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The show "Hot Times in Alaska" premieres June 15th, 2004, The online video for the show is below. Also be sure to take a look at related stories from the Frontiers Archive:

				Canary in a Coal Mine Climate models predict major changes for Alaska's wildlife. Scientists are already seeing these effects on the guillemot's population.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: There's no clearer illustratioof Alaska's warming up than what you see here... or rather, what you don't see. 30 years ago, there would have been sea ice right out here on the Arctic Ocean. Today, there's none in sight. We're getting a ride along the coast with Barrow Brower, an Inupiat Eskimo, the native people of Alaska's Arctic coast. We're looking for the lone inhabitant of a small island. Last winter, Barrow dragged a cabin out here across the ice for him. BROWER: I guess he likes it. He's a lot warmer, I guess... and more... more protected from the bears. ALDA: It was a surprise to the locals that after 28 summers living in a tent, George Divoky had not yet been eaten by polar bears. But George is more interested in a different kind of wildlife. Every summer he comes here to Cooper Island to study the guillemots. ( guillemot shrilling ) Guillemots nest on the island and catch fish in the Arctic Ocean. This year, they're not doing so well. This guy's over 30 days, which means he should look older than this, but he's one of the malnourished ones. ALDA: Guillemots are quite common around the world, but this must be their strangest colony. George first found them here in 1972, nesting in the remains of ammunition boxes left by the Navy in the '50s. He built up the colony by carefully arranging the bits of wood to form just the right kind of nesting cavities. Starting from about ten adult pairs, the colony grew to 225 pairs. George's aim was to study the basic biology of the birds, but it turned out his guillemots would tell a story about the impact of changing climate. The story is filled with new insights into nature's reactions to climate change. One critical factor for the guillemots has to do with the vital flights the adult birds take out to sea. DIVOKY: One of the problems guillemots have here is that the food source has to be within a flying distance from the colony. Guillemots are not great oceanic flyers, like albatross and even puffins, and feed in the near shore, typically. So they go out maybe 15 to 20 kilometers or so and come back with... with food. ALDA: Life at the extremes of the earth has little room for error. The guillemots arrive at the island as the snow melts in June, lay and hatch their eggs, feed and raise the chicks, and leave to go south by September. They need plenty of high-energy food to be successful, and for this they depend on a small, oily fish called Arctic cod. Arctic cod in turn depend on the shelter and food they find under the sea ice. So all the guillemots have to do is fly out to the ice, dive down and grab the cod. It's a great system... so long as you can find the ice. DIVOKY: This year, with the ice being well offshore and this being open water, large numbers of chicks died in the nest because parents were unable to find food after... after the pack ice pulled offshore. ALDA: George has discovered what the adult birds do when they can't find cod. DIVOKY: This is a chick that's around 30 days old. He is one of the lighter chicks on the island for that age. He's almost 290 grams today, which isn't bad. But one of the problems is that since the... since the Arctic cod are gone, parents are having to feed them... feed the chicks things like this four-horn sculpin. And sculpin actually can maintain those horns sticking out like that, which makes it very hard for a chick to feed on. ( igniter clicking ) ALDA: George knows what happened in every nest on the island every day of every summer for the last three decades. He's tracked eight successive breeding generations, and he's beginning to see that some adults are better than others at finding cod when there's no ice nearby. Maybe guillemots can adapt to a different climate. He regularly traps adult birds along with their chicks to see how their health varies, DIVOKY: This is a great way to catch a bird that you know is a parent of the chick inside. You're certain that a bird will be walking over these nooses within a half hour or so. ALDA: The parents soon show up to feed their chick. And our camera caught a rare sight for this year-- a lucky chick gobbling down an Arctic cod. If it had been one of those nasty horned sculpin, the chick probably would have ignored it. One of the adults got caught as it left the nest. George's colony has been in steady decline since the 1990s. Its numbers are now down more than a third from their peak. He can relate the fortunes of the colony directly to the steady warming that Alaska has experienced in the last three decades. At first, in the 1980s, things went well as the island became snow-free earlier in the year. DIVOKY: When the snow-free period opened up here and the ice was just offshore, things were very good for guillemots here, because they had no constraint about the snowmelt or the snow accumulation and they had prey offshore. As the warming continued... and now the snow is melting in May, well before they even want to breed. So even though now they can essentially breed whenever they want in the spring, they can't raise young as successfully because the pack ice has receded. ALDA: Nature's thrown in a new complicating factor. In the last two years, puffins-- sub-Arctic birds that prefer warm conditions-- have been prospecting for nests in the colony. Puffins are aggressive, and this year George counted ten of them attacking guillemot eggs and chicks. Quite rapid change is under way on Cooper Island, but it's not just local. Summer sea ice now recedes hundreds of miles offshore all along the Siberian and Alaskan coasts, whereas in the '70s, it stayed right at the shoreline. Of course, the impact can't be confined to guillemots. We just happen to know about them, thanks to George's unique study. Many other animals, from whales to polar bears, depend on Arctic sea ice, and native hunters depend on many of those animals in turn. They're all vulnerable, but right now nobody can be sure to what extent. MAN: The Alaska Rangeis out there.

				The Heat is On As Alaska gets warmer and dryer, there are big changes in the boreal forests and impacts on the melting permafrost.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: You can see it just about every day... ALDA: Climate change has becomliterally a hot topic at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, now a world center for this research. My first stop was with John Walsh, a meteorologist who's a sea ice expert. He showed me what computer simulations or models are saying about the future. On this computer, we... we have some computer model output. ALDA: Five research groups around the world have developed computer models of the global climate. This display shows what all five combined are predicting for Arctic sea ice. The views look directly down at the North Pole. The winter coverage is over on the left, the summer coverage is over on the right, and there's our calendar ticking away through the next century. It's at 2055 right now. You'll notice the summer sea ice essentially vanishes by the end of the century. ALDA: Disappearing ice is one reason the top of the planet is warming more than lower latitudes. The white Arctic ice is a global cooling system-- it reflects the sun's heat into space. But dark open water absorbs heat. This is self-reinforcing-- ice melts, it gets warmer, so more ice melts, and so on. You're creating a much darker surface where the ice retreats. That darker surface is able to absorb a lot more sunlight. It's much less reflective, so there's an extra gain in the polar regions. It's a gain that the tropics do not have... Oh, because they're already absorbing the heat. Exactly, yes. And here you were reflecting the heat back, so the change is going to be much more pronounced. ALDA: Alaska has warmed up about four degrees Fahrenheit on average over the last 150 years. Glaciers really are melting. We're going to spend most of the program with scientists who are looking at many remarkable effects of warming-- from guillemots to glaciers. But why Alaska and the earth as a whole are warming is addressed not by field science but by the same computer climate models that produced the sea ice predictions. The models say it's caused by greenhouse gases, like CO2, that humans have added to the atmosphere for the last 200 years. This is politically controversial, of course, but no longer scientifically. Many people have questioned, you know, "So, how reliable are these models?" Climate is driven by many different factors, including natural variability-- for example, the energy that comes from the sun, the so-called solar constant-- but also by carbon dioxide. So the models have attempted here to model the climate only using natural parameters. And you can see that in recent years, they've done fairly poorly. This is the observed record in black here, that's the observed temperature. You see... you see that it's gone up. For the natural in recent years, the computer ensembles, the computer runs don't do very well. If you only use the greenhouse effect-- anthropogenic factors, manmade influences-- then in this region here, the models do very poorly. You know, you can see the colored graphs don't coincide with the... with the observed. But if you combine both... Yeah. And that's the critical issue-- then they do very well. And then that gives you some confidence that the projections in the future are also probably not all that bad. We're always ready to say, "Well, maybe this is a... a 20,000-year cycle "that hasn't really been observed before, "and we got through this... "maybe we got through this before, "and we'll get through it again, and it's not going to be affected by what people do." How would you answer that? You bring up a very good point, because there are all kinds of cycles, including ice ages. Remember, every 100,000 years or so, we've had an ice age, and then that was followed by a warm period. At the present, we are in a warm period, and by rights, the warm periods are only short-- 10,000 years or so, compared with 100,000 for an ice age-- and we should move into another ice age. But I think, and I think the scientific community is behind this idea, that mankind, humanity has begun to interfere with these natural cycles and instead of moving into the ice age, we're continuing this warm interglacial. ALDA: It was over the 10,000 years of the current warm interglacial that the distinctive natural landscapes of the north emerged, including the huge boreal forest, or taiga, that's about a third of the earth's entire forested area. We're going to see the great changes now coming to these regions, with consequences for grizzlies and salmon and all the other inhabitants of the north, people included, that we cannot yet predict. We're in the St. Elias Mountains, which run between southern Alaska and Canada. This region has a vast, 600-mile stretch of mountain ranges that's sometimes thought of as North America's Himalayas. In front of us is part of Jeffries Glacier, an immense river of snow and ice that's sliding gradually down into the valley. Ready to roll? Looks like a beautiful day. Yeah, it's great. ALDA: Today, Anthony Arendt and Paul Claus are going glacier flying. Are you good to go? Yep. Power's on. So... everybody's clear? ( switches clicking ) ( engine engaging ) MAN ( on radio ): Okay, the gyro is zeroed and we're ready for takeoff. ALDA: They're flying out of the strip at Paul's remote hunting lodge. He's an expert bush pilot who's just started working with the glacier group from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. They head over to Jeffries Glacier, about 40 miles away and 6,000 feet up. These mountains have some of the largest glaciers in the world. That's because the snow and ice are built up by constant storms coming in from the Pacific Ocean just to the south. For the last ten years, the Fairbanks group has been keeping track of a hundred representative glaciers in Alaska and Canada. They do it with precision flying. Year after year, they've flown the same tracks down the glaciers, bouncing a laser altimeter off the surface as they go. They end up with the exact heights of the glaciers, accurate to within about 12 inches. CLAUS ( over radio ): Now I'll start logging right when you cross the pass. ALDA: Paul banks the plane around to the center line of the glacier, while Anthony prepares to log the plane's position in relation to GPS satellites, along with its exact height above the glacier. ARENDT ( over radio ): Okay, laser's in range right now, 200 meters. Looking good! And we're logging... 50 meters. 25 meters. So, it looks good; we'll just fly down right down the center line. CLAUS: All right. ARENDT: 50 meters. ALDA: They also plot the terminus point in the valley where the glacier transforms into a river. ARENDT: Pretty distinct terminus on this one. CLAUS: Boy, I guess. ARENDT: Ice ends right... now. CLAUS: Okay. ALDA: Back at the lab, there's a lot of number crunching to come up with the latest height contours of each of their hundred glaciers. MAN: This is our glaciology lab, and we'll... ALDA: Keith Echelmeyer started the glacier project and used to do all the precision flying himself. They found that, compared to the maps of 50 years ago, the glaciers have shrunk dramatically. And that's not all. Is it really accelerating? What do you mean, "accelerating"? We find that on average every year that the glaciers are thinning by a half a meter... every year. Every year? So, you know, so... From the '50s up through the '90s every year they lost an average of a half a meter. Half a meter. Wow. And then, if you look at the period from the early 1990s to 2000, 2002, that rate goes up to 1.8 meters per year. So nearly two meters every year of ice is lost on average over the entire surface of the glacier. So that really is zipping ahead, isn't it? Oh, it's zipping ahead, really a lot. And if that continues in the future, a lot of these glaciers won't be here. ALDA: The findings translate into staggering volumes of water added to the oceans, 900 trillion gallons just from Alaska and western Canada in the last 50 years, enough to raise sea levels by about a quarter of an inch worldwide. Like Alaska's other climate changes, all we can say right now is that whatever's happening is speeding up. Can you tie this acceleration into some human activity that happened at the same time, or are they independent? Yeah, we can't do it for sure... yeah. And it's not like the Industrial Revolution started in the '50s or something like that. Yeah, it's not that clear. But, uh, his could be... It's really interesting-- if it's long-term, then it means the climate's really doing something. ALDA: We're a few miles from Fairbanks, right in the center of the state. We'd be on firm ground here, you'd think. Why does this drop away so steeply on both sides here? MAN: Because ice... big ice was here. There was a lot of ice in there? Yeah, yeah. And that melted, and then it eroded? Yeah, yeah. ALDA: Beneath the boreal forest's lush carpet of mosses and lichens, there's ice-- permafrost. Vladimir Romanovsky is keeping a close and fascinated watch on the permafrost because he may soon see something that hasn't happened here for 8,000 years. That's it? Yes, this is our borehole, which goes down 25 meters. ALDA: Vladimir maintains a string of permanent boreholes running north to south through the state. Powered by solar cells, they're constantly measuring temperatures underground and in the air, and logging the results. ROMANOVSKY: So, it's a little bit messy wiring here, but it works well. ALDA: Once a year, Vladimir comes by to download the records. ROMANOVSKY: So, the upper number is 16.9. That's the temperature of the ground's surface. And then, uh... it's every approximately ten centimeters is depth. And the deeper one is minus 0.4, is at one meter. And down to... Minus 0.4-- that's... really close to the melting... It's warm, yeah. And about approximately the same temperature is going down to 15 meters. So at 15 meters, it's about minus 0.7. And this temperature stays there like this over the year. So upper part, of course, warmer now because it's summer. But at that depth, 15 meters, it's... there is practically no seasonal changes. It stays like this, and it's slowly warming. ALDA: We'll come back to Vladimir in a moment, but first, let's take a look right below him. This is the way into a tunnel driven into the hillside underneath the borehole. The entrance has to be refrigerated so as not to damage the permafrost inside. MAN: Okay, here we go into the tunnel. ALDA: The tunnel was built by the Army in the 1960s to develop permafrost excavation methods. It's a great place to see what permafrost is. The forest floor is now about 50 frozen feet above us. Does the permafrost keep going down? The permafrost keeps going down-- another maximum about 200, 250 feet in this area, depending on the local terrain. So we're right in the middle of it. We're right in the middle of the permafrost in this tunnel. ALDA: The walls are made of windblown silt bound with ice that filled up the valley during the 100,000 years of the last ice age. There are ice wedges, formed when surface water drained down and froze. This ice has been here at least since the end of the ice age 10,000 years ago. Then the area became as warm as it's ever been since. But Vladimir has his eye on the future. The concern of scientists is that it'll get worse, it'll get warmer than it was 10,000 years ago. And the reason for that concern is what? Is it that you just see the trend going and you don't see any abatement in it? It's not slowing or what? ROMANOVSKY: It's accelerating, yeah. It's accelerating. Ah, so, as long as it's accelerating... And the scale of changes, of course, is very different, because the scale of changes from that time, of course, we have some kind of... What do you mean, "scale of changes"? Well, uh, the changes in temperature for the last, say, century and especially for the last 20, 30 years was, uh, very... all changes were very rapid. And if this trend or changes in temperature will continue at the same rate, you actually will cross this threshold in 15 another years. ALDA: If we do cross that threshold, at some point the ancient permafrost will begin to break down. That will introduce a whole new factor into global climate calculations. COLLINS: These roots are from grasses that were growing at the surface here, oh, about 30,000 years ago, and they're just preserved in the permafrost. So even though, uh... they're 30,000 years old they're just very fine organic material just trapped in the permafrost. ALDA: The ice age roots and sticks never had a chance to decompose. They were just frozen in place. It's a warehouse of organic material that, once thawed, will release the CO2 it's made of. If this material will be exposed to warm temperatures and together with erosion, it could happen very rapidly. So all this organic... not all of, but a pretty significant part of this organic material will turn into CO2. Is that measurable? Can we make a prediction now about what that's liable to do? There is estimations of the amount of carbon in the soil in the frozen state. And this estimation show... very significant number-- actually the largest number-- it's very much more than growing vegetation on top. It's much more organic matter here. And compared to CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, it's also a comparable number. So if all this organic matter will go as CO2, so we can double, actually, CO2 in the atmosphere. ALDA: So thawing permafrost could greatly reinforce the warming of the global climate. We're heading out to the Tanana River Flats, again in central Alaska, where we can see what disappearing permafrost looks like. This is 800 square miles of meandering channels, wetlands and low-lying forest. It's prime moose habitat, too. Since the last ice age, there's been permafrost under everything here except the large river channels-- at least there was until about 200 years ago. Before then, most of the flats would have been forest growing on a permafrost plateau just above water level. Now about half the area consists of these waterlogged fens covered in thick floating mats of vegetation. You can see this transformation continuing today in the remaining forest areas. They call them "drunken forests," collapsing as the ground disappears beneath them. I see a lot of trees tipped over here. Yeah, well, welcome to the 21st century in central Alaska, where the ice-rich become the poor. And then I've got to present you with a stick. And you need this for... if you punch through the floating matout here, it's a way to get back out. So... you're serious about that. Oh, yeah. These trees through here are about 65 years old. So we can see that... from this age structure that most of this collapse has happened just during the last 30 years. This is where you start using the stick as a... as a life-saving device. And you can feel a little bounce to that mat so you know that we're really floating on water out here. ALDA: I'd really prefer some nice, solid permafrost to walk on. ( moaning and groaning ) ( chuckling ) See, this is what happened to the last guy that came out here. He kind of ended up here. ALDA: When I made it through the floating buckbean and horsetail, Torre Jorgenson explained that the solid ground here had actually been a wetland fen only a few hundred years ago. It shows that there are natural cycles in the climate, and it's been warm enough here in the past to thaw the permafrost. JORGENSON: This is old fen peat developed from buckbean and horsetail. So this tells us that this area used to be a fen at one time. So we've gone through a cycle of it being a fen, becoming uplifted into this permafrost plateau, and then becoming forested by birch trees, and now it's starting to degrade again back into fen. ALDA: It's now even warmer here than when the area was last a fen. You can see the process of degradation. As the ice in the ground melts, the soil shrinks, so the surface sinks. The trees become waterlogged and die, and eventually the patchwork of sinkholes coalesces into one big wetland. ( motor humming ) Up! ALDA: Well, I hadn't fallen through the floating mat, so Torre thought he may as well try me out on drilling a permafrost borehole. We're going down below the level where large annual seasonal variations would be seen. Up! Okay, let's take a look right there and extract what we've got inside. Okay, so we've got a little core coming out. It's kind of got slop along it outside from drilling, but we're going to clean that off. So, look at that. That's all peat running right through there. And then we're getting into the silts. They're all part of this loess deposit. And just look how wet and sticky that is. It's a real good indication that this is already degrading. ALDA: Since the area was last a wetland a couple of hundred years ago, the climate briefly cooled, and this ice was formed. Then a steady warming, about four degrees Fahrenheit so far, began to switch it back to wetland. That's all it takes for the transformation to proceed. If the present trend continues, how much higher will the average temperature be? We would anticipate that within 50 to a hundred years that temperatures will increase on order of three to five degrees C.-- centigrade. So about five to eight degrees Fahrenheit. Well, wait a minute-- so that... From what you're telling me, that means that all the permafrost will melt. ALDA: The Tanana Flats are especially sensitive to change because the land is already relatively warm, thanks to the waters of the nearby Tanana River. If the predictions of warming coming from the computer models are correct, then the future of this area is pretty clear. What's worrying you is the models that suggest that this is going to keep going, this warming. Is that right? That's a good interpretation of it. So, my initial concern is that this landscape is very sensitive to small changes. So if we add just a one-degree change, we're losing our permafrost in this area. And we're already... have been losing substantial amounts in the last 50 years with just a half-a-degree or a one-degree change. So imagine what would happen if you add three degrees or five degrees. It's way beyond the capacity for permafrost to exist in this area, so it'll be fairly quickly eliminated. ALDA: Alaska has permafrost under 85% of its land area. Sensitive parts like the Tanana Flats will be the first to go, but there could be very large-scale disruption. This is a Canadian projection showing that the permafrost line could move north by several hundred miles during this century-- again, if those computer predictions of warming are right. Everything that depends on solid foundations-- from forests to roads and buildings-- will be affected. Now we're going to look at another kind of change. Alaska is a largely pristine land, with rivers, streams and lakes as far as the eye can see. What's happening to them is not a prediction; it's here and now. MAN: The question is: Where in Alaska is it getting drier? And what Brian's found is most places in Alaska it's getting drier. ALDA: Brian Riordan, who's Dave Verbyla's student, has been looking at ten representative areas around the state. He started with government maps produced in the 1950s. RIORDAN: What we're attempting to do is look at water bodies across these maps and see how they've changed from the 1950s till the present day. ALDA: In the 1950s, Lake 405 was 180 acres. Here it is again in a 1980 picture-- it's down to 28 acres. It's the same with the surrounding lakes. The outer rings are the 1950s, the inner rings, 1980. It seemed like a clear result, but look at the lake at the bottom right. The original photograph the map was based on shows a patchy wetland at best. The maps were filled with inaccuracies. What that led me to have to do is go through, order all these black-and-white photographs-- which we have right here-- for each one of these areas... and go through and recreate each one of these water bodies. That sounds like it would take you 50 years to do that. ALDA: So far, Brian has retraced about 17,000 water bodies, and he's extended the comparison later in time using recent satellite pictures. Here's Lake 405 again. By the year 2000-- outlined in blue-- it had shrunk to ten acres. The startling overall conclusion is that just in the last 50 years, Alaska has lost on average 15% of its open-water area. At this point, we don't really know why, but it's probably a combination of increased evaporation from warming and drainage away through cracks in degrading permafrost. I'm with Glen Juday, a leading expert on the boreal forest, which around here is not doing well. Okay, now we're entering a sick forest. ALDA: The boreal, or northern, forest rings the globe in a huge band running through Canada, the U.S., Russia and Scandinavia. It's about one-third of the planet's total forest area and easily the largest in North America. Is this alive or dead? This one is alive, but it's been attacked by spruce bark beetles. You can see in the lower section here there's pockets of hardened sap. When the wood-boring beetles went into the tree, the tree tried to defend itself by flooding those holes with pitch. When the trees are weak, then the beetle attacks are more successful. ALDA: In recent years, these white spruce trees have been weakened. Especially heavy winter snowfalls have simply overloaded the tops and broken them off. And in summer, there are more insects around just because it's warmer. ALDA: So, that snowfall-- That's a natural event that occurs all the time, right? JUDAY: Yes, it can be, but it happens to be associated with warmer winters. But it's the frequency and the magnitude and the intensity of these conditions that is very unusual right now and reflects the strong influence of the climate warming... that it's having on the health of these forests. ALDA: Trees contain a history of their lives in their annual growth rings. During 20 years of study, Glen Juday has drilled thousands of tree cores at Bonanza Creek. JUDAY: We use this high-tech device here... to keep everything all solidly in place. We're looking at about, um... at least 150 years' worth of growth. We can see that the rate of growth was very rapid in the early years-- big rings-- and it slowed down. Well, that's pretty typical of most trees just for the geometry of the growth. And then there's some really narrow rings here in the late 20th century, suggesting that its rate of growth in the last couple of decades was not very good. And, in general, that's the signal that we find in these trees. ALDA: Why don't trees grow well in a warm summer? You would think that warmth would make things grow. What we've discovered is that it's a temperature-induced drought stress. Drought? It's drought, huh? They run out of water. ALDA: So far, we've had winter snowfall, insects, summer drought and now more insects. Here we go. This is a tree that's being attacked by the spruce budworm, and you can see the tips of the growing points here where buds used to be. Now, repeated episodes of this enough years in a row will just kill the tree. The interesting thing here is the budworm, as far as we know, was never here before. And, number two, it's one of these temperature-controlled insects.