We’re all aware that high gasoline prices have caused people to cut back on planned trips and redo household budgets. Research communities, especially those involved in Arctic and Antarctic expeditions, have to do the same thing. Such expeditions need fuel for airplanes, helicopters, and ships to reach sites in the polar regions. They depend on their sponsors to dispatch tankers of fuel and draw on those supplies for their survival and the work of the mission.

According to an article in the July 2, 2008, Chronicle of Higher Education, the National Science Foundation (NSF) sends six million gallons of fuel a year to McMurdo Station in Antarctica for distribution to two other permanent bases and the temporary research camps. In a year the price has gone up 60 percent. The ships that break ice, making it possible for the fuel tankers to reach stations, are themselves using vast amounts of gasoline—6,800 gallons per day while they are cruising as oceanographic laboratories, 9,000 gallons a day when they are working as icebreakers. While the cost per gallon to NSF is slightly less than the rising prices the public must pay, the research group predicts it will have to pay over $4 per gallon in 2009.

One Antarctic expedition that is threatened, according to the Chronicle article, holds great promise for unlocking the oldest climate record on the earth. Four countries planned to set up a camp deep in the interior of Antarctica to survey the Gamburtsev mountain range, which is the size of the Alps and buried under ice. Two survey aircraft would sweep back and forth over the ice to map the hidden mountains. The United States was to provide fuel for the planes but now has to reconsider the price of flying the gas to the remote location.

A program manager for NSF warns there may be a 25 percent cut in the number of new programs in the Arctic. A geophysicist whose proposal for investigating ice-sheet melting in Greenland was rejected after she couldn’t cut her budget is quoted as saying: “Maybe we could have made it [budget cutting] if fuel cost hadn’t gone crazy.”

In a recent study, some emperor penguins wore digital electrocardiogram recorders when they dove deep into the waters of McMurdo Sound in Antarctica. Using these devices for the first time on penguins, researchers were able to record heart rate data beat by beat.

Among some surprises: in one lengthy dive, the penguin’s heart beat only six times per minute over a five-minute period. Another penguin’s heart was racing at 256 beats per minute when it returned from a dive.

 The purpose of this study by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography was to gather information about the bird’s adaptations to low-oxygen during diving, which may help humans, and to a changing climate. Heart attacks and strokes cause low levels of oxygen in humans and can damage human tissues.  The research took place at a special research camp called Penguin Ranch, designed for studying penguins’ underwater behaviors. In the 1990s, researchers from Scripps and National Geographic attached miniaturized cameras in backpacks on the animals, providing the first live footage of emperor penguins hunting for fish under the Antarctic ice. Segments of this appeared in the film March of the Penguins. Other research has recorded time and depth of the birds’ dives—underwater stays of 30 minutes at a time and dives over 1,500 feet.

A research team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) has found evidence of explosive volcanic eruptions deep under the ice-covered surface of the Arctic Ocean. Violent eruptions were not thought possible at great ocean depths because of the intense weight and pressure of water.

Researchers found jagged, glassy rock fragments, known as pyroclastic deposits, spread out over a 10 square kilometer (4 square mile) area around a series of small volcanic craters about 4,000 meters (2.5 miles) below the sea surface. The volcanoes lie along the Gakkel Ridge, a section of the mid-ocean ridge system that runs through the Arctic Ocean.

Scientists had thought it was unlikely explosive plumes of gas, steam and rock would rise from volcanoes submerged under miles of cold water. From earlier observations of seafloor samples, the researchers doubted that the undersea volcanoes below 3,000 meters (1.8 miles) could build up the amount of steam and carbon dioxide gas in the magma to throw a mass of rock up in the water column. 

The researchers used survey instruments, cameras, samples of rock and sediment, and videos to study the volcanic craters. They found evidence that rock debris had fallen out of the water rather than being moved around by lava. Fresh pyroclastic deposits were spread out in all directions from the volcanic craters.

The researchers say more needs to be done to determine whether pyroclastic eruptions are common or whether they only occur along the Gakkel Ridge.

At the Woods Hole web site you can see images of the seafloor along the volcanoes as well as a fly-through animation showing bathymetry (depth measurements) of the Gakkel Ridge.

According to news from the European Space Agency, the Wilkins Ice Shelf is “hanging by its last thread” to the  Antarctic Peninsula The researchers are studying satellite images that show continuing disintegration of the shelf and a fracture in the ice bridge connecting the shelf to land. The bridge helps stabilize the ice shelf, and its collapse could hasten the break-up of the shelf.

Surprising to scientists at the European agency and other research centers is the fact that the break-up is occurring in the Antarctic winter. One news headline read: “Even the Antarctic Winter Cannot Protect Wilkins Ice.” In addition, these first-ever recorded winter break-ups are different from earlier events this year. Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center noted that the pieces are moving out as large bergs and not as a divided mixture of ice.

 Recording a break-up during the dark Antarctic winter is possible because of an observation spacecraft called Envisat. It is the largest earth observation spacecraft ever built and carries optical and radar instruments to provide continuous observation and monitoring of land, atmosphere, oceans and ice caps. It can produce high-quality images even through clouds and darkness.

Scambos also points out that warm water may be reaching the underside of the Wilkins shelf and thinning it. Another researcher studying the images acquired by the observation spacecraft says the scientific community was “too conservative when it predicted the Wilkins Ice Shelf would be lost within 30 years. It is going more quickly.”

Wilkins Ice Shelf, a broad plate of floating ice on the Antarctic Peninsula, is connected to Charcot and Latady Islands. It began retreating in the 1990s with large sections breaking off rather than the calving ordinarily associated with glaciers. Now the ice sheet is being monitored daily.

A volcano located on Umnak Island in the western Aleutians Islands erupted on Saturday, July 12, 2008, with little warning to the ranch family who shares the island or the Alaska Volcano Observatory, which monitors the state’s hazardous volcanoes.

The crater of the Okmok Volcano is about six miles wide and 1,600 feet deep. Seismologists maintain several monitoring stations on the crater, which last erupted in 1997 and was active for eight months. More than a dozen volcanic cones are contained in the crater, which was formed about 2,000 years ago Okmok is highly active, with about 16 eruptions occurring every 10 to 20 years since 1805. .

 The initial ash and gas cloud of the current eruption reached 50,000 feet above sea level and is drifting south over the North Pacific. It caused cancellations of some air travel.

In an Associated Press story, the rancher gives a firsthand account of being up-close when a volcano erupts. He, his family, and ranch workers were rescued by a fishing vessel. He describes a sound like huge rocks rolling and an ash cloud that shut out the daylight. A small Aleut village with about 40 people is located on the other side of Umnak Island and out of the southeasterly path of the ash cloud.

 You can keep up to date on Okmok activity at http://www.avo.alaska.edu/activity/Okmok.php with satellite pictures of the ash cloud and links to images of the volcano dating back to the 1940s.

In June 2008, Miami, Florida, artist Xavier Cortada traveled to the North Pole with sound artist Juan Carlos Espinosa to create paintings using Arctic water and install eco-art at 90 degrees North.

Cortada made a similar art trek to the South Pole in January 2007 as a recipient of an Antarctic Artists and Writers Program residency from the National Science Foundation. There he used sea ice, glacier and sediment samples provided to him by scientists working in Antarctica to paint on paper. He also did a mixed media portrait of Sir Ernest Shackleton, which is on permanent exhibit in the U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.  For the Antarctica installation, Cortada planted 51 colored flags 10 meters apart, marking where the South Pole stood during each of the past 50 years, and placed 24 shoes in a circle around the Pole, each serving as a proxy for a person affected by global climate change. He also planted 24 flags around the South Pole to warn of the threat to Earth’s biodiversity. Using melted sea ice and acrylic paint, he wrote the scientific name of an endangered species on each flag, as well as the longitude of the habitat in which it struggles for survival. At the North Pole, Cortada will again do a series of paintings using melting ice. His installation will be a green flag to encourage the reforestation of native trees in the world.

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, will host an exhibit of art related to the polar regions from June 28, 2008, through June 7, 2009. Cortada’s paintings and the works of 30 other North American artists, including Native Americans and Canadian Inuit, are presented in four thematic sections: ice, landscape, wildlife, and human interactions.

In June 1988, a government scientist named James E. Hansen told a Senate committee that the greenhouse effect was changing the climate. “We have already reached the point where the greenhouse effect is important,” he said.

It is now generally agreed that Hansen’s presentation to the committee alerted other scientists, policymakers, and the general public to the reality of changes in global climate and the role humans played in it.

In June 2008, Hansen returned to Capitol Hill to testify to a House committee and also appeared at the National Press Club, two of several occasions commemorating the 20th anniversary of his first warning. Hansen was then and continues to serve as the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and adjunct professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University.

Time and the need for action were again emphasized, but the sense of urgency was greater. Hansen told lawmakers and journalists: “The difference is that now we have used up all slack in the schedule for actions needed to defuse the global warming time bomb. The next President and Congress must define a course next year in which the United States exerts leadership commensurate with our responsibility for the present dangerous situation.”

Using the analogy of a “perfect storm,“ Hansen listed warming events now pushing us toward the tipping point: “Climate can reach points such that amplifying feedbacks spur large rapid changes. Arctic sea ice is a current example. Global warming initiated sea ice melt, exposing darker ocean that absorbs more sunlight, melting more ice. As a result, without any additional greenhouse gases, the Arctic soon will be ice-free in the summer…West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are vulnerable to even small additional warming. These two-mile-thick behemoths respond slowly at first, but if disintegration gets well underway it will become unstoppable.”

He predicted hat the disintegration of the ice sheets will raise sea levels six feet in this century, creating hundreds of millions of refuges as well as unstable shore lines far into the future.

Noting the many other dire consequences of unchecked greenhouse gas emissions—extinction of species, expansion of subtropical climate zones, shortage of fresh water—Hansen said we have already gone too far, adding “We must draw down atmospheric carbon dioxide to preserve the planet we know.”

He referred to a paper he has written with climate experts that puts the safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide at no more than 350 parts per million (ppm). Already the amount is 385 ppm and rising by 2 ppm per year.

With no time to waste, Hansen urges us to phase out of coal use except where the carbon is captured and stored below ground. Because we are running out of oil used in vehicles and eventually must find other sources, Hansen tells us to move promptly to carbon-free energy.

Putting little hope in politicians or CEOs of fossil-energy companies to lead, Hansen says citizens must demand a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants. “We must block fossil fuel interests who aim to squeeze every last drop of oil from public lands, off-shore, and wilderness areas. Those last drops are no solution. They yield continued exorbitant profits for a short-sighted self-serving industry, but no alleviation of our addiction or long-term energy source.”

Using greenhouse gas emissions from China and India as excuses for doing nothing to cut emissions in the United States is dismissed as demagoguery by Hansen. He points out that we have produced most of the excess carbon in the air today. Other countries will follow because they too have much to lose from climate change.

Since the scientist’s first warning about greenhouse gases, little has been done to cut emissions in the United States although climate change has become a “global cause,” according to an article in the Washington Post on the day of Hansen’s testimony, June 23, 2008. The paper reported: “In the two decades since Hansen’s testimony, Congress has not passed any law mandating major cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. In that interval, 21 new coal-fired generating units have been built at power plants around the United States. The country’s total emissions of carbon dioxide have climbed by about 18 percent, according to the latest statistics.”

 The NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which Hansen heads, is a laboratory of the Earth Sciences Division of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a unit of the Columbia University Earth Institute. Research at GISS emphasizes a broad study of global climate change.

The same U.S. House committee that heard testimony from climate scientist James Hansen on June 23, the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, held a joint hearing the following Wednesday with the Intelligence Community Management (ICM) Subcommittee to discuss the results of the first-ever U.S. Government analysis of the security threats posed by global warming.

 In his statement, National Intelligence Council Chairman Thomas Fingar said, “We judge climate change will have wide-ranging implications for U.S. national security interests over the next 20 years,” including security concerns arising from humanitarian crises overseas and stress on weak governments. The chairman explained that the security analysts used the findings of many climate research groups to prepare their report but did not evaluate the science of climate change.  

After detailing how regions around the globe might be affected, Fingar concluded that “most developed nations and countries with rapidly emerging economies are likely to fare better than those in the poorer, developing world, largely because of a greater coping capacity.” Among the events the United States might have to cope with, according to Fingar’s statement to the committee, are: “thawing in and around Alaska, water shortages in the Southwest, and storm surges on the East and Gulf Coasts . . . . wildfires throughout the longer summer…. and two dozen nuclear facilities and numerous refineries along U.S. coastlines are at risk and may be severely impacted by storms.”

 In other remarks at the hearing, Kent Hughes Butts, with the Army War College. saw hope for more cooperation as the world powers see their common interests in maintaining stability in unstable regions. But, he also noted the dangers in regions ravaged by the consequences of global warming:  “Scarcities of resources, lack of safe water, reduced agricultural capacity; widespread disease and poverty create underlying conditions that terrorists seek to exploit.” The House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming was formed to increase the visibility and priority given to America’s oil dependence and global warming challenges. It is chaired by Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA).

Have you ever felt confused by the complexity of the polar regions? Or realized that your knowledge just scratches the surface of these far-off places? If you have, you are certainly in good company. All of us - especially the project staff at Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears - have been confronted with our lack of understanding of the Arctic and Antarctica. While most of us haven ‘t actually been able to visit these places, we are continually expanding our knowledge and developing a polar “sense of place.”

In this spirit, we’d like to share with you a new type of reflection: a digital story. If you aren’t familiar with the term, a digital story is a short movie comprised of narration, images, and a soundtrack. This particular story was the result of a three-day intensive workshop at Ohio State University’s Digital Union. In the story, Jessica Fries-Gaither describes her own journey to a better understanding of the regions and why we should all brave this “wilderness.”

If you are unable to view the embedded video below, you can also view it directly on YouTube or Teacher Tube.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/fs9Ejy2WF_o" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Digital stories are a new medium for us and one that we hope to utilize in the future! As always, your comments and suggestions are much appreciated.

This July, a team of four scientists, a writer and a photographer from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of Washington will return to Greenland for their third year of investigating glacial lakes, which form atop the ice sheet each spring and summer. The expedition runs from July 7 to 24.

From their tents on the ice sheet, the investigators and the media team will send daily dispatches and photo essays to the Polar Discovery web site. Scientists and journalists use satellite phones and computers powered by solar energy to share their findings and experiences. About half way into the expedition, they will hold live talks with audiences at eight major science museums across the United States.

Museums that have scheduled live talks include the Field Museum in Chicago, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Maryland, Boston Museum of Science, Pittsburg’s Carnegie Museum, Houston Museum of Science, and Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Most are open to the general public with a few held for students. Each presentation will feature a knowledgeable moderator – often a scientist – who will present a short summary about the research before the live question-and-answer session. The Live Talk schedule at the WHOI web site gives dates, times, and locations within the institutions.