice is bright, or has high albedo, reflecting a significant amount of sunlight back into space. The result is cooler temperatures, which is important to maintaining the local and global ecosystems as well as the movement of global ocean currents. Dense, cold, salt water sinks to the ocean floor and moves toward the equator, while warmer equatorial water moves along the surface toward the poles. These temperature differences in ocean currents are crucial in circulating nutrients and global climate patterns.
Unfortunately human activities have increased concentrations of greenhouse gases resulting in global warming. The increase in average global temperatures has impacted Earth’s polar regions first. This is because increasing water temperatures have begun to melt sea ice and therefore decrease the albedo of the polar regions. This causes the water to warm up faster and faster the more ice is melted. Without the cooling effect of the sea-ice global temperatures will be harder to control, climate patterns will be greatly disrupted, and ocean currents will be irreversibly altered. Now humans that were never that concerned about the most isolated, scantly populated, and coldest parts of the globe are now realizing that in destroying it they may have permanently altered the planet along with their lifestyle.
I found one example of global climate change altering human activities on Our World 2.0, one of the many useful resources presented in this module. The article and corresponding video discuss the nomadic shepherds of Kyrgyzstan’s grasslands, and how global climate change is affecting their grazing lands and indigenous lifestyle. Resources such as Our World 2.O and NASA are essential to allow students to see the diverse impacts of topics such as global climate change on real people. In addition, resources such as the 2009 Indigenous People’s Global Summit on Climate Change—Anchorage Declaration allow students to see steps that people are actively taking to address the issue of climate change. In particular I really connected to number 6 of the “calls to action” in the Anchorage declaration. I feel like I have been struggling to articulate the concept of “false solutions” to climate change for years until reading that portion of the declaration. Resources such as these can only enrich the learning experience for students and encourage independent exploration.
Welcome to my first blog. This blog was created to participate in the course, Explore Alaska! - Alaska Native and Western Perspectives on Land & Climate. The main purpose for the blog is to use it as a posting board as I attempt to answer a weekly Essential Question. I look forward to reading other student responses in their blogs and in doing so, make valuable connections and applications in the classroom.
