Climate can change quickly: scientist
Advance of glacial ice took place
in one lifetime about 8,000 years ago
Shawn Giilck
Northern News Services
Published Thursday, December 5, 2013
INUVIK
A presentation by a noted Arctic scientist shows there's always room to refine people's understanding of the Northern environment.
Dr. John England's presentation at the Aurora Research Institute in Inuvik Nov. 27 was an intriguing mixture of geological science and history. The noted Arctic scientist has conducted most of his recent research in the Beaufort Delta region. - Shawn Giilck/NNSL photo
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Dr. John England, professor emeritus in the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences department at the University of Alberta, told an intriguing story of geology, climate and history during his presentation to about 20 people at the Aurora Research Institute in Inuvik on Nov. 27.
"(It's like) a geologic who done it," said audience member Janet Boxwell. "It always helps when there's a good storyteller to tell the story. John can spin a good yarn."
England began doing fieldwork on Baffin Island in the Eastern Arctic in 1965, and continued to study Arctic environments, particularly the high Arctic, for most of his career.
He joined the University of Alberta in 1975, where he began to focus on environmental change throughout the Arctic.
His most recent research has been concentrated in the Beaufort Delta area, especially Banks Island, where he's found some very interesting and surprising evidence of unexpected rapid changes in the past that might provide some perspective on what people are seeing now.
England said there was an unbelievable spread of glacial ice from Banks Island all the way to Melville Island approximately 8,000 years ago. Contrary to what most people think, he said there is gathering evidence that such climactic changes don't always occur at the slow geologic pace people learned about in school.
Instead, this advance of ice took place in about 75 years, or, as England put it, within a human lifetime.
It lasted about 400 years, and then largely retracted and disappeared in the same startling amount of time of about 75 years.
"Again, that's a human lifetime," he said.
"Things happen a lot more catastrophically than we think," England added.
The famous explorers looking for the Northwest Passage route in the 19th century, he said, had the "misfortune to come up during the worst sea ice in the last 8,000 to 10,000 years."
Yet that's what most people have been taught to think the Arctic is, but that's a perspective that needs to change, he suggested.
He talked about how changeable conditions can be. England said in 2004 he was on the sea ice off the coast, where he could have walked for a vast distance. Three years later, there was nothing but open water.
There are other intriguing signs of fast-paced environmental change. There are spots in the Arctic where the land is rising as much as seven to 10 metres per century, which is phenomenally fast in geologic terms.
England noted wryly that he has colleagues who get excited about areas like the Tibetan tableau rising about seven millimetres in one century.
The Western Arctic as a whole is sinking, England said after the presentation. A geological feature called the "forebulge" has passed through the region, heading slowly east, he said, causing the land to settle.
Several audience members came forward to chat with him, including Boxwell, who works for the Gwich'in Renewable Resources Board.
Other fascinating changes in the Western Arctic include the drying up and disappearance of lakes, England said, and there's no clearly understood reason for that.
"It's all about putting things into perspective," he said. "And proper stewardship of the land requires paying attention to the details.
"I've had a chance to see things we've never seen before," England continued. "Some things in the past inform us about what's happening in the present. Some things bear no relationship."
The critical thing, England said, is to discover which is which.
