Photos courtesy of Dr. Joseph Ortiz

Lyanne Yurco, Kent State geology student and undergraduate researcher, and her research advisor Dr. Joseph D. Ortiz, associate professor of geology, study marine sediment recovered during an Arctic research expedition.

 

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Climate Change?

Research on Arctic melting yields clues

A vast expanse of ice sits atop the northernmost region of the Earth like a dense, skewed hat. And similar to a hat, one side of the ice traps heat below its surface, while the other side reflects the rays of the sun back into the atmosphere.

While this process may seem elementary, it represents a delicate natural balance that has evolved over millennia, and one that has allowed wildlife to flourish in an unforgiving environment.

It is in these places of extreme beauty and harsh climates that we first see evidence of change in the natural world, says Dr. Joseph Ortiz, Kent State associate professor of geology and co-director of the Water Resources Research Institute.

“As sunlight shines down onto the surface of the Arctic, much of it gets bounced back up to space and is lost from the climate system,” Ortiz says. “As you start to melt that ice, you replace it with darker surfaces. The darker surfaces tend to absorb heat more readily than the snow and ice.”

Scientists agree the effects of climate change appear in the Arctic before becoming apparent in other regions, but without an understanding of how the Arctic climate system functions, it is difficult to predict how it might change.

“This year, there have been some reports that the sea ice in the Arctic is melting much faster than climatologists had predicted. By going to the Arctic, we are hopeful we can understand what’s driving these changes,” Ortiz says.

Arctic odyssey

This question prompted Ortiz and other scientists to embark on a journey to the Arctic as part of the Healy-Oden Trans-Arctic Expedition (HOTRAX). The collaborative project, funded by the National Science Foundation, involves several international and U.S. institutions, including Kent State University, Ohio State University, Old Dominion University (Norfolk, Va.) and Montclair State University (Montclair, N.J.).

Through field research, HOTRAX scientists are exploring how the Arctic Ocean basin was formed, the nature and physical characteristics of the ocean itself and the Arctic’s role in climate change.

Ortiz describes his first trip to the region via the Healy-Oden, a displacement icebreaker vessel, as “otherworldly.”

“As far as the eye could see was just flat white. Picking out the horizon was very difficult at times and of course the sun didn’t set because we were there in the summertime. It [the sun] just came down slightly toward the edge of the horizon,” Ortiz says. “It was one of the most starkly beautiful places I’ve ever been.”

After moving through sheaths of ice, protecting calm waters below, researchers collected “cores,” or 10- to 15-meter-long samples of sediment, from the Alaskan Shelf during the first HOTRAX expedition and from the central Arctic Ocean during the second expedition. On both cruises, they set about mapping the sea floor to learn more about how the climate system works over long time intervals.

Their tasks took them to largely uncharted territory; after all, scientists know more about the surface of the moon than the Arctic sea floor.

As a paleoclimatologist, Ortiz studies the physical, chemical and biological properties of sediment and uses his findings as a means to understand how climate changed in the past. Not unlike a detective, he gathers evidence using scientific instruments and old-fashioned observation, constructing a history of the material at hand.

The primary objective of the first HOTRAX mission was to establish paleoclimate records for the Holocene, a time period encompassing the last 10,000 years, using cores taken from the continental shelf margin north of Alaska.

Ortiz explains that the cores provide a map of the ocean’s history. Similar to tree rings, the core samples offer scientists detailed information on the past.

The team, while continuing to analyze data and evaluate results from the cores, presented their preliminary findings at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

The human factor

For Ortiz and the many other scientists who study the Arctic and grapple with issues of climate change, the question is not, “Is there or isn’t there climate change?” but rather, “What role do people play in climate variability?”

“It’s certainly true that over many different kinds of scales the earth goes through natural cycles. And on very long time scales, it’s gone through tremendously dramatic changes,” Ortiz says. “What’s different about modern history [the last 200 years], is the rate at which carbon dioxide is increasing in orders of magnitude higher than what we’ve seen during most of geologic history.”

From the last glacial maximum to the beginning of the Holocene, atmospheric carbon dioxide increased by about 80 parts per million. In contrast, from the start of the Industrial Revolution to today we have seen a similar increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. In short, what took nature 20,000 years to complete has happened in approximately 200 years.

For skeptics of climate change, Ortiz says that in addition to the geologic record, evidence includes an accelerated rising of sea levels, displacement of polar species by subpolar species and rapidly decreasing amounts of sea ice.

While it is true that humans have been adapting to their environments for thousands of years, the success with which humans adapt to climate change in the modern world will depend largely on their economic status and access to resources, Ortiz says; in other words, the less developed nations will more directly suffer the consequences of a changing climate.

The process has already begun to affect some organisms and plant life. As nonnative species of plants and animals encroach upon the habitats of native species, or habitats suddenly shrink or disappear, we get a glimpse of a future world that looks very different from the one we were born into, Ortiz says.

The power to halt climate change lies with the developed world, where 25 percent of the world’s population currently uses about 75 percent of the world’s resources, he says.

“Going to an economy that’s more hydrogen-[based] or less carbon-based doesn’t necessarily mean decreasing your standard of living; in Western Europe, where the standard of living is similar to that of the United States, carbon dioxide emissions are much lower,” he says. “There are things we could do now that would have a big impact.”