![]() ![]() "We live in a place of almost land, almost water," says the 52-year-old Curole. With his French-tinged lilt, Curole points to places where these bayous, swamps, and fishing villages portend a warmer world: his high school girlfriend's house partly submerged, a cemetery with water lapping against the white tombs, his grandfather's former hunting camp now afloat in a stand of skeleton oak snags. The seventh-generation Cajun and manager of the South Lafourche Levee District navigates his truck down an unpaved mound of dirt that separates civilization from inundation, dry land from a swampy horizon. It's like taking the global sea-level-rise problem and moving it along at fast-forward. A sinking coastline and a rising ocean combine to yield powerful effects. In southern Louisiana coasts are literally sinking by about three feet (a meter) a century, a process called subsidence. ![]() A continuation or acceleration of that trend has the potential to cause striking changes in the world's coastlines.Äriving around Louisiana's Gulf Coast, Windell Curole can see the future, and it looks pretty wet. ![]() But the recent rate of global sea level rise has departed from the average rate of the past two to three thousand years and is rising more rapidly-about one-tenth of an inch a year. Scientists point out that sea levels have risen and fallen substantially over Earth's 4.6-billion-year history. This combination of effects has played the major role in raising average global sea level between four and eight inches (10 and 20 centimeters) in the past hundred years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). When temperatures rise and ice melts, more water flows to the seas from glaciers and ice caps, and ocean water warms and expands in volume. From the Arctic to Peru, from Switzerland to the equatorial glaciers of Man Jaya in Indonesia, massive ice fields, monstrous glaciers, and sea ice are disappearing, fast. Thawing permafrost has caused the ground to subside more than 15 feet (4.6 meters) in parts of Alaska. Spring freshwater ice breakup in the Northern Hemisphere now occurs nine days earlier than it did 150 years ago, and autumn freeze-up ten days later. NASA's repeated laser altimeter readings show the edges of Greenland's ice sheet shrinking. Arctic sea ice has thinned significantly over the past half century, and its extent has declined by about 10 percent in the past 30 years. Glaciers in the Garhwal Himalaya in India are retreating so fast that researchers believe that most central and eastern Himalayan glaciers could virtually disappear by 2035. The famed snows of Kilimanjaro have melted more than 80 percent since 1912. "It's now less than 250 acres (100 hectares)."Ä®verywhere on Earth ice is changing. "That's out of date," Fagre says, stopping to catch his breath. A trailside sign notes that since 1901, Sperry Glacier has shrunk from more than 800 acres (320 hectares) to 300 acres (120 hectares). "This glacier used to be closer," Fagre declares as we crest a steep section, his glasses fogged from exertion. In the past decade scientists have documented record-high average annual surface temperatures and have been observing other signs of change all over the planet: in the distribution of ice, and in the salinity, levels, and temperatures of the oceans. Most believe that human activity, in particular the burning of fossil fuels and the resulting buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, have influenced this warming trend. Scientists who assess the planet's health see indisputable evidence that Earth has been getting warmer, in some cases rapidly. ![]() "It's like watching the Statue of Liberty melt." "Things that normally happen in geologic time are happening during the span of a human lifetime," says Fagre. Fagre predicts that within 30 years most if not all of the park's namesake glaciers will disappear. Since then the number has decreased to fewer than 30, and most of those remaining have shrunk in area by two-thirds. When President Taft created Glacier National Park in 1910, it was home to an estimated 150 glaciers. So far, the results have been positively chilling. They're doing what they've been doing for more than a decade: measuring how the park's storied glaciers are melting. Geological Survey Global Change Research Program. I fall in step with Fagre and two other research scientists from the U.S. We're armed with crampons, ice axes, rope, GPS receivers, and bear spray to ward off grizzlies, and we're trudging toward Sperry Glacier in Glacier National Park, Montana. "If we don't have it, we don't need it," pronounces Daniel Fagre as we throw on our backpacks. ![]()
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