Risk of massive tsunami in Alaska

From Ecowatch

As the climate crisis takes hold, the effects are noticed most conspicuously at the extremes like the poles and the desert, where the harsh environments are drastically altered by a changing climate.

The latest evidence is from a melting glacier in Alaska that may trigger a landslide that catalyzes a major tsunami, scientists warned on Thursday, as The New York Times reported.

A public letter signed by several scientists warns it's possible that the landslide and tsunami could happen "within the next year, and likely within 20 years," and detailed potentially devastating effects.

The scientists warn that an unstable, mile-long slope that sits above Prince William Sound, about 60 miles east of Anchorage, is supported only by a glacier in retreat. Warming temperatures have caused the ice to melt, leaving only one-third of the slope supported by ice. That means an earthquake, a heat wave, or prolonged heavy rain could trigger a landslide.

If the slope above Barry Glacier crumbled, it could impact tourism, fishing and hunting, according to the letter. It could also lead to 30-foot waves that reach the town of Whittier, 28 miles away across Prince William Sound, according to the Anchorage Daily News.

The glacier's retreat "could release millions of tons of rock into the Harriman Fiord, triggering a tsunami at least as large as some of the largest in the state's recorded history," according to a statement from the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys, as the Anchorage Daily News reported.

Alaska's warmest month ever

Bushfire in Alaska, July 2019.  (Source)

From The Guardian:

A heatwave pulsating through the Arctic helped push Alaska to its warmest month ever recorded in July, with the state’s vast coastline left completely barren of sea ice.

Alaska’s average temperature in July was a record 58.1F (14.5C), nearly 1F above the previous monthly high set in July 2004, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Cities and towns across the vast US state, such as Anchorage, Utqiaġvik (formerly known as Barrow) and Kodiak all had their warmest month in 125 years of record-keeping.

This heat, 5.4F warmer than the long-term average for July, helped spur wildfires that shrouded much of Alaska in a pall of smoke and has now resulted in a remarkable melting away of shoreline ice.

There is now no sea ice within 150 miles of Alaskan shores, according to an analysis by the National Weather Service. The pace of ice loss is “unprecedented” in 40 years of satellite records, scientists said, with the Bering Sea, which separates Alaska from Russia, left completely ice-free.

The record-breaking warmth in Alaska is part of a broader heatwave that has swept the northern latitudes, with Greenland shedding a record 12.5 gigatons of ice into the ocean in a single day, Norway experiencing its joint hottest day ever and forest fires in Siberia tearing through an area as large as Belgium.

Scientists warned that the extreme conditions are consistent with the most pessimistic scenario where countries do little to constrain global heating by cutting planet-warming gases from cars, trucks and power generation.

“We are seeing record after record after record,” said Marco Tedesco, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, of the heat and melting episodes.

“It looks like the worst case scenario put forward by the IPCC [International Panel on Climate Change] could be an underestimate because we are seeing ice melting now that we expected 30 to 40 years from now. It’s alarming because it’s very fast-paced and the consequences are hard to predict.”

The Arctic is heating up at about twice the average of the rest of the world, with the frigid polar region caught in a spiral where sea ice thins and melts away, opening up vast tracts of dark ocean that is more absorbent of heat, causing further warming.

Tedesco said that the pace of melting in Greenland this year is on track to break a record set in 2012, when a net 562 gigatons of ice was lost. This will probably raise the global sea level by more than 1mm. If Greenland’s entire ice sheet were to melt, the world’s oceans would rise by about 20ft.

“What’s happening in Greenland is exceptional and shows that the melting is not only increasing but accelerating,” said Tedesco. 

[Read more here]

Record 20C+ north of the Arctic circle

Alert, Nunavit, Canada, according to Google Maps.  Click image to enlarge.
The map makes it easier to see why if Alert has temperatures of 20 C, Greenland's ice is melting.

The planet’s most northerly human settlement is in the midst of an “unprecedented” heatwave as parts of the Arctic endure one of their hottest summers on record.

Canada’s weather agency confirmed on Tuesday that temperatures in Alert, Nunavut, peaked at 21C at the weekend – far exceeding the July average for the area of around 5C.

Overnight temperatures on Sunday remained above 15C; again, well in excess of nighttime lows that usually hover around freezing in a settlement that lies less than 900km from the North Pole.

The previous temperature record for the town, of 20C, was set in 1956.

In a further alarm bell for the region, the mercury climbed above 20C for a second day on Monday – the first time Alert’s climate station has recorded two consecutive days of 20C-plus temperatures in its history.

Alert is the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world – with a population numbering less than 100 – and is far to the north of the Arctic Circle.

David Phillips, Environment Canada’s chief climatologist, said the weather in the far north of Canada was “quite spectacular” and “unprecedented”.

He told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: “It’s nothing that you would have ever seen.” 

Armel Castellan, a meteorologist at the Canadian environment ministry, told AFP the extreme weather was “quite phenomenal”.

“It’s an absolute record, we’ve never seen that before,” he said.

Tyler Hamilton, a meteorologist at the Weather Network, said: “This is in fact the first time a temperature warmer than 20C has been measured north of 80° on the planet.”

Alert’s heatwave comes as nearby [it's not actually 'nearby', although it is adjacent to the Arctic] Alaska saw its own record temperatures earlier this month.

Anchorage, the state’s largest city, sweltered in 32C on 4 July – shattering the seasonal high of around 24C.

Other local records were set across southern Alaska and came after five weeks of above-average temperatures in the outlying US state.

Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the University of Alaska, said at the time that exceptionally warm weather events would only become more frequent because of the loss of sea ice and warming in the Arctic Ocean.

“These kinds of extreme weather events become much more likely in a warming world,” he said.

“Surface temperatures are above normal everywhere around Alaska. The entire Gulf of Alaska, in the Bering Sea, in the Chukchi Sea south of the ice edge, exceptionally warm waters, warmest on record, and of course record-low sea ice extent for this time of year off the north and northwest coasts of the state.”

[Read more here]

Baked Alaska

There's been an incredible heatwave in Alaska.  Again.

Before the heatwave, the Washington Post reported the prognostications of the weather boffins:

All-time heat records are at risk in Alaska in coming days as a massive and abnormally intense area of high pressure locks in and strengthens over the region.

This heat dome is expected to produce temperatures near and above the highest values ever recorded for multiple days, particularly in southern parts of the state. It’s the latest in a slew of record-shattering heat events in Alaska.

Anchorage is predicted to test or best its highest-temperature ever recorded of 85 degrees (set in 1969) on five straight days between July 4 and 8. It could even flirt with 90 degrees.

The National Weather Service in Anchorage wrote that most of southern Alaska will be “downright hot with many locations in the 80s and even low 90s.”

Anchorage’s nighttime lows may settle only in the mid-60s during this hot stretch, which is close to its average high at this time of year.

“This 7-day forecast contains the warmest 1-day, warmest 2-day, warmest 3-day, warmest 4-day, warmest 5-day, warmest 6-day, and warmest 7-day period on record for Anchorage,” tweeted Alaska climatologist Brian Brettschneider.

This heat wave is the latest in a nonstop barrage of warm weather for the northernmost state. It comes right on the heels of a June that was well above average and filled with wildfires that are persisting and/or growing into July. Spring was disturbingly warm before that, and so was winter.

It also follows a historic heat wave in Europe, which shattered records.

Alaska’s temperatures have shifted abruptly higher in the past few years, and it’s a similar story across the Arctic more broadly because of climate change.

[Read more here]

Alaska: forecast high pressure and temperature.  Source: The Washington Post

Alaskan sea temperatures 5 degrees C above normal.  Source: Rick Thoman

Annual average temperatures in Fairbanks used to be below freezing.
This year, the average is above freezing.  The last time was the El Niño of 2016.
The last six years have been among the 10 hottest ever.
Source: Rick Thoman

The BBC reported what actually happened.  And it was hotter than expected.

The US state of Alaska, part of which lies inside the Arctic Circle, is sweltering under a heatwave, with record temperatures recorded in several areas, including its largest city.

Temperatures reached 90F (32C) in Anchorage on Thursday, shattering the city's previous record of 85F.

Several other places in southern Alaska also set all-time or daily records.

Anchorage's record temperature of 90F was recorded at its airport at 17:00 on Thursday (01:00 Friday GMT), according to the National Weather Service. The previous all-time record for the city was in 1969.

Other areas in Alaska also reached similar temperatures amid the heatwave, and several recorded daily and all-time records.

[Read more here]


What sort of evidence will it take to convince the denialists that global heating is happening and that our emissions of greenhouse gases is responsible?  There was a time when the Right was cautious, evidence-based, pro-science,  and well, conservative—keen to preserve the status quo.  Now the Right has degenerated into swivel-eyed loons, unwilling to face up to the greatest crisis our civilisation faces, convinced that global heating is some sort of socialist plot.  Sad.

Arctic permafrost thawing 70 years sooner than expected

A cemetery sitting on melting permafrost tundra at the village of Quinhagak on the Yukon delta in Alaska. The scientists’ findings offer a further sign of a climate emergency. Photograph: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images
Via The Guardian

From The Guardian:

Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.

A team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks said they were astounded by how quickly a succession of unusually hot summers had destabilised the upper layers of giant subterranean ice blocks that had been frozen solid for millennia.

“What we saw was amazing,” Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the university, told Reuters. “It’s an indication that the climate is now warmer than at any time in the last 5,000 or more years.“

With governments meeting in Bonn this week to try to ratchet up ambitions in United Nations climate negotiations, the team’s findings, published on 10 June in Geophysical Research Letters, offered a further sign of a growing climate emergency.

The paper was based on data Romanovsky and his colleagues had been analysing since their last expedition to the area in 2016. The team used a modified propeller plane to visit exceptionally remote sites, including an abandoned cold war-era radar base more than 300km from the nearest human settlement.

Diving through a lucky break in the clouds, Romanovsky and his colleagues said they were confronted with a landscape that was unrecognisable from the pristine Arctic terrain they had encountered during initial visits a decade or so earlier.

The vista had dissolved into an undulating sea of hummocks – waist-high depressions and ponds known as thermokarst. Vegetation, once sparse, had begun to flourish in the shelter provided from the constant wind.

Torn between professional excitement and foreboding, Romanovsky said the scene had reminded him of the aftermath of a bombardment.

Scientists are concerned about the stability of permafrost because of the risk that rapid thawing could release vast quantities of heat-trapping gases, unleashing a feedback loop that would in turn fuel even faster temperature rises.

[Read more here, and read The Guardian's Environment pages here]

We need to target a minimum cut in our emissions of 3% per annum, stepping up to 5% p.a. by 2030 and 9% p.a. by 2040 if we are to cut emissions to zero by 2050.  More on that in my next post. 

Temperature records blown away in Alaska

New temperature records continue to be set around the world: Australia, California, The UK, Canada, globally.  And now Alaska.

Hat Tip to Wayne from my group and Rick Thoman

Solar panels in Alaska

From CleanTechnica:

File this one under W for When You’ve Lost Alaska, You’ve Lost. The great oil-producing state of Alaska is beginning to deploy solar panels to reduce the use of diesel fuel for electricity generation and reduce sky-high electricity bills in remote rural villages — and yes, the solar panels work just fine in cold, snowy weather.

Also did you know that Alaska has solar resources comparable to Germany? 

The new project is located in the Native Village of Hughes [66° N] and is being partially funded by the Energy Department. In its blog, the DOE noted that Hughes currently consumes 40,000 gallons of diesel for power generation every year.

The diesel situation is really messing with the local economy:

…The Village powerhouse generates 100% of the electricity it produces from diesel flown in on Korean War-era planes. And because Hughes lacks sufficient fuel storage to make fuel delivery by barge cost effective, residents who use over 500 kWh per month pay more than $0.70/kWh—nearly four times the state average.

Yikes! Those are Douglas DC-6 planes, to be exact. The last one rolled off the assembly line in 1958, so you do the math.

Where were we? Oh right, the solar panels. The size of the new installation is smallish, at 120 kilowatts, but everything is relative. When completed, it will be the largest solar installation in Alaska to date.

The new solar panels will be part of a solar-diesel microgrid that includes energy storage. Once up and running later this spring, the microgrid will reduce the village’s dependency on diesel by about 25% and save about $1 million in electricity costs over the next 20 years.

[There's a lot more about the project in the original article]

Some observations:

• Solar works even this far north!
• It's extremely cost effective because diesel-powered electricity is so expensive.  The same situation applies in many "island grids", for example, Hawaii.  But as renewable costs decline it will be true everywhere that renewables are materially cheaper than fossil fuels.
• Although a small wind turbine suitable for such a small community would not be nearly as efficient as the new behemoths now being built around the world now, its electricity would likely still be cheaper than diesel.  Adding wind to the mix would reduce diesel demands in winter and make the renewable generation less variable on average.