Global Meltdown

I’m staring up at the crumbling edge of the frozen white cap cloaking most of this vast Arctic island. The ice is thousands of years old, yet melting relentlessly in the bright May sunshine, sending a torrent of gray water to the sea. With me is Joe McConnell, a snow scientist who just spent three weeks drilling samples from the ice sheet, which extends over an area four times the size of California and is almost two miles high at its peak.

McConnell, 49, an expert on the world’s frozen places, is from—of all places—the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada. That incongruity isn’t so jarring when he explains that many of the world’s driest communities, from the Andes to the American Southwest, are home to the billion-plus people who get much of their water from mountain snow and glaciers.

The ice-gouged, U-shaped valleys around us, now covered with lichens and shrubs, show that the earth’s climate has changed naturally for billions of years, ever since there’s been an atmosphere. Great warmings and coolings have sent ocean levels rising and falling as enormous amounts of water were locked in glaciers or released like the flows we see here in Greenland.

But the current warming trend is happening much faster than previous hot spells, says McConnell, and none of the forces that usually affect climate—such as variations in the sun’s strength—are in sync with this recent change. Should these patterns continue, he believes, the consequences are clear. “If Greenland melted, it’d raise sea levels by twenty feet,” he explains. “There goes most of the Mississippi embayment. There go the islands in the South Pacific. Bangladesh is obliterated. Manhattan would have to put up dikes.” A similar amount of ice is vulnerable in western Antarctica, another focus of McConnell’s work. While this would most likely be a slow-motion sea change taking many centuries, gases being pumped into the atmosphere by cars, planes, factories, and power plants could raise the odds of such a shift.

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