PAUL BROWN
@ PabloPardo1
Monday, December 2, 2019 - 16:08
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In October 2014, the Atlantic Ocean was swallowing the hunting lodge on Tangier Island. The waves beat within the abandoned wooden structure, and struck against the walls of what had been a construction used by the men of the region to spend the night when they were going to hunt ducks.
But in 2014 it was impossible to even access it. The water of the Chesapeake Bay, an arm of the sea of approximately the surface of Asturias, in the Eastern United States, was invading the island, and surrounded the entire refuge, a part of which had collapsed. What had been forests and meadows had been transformed into a marsh of thin thickets, scalloped from the phantasmagoric trunks of trees killed by sea salt . Only a few trees were left next to the shelter, doomed to die as winter storms, or hurricane season, left that island covered by the sea again.
To the right of the refuge, on a small beach, the sea returned to Earth the remains of the civilization that has populated the region since around 1570 a ship of Spanish Jesuit missionaries took the first Europeans there. They were the tombstones of one of Tangier's cemeteries , which had been invaded by the sea and were now being moved by the Bay. In the sand were stone plates, like that of Margarer Pruitt, who was born on April 2, 1836, and died on December 2, 1902: «In the silent cemetery under the grass and dew / Never forgotten a moment / In our sadness we think of you » .
The island is only 120 cm high above the water level at its highest point. In three or four decades, its nearly 500 inhabitants will have to leave
The mayor of Tangier, John Eskridge , aka Ooker - pronounced a uker - had taken that piece of the island in his boat to THE WORLD. Two years and seven months later, in April 2017, Ooker could no longer make the trip. All that was under the sea. There was nothing to see. In Chesapeake Bay, sea level rises between 3.2 and 4.7 millimeters a year . Being an almost closed sea arm, the water reaches a higher temperature, which expands its volume. The island is only 120 centimeters high above the water level at its highest point, and is formed by sand and clay, which makes it more susceptible to erosion. In three or four decades, its nearly 500 inhabitants will have to leave. But, they argue, they are going through erosion and because the island is sinking. Not because of climate change . No one in Tangier believes the Earth is warming up. His thesis is that the island is sinking, not that the sea level up.
Ooker has been at CNN explaining that climate change is a lie. Donald Trump, who won more than 90% of the votes in Tangier in the 2016 elections, has called this sixty-odd shellfish by telephone to support him.
Actually, I could have gone to see him. Because Tangier is not a remote Pacific island, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of water. Unlike. It is 150 kilometers in a straight line from Washington. Arriving from Tangier from the capital takes two and a half hours by car plus an hour on a ferry.
The inhabitants of Tangier are deeply religious evangelical shellfish who have transformed the phrase of the Gospel of St. John "Blessed are those who believe without seeing" into "Blessed are those who do not believe after having seen." "The polar caps are spreading," Jim, a neighbor, explained to Ooker, in October 2015, next to the local school, which they have built on pontoons, as if it were a 21st century palafito, so that the sea does not destroy
Whatever Jim says, the polar caps are melting. The best way to see it is to go see it in situ . In alaska. Or in Greenland. For example, ice has disappeared from the Davis Strait, which separates Canada from Greenland, and Atlantic killer whales have entered the Arctic. Without ice there are no seals. And without seals, polar bears have nothing to eat. In the Canadian province of Quebec, some of them have started to compete with brown bears and have started fishing for salmon in the rivers to try to avoid starvation.
But perhaps the salmon do not save them either. On the other side of Quebec, in Alaska, the Kuskokwim and Koyukuk rivers - the first, longer than the Tagus, and the second, larger than the Guadiana - have been literally covered this year with hundreds of millions of salmon carcasses , who died before reaching their breeding grounds because the water was too hot.
Although the Kuskokwim and Koyukuk are just 500 kilometers from the Arctic Circle, the temperature reached 21 degrees in the banks of both rivers in July. Anyone who has gone to Alaska will know that summers are getting hotter, and winters, less and less cold. On Thursday, August 15 at midnight, in Anchorage, the largest city in that state, there were 17 degrees Celsius.
The result is that Alaskan brown bears, like Quebec's polar bears, are starving. The problem also affects humans. The Eskimos of Utqiagvik, in Northern Alaska, have not been able to hunt a single Greenland whale this fall. The reason is that the cetaceans, which reach 18 meters, have not made their migration south, because - again contrary to what Jim says -, the polar cap is getting smaller. It is December, the Arctic night has arrived, and there is no light to go out to look for whales. Of course, even if there is, there is the problem of what to do with your meat. The natural fridges that the Eskimos use to conserve the meat of the cetaceans, have lost much of their effectiveness, because they are nothing more than caves dug in the ice that are melting. Without whale meat for the winter, the community will possibly need state aid to survive.
Alaska and Tangier are separated by 5,500 kilometers - almost as much as Tangier from Madrid - but they have much in common. They are two isolated worlds, whose inhabitants have a certain feeling of moral superiority derived from the belief that they are able to survive on their own without the help of the State and, in general, without that of the rest of the world. That is a myth. Tangier depends on aid for people with low incomes. Alaska, of the enormous rights of exploitation of the subsoil that the oil companies pay to the State and of the immense investments of the Department of Defense, which maintains there gigantic bases of the Air Force.
And both places are much less pristine than it seems. The second largest city in Alaska - actually, a town of 30,000 inhabitants - is Fairbanks. Although it is located less than 350 kilometers from the Arctic Circle, it is the most polluted population center in all of America, and, some years, it has come to surpass Beijing itself in pollution rates, because its inhabitants only use wood for heating in winter, and the hot air from the chimneys is trapped at ground level.
Despite the distance that separates Alaska from Tangier, both share their absolute denial of climate change . It is not that they deny that the human being causes it. They refuse to exist. According to them, the Earth is not heating up.
It is impressive that nobody in Alaska believes in climate change, because it is something that is noticed daily
César Plaza (CSIC)"It is impressive that nobody in Alaska believes in climate change, because it is something that is noticeable every day," explains César Plaza , a researcher at the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), who has spent two years in this state of investigating with the team of Ted Schuur, of the University of Northern Arizona, one of the most incredible phenomena - and unknown - of CO2 emissions: soil heating.
Because, if Tangier's soil is taken away by water, Alaska's is disappearing by himself.
To prove it, you just have to travel around the state. An example: 42 kilometers north of Anchorage, the highway sinks into a spectacular and unexpected speed bump that has cracked the asphalt and forced to put a bungling layer of chipboard on top. Another: on the banks of the Teklanika River, in the Denali National Park, in the center of the state, there is what is known as "a forest of drunken trees." The trees are inclined, some to the point of showing their roots. And that is because the frozen ground of Alaska is melting.
It is one of the most extreme and ignored consequences of climate change. And, also, one of the most going to feed back the phenomenon in the next century. To understand it, we must first explain how the soil of the circumpolar regions is, and also of some large mountain ranges.
Alaskan soil consists of two parts. On the one hand, there is the active layer or mantle ( active layer ), which can be between a few centimeters and several meters thick, and that does not freeze in summer. That's where plants sink their roots. Below is the permafrost , which in English means precisely "permanently frozen." With the greenhouse effect, permafrost melts deeper and deepens every year. That causes the active layer to extend down. But the roots of the trees are very superficial. With a less fixed soil every day, trees lose their grip. That's why there are drunk forests.
The consequences defy the imagination. The most visible are houses that are collapsing because their foundations are on icy soils that melt or, as was visible in Denali in August, mountain roads on which driving is an exercise in recklessness because the slopes are collapsing.
In fact, a part of that national park, located 700 kilometers from the Arctic Circle and very close to the town of Healey, where Schuur has been conducting his research for more than a decade, was closed this year to visitors by the Landslides caused by landslide due to the melting of permafrost .
Others are anecdotal, such as the nascent industry of mammoth ivory figures that have been accessible in Alaska and, especially, Siberia, when the ice they were trapped in has disappeared. And there are horror movie things. In 2016, an anthrax epidemic caused dozens of hospitalizations in Siberia and the death of a 12-year-old boy when zombie bacteria that had been released and resurrected after the permafrost melted into the atmosphere. The American biologist Zac Peterson suffered a skin infection that has not yet been explained in 2018 after a trip to the Arctic, presumably caused by some bacteria or virus frozen in the ice for thousands or tens of thousands of years that is now circulating on Earth.
Other consequences are not so spectacular, but very serious. Denali, for example, only has rainfall of 34 centimeters per square meter. In fact, in that region of Alaska there is the same rainfall as in the famous Grand Canyon of the Colorado, which is not exactly a vergel. In Niamey, the capital of Niger, at the gates of the Sahara, it rains more than in Denali.
So, when permafrost ceases to exist, the earth absorbs water and it does not remain for plants. People in the city of Fairbanks, Alaska, admit that before the ground was much more "spongy" because of the moisture in it. "When I was a child, the forest floor was like a water mattress," explains Kirk, a 45-year-old consultant who lives in New York but was born and raised in Fairbanks. "Today, in more and more places, it is like that of a forest in a temperate region: hard and dry," he concludes. He is one of the few Alaskan people who admits climate change, and acknowledges that it makes him sick that his childhood friends end all conversations about the weather with a joke like "when the weather changes a little more, we will plant oranges and we will have beachfront hotels, like in Florida . " Actually, if Alaska's climate changes but current rainfall is maintained, that will be like the Monegros.
When the weather changes a little more in Alaska, we will plant oranges and have beachfront hotels, like in Florida
The fusion of permafrost , however, has a touch of cataclysm. From mammoths to mosses, to billions of trees, everything that has died in thousands of years has been trapped in the frozen ground. And now, that organic matter is being exposed and subjected to rot. That is causing a huge amount of carbon dioxide and, to a lesser extent, methane, the main culprits of the greenhouse effect. Only in the permafrost that is three meters or less from the surface, there is as much CO2 as in the entire atmosphere , and double that in all the Earth's plants. In other words: if we cut down all the trees and tear off all the blades of grass on the planet and let them rot, only half of the greenhouse gases in permafrost will be released. Icy soils also have considerable amounts of methane, a gas that traps much more heat than carbon dioxide.
Scientists' estimates, according to Plaza, point out that in the 21st century global warming will cause permafrost to emit 10% of the CO2 it has stored: that is as much as everyone who has released human beings since the Industrial Revolution , over 200 years ago.
But that doesn't worry in Alaska, just like Tangier doesn't worry about rising sea levels. The inhabitants of the trenches of the war of climate change have decided that, in reality, there is no war, despite the fact that their houses sink or the sea invades their homes.
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