With arctic sea ice melting like ice cubes in soda, scientists want to protect a region they say will someday be the sole remaining frozen bastion of a disappearing world. Spanning the northern Canadian archipelago and western Greenland, it would be the first area formally protected in response to climate change, and a last-ditch effort to save polar bears and other animals.
With arctic sea ice melting like ice cubes in soda, scientists want to protect a region they say will someday be the sole remaining frozen bastion of a disappearing world.
Spanning the northern Canadian archipelago and western Greenland, it would be the first area formally protected in response to climate change, and a last-ditch effort to save polar bears and other animals.
"All the indications are of huge change, and a huge response is needed if you want to have polar bears beyond 2050," said Peter Ewins, the World Wildlife Fund's Director of Species Conservation.
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National Parks have proven to be one of the most important ways to protect and preserve natural areas and wildlife. First established in the United States in 1916, national parks have since been adopted internationally. But protecting an area outside of a single country's borders could prove to be difficult.
The arctic sea ice is composed of vast plains of three- to nine-foot-thick ice that cover the top of the northern hemisphere. Though some of the ice melts each summer, much of it remains frozen year-round — or, at least, it used to.
Summer melts are accelerating, and winter re-freezing can no longer make up the difference. Every summer now seems to be accompanied by news of unprecedented ice loss and more waters open for the first time in known history.
"When the (Ice Age) glaciers retreated, there was ice left in different spots around the world. Those isolated pockets of biodiversity were called refugia," said Stephanie Pfirman, an environmental science professor at Barnard College. "The same is likely to happen in the Arctic."
If current greenhouse gas emission trends continue, the proposed protected region will be the only area with year-round ice, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
"The IPCC reports published over the last few years pretty much agree that even if we switched off our carbon power stations and SUVs tomorrow, we'd have significant shrinkage of ice-dominated ecosystems to the middle of the century — and in reality, it could be faster than that," Ewins said.
Protecting the ice won't be easy: a warming Arctic means new shipping routes and newly-accessible natural resources, from oil to diamonds and uranium. But this isn't the first time humanity has chosen between material wealth and icy treasure.
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