Thin Ice - Hardcover

Bowen, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805064435 ISBN 13: 9780805064438

Verlag: Henry Holt & Company Inc, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

For three decades paleo-climatologist Lonnie Thompson, one of the greatest explorers of our time, has risked his life and career to unlock the secrets of climate. Diverging from mainstream scientists' study of the polar ice caps, Thompson scaled the world's highest peaks along the equator to collect ice cores. His ground- breaking fieldwork demonstrates that tropical glaciers hold the clues to global climate change and the world's environmental future. In "Thin Ice", Mark Bowen, who joined Thompson's crew on three expeditions, documents in vivid detail the gruelling conditions under which they work; in one instance they survive for more than a month in the atmosphere mountain climbers call the "death zone." What this punishing work yields are amazing findings about the temperatures of the earth, stretching back hundreds of thousands of years, along with alarming predictions. An eye-opening ascent in East Africa reveals why the snows of Kilimanjaro will disappear within two decades. Ice cores retrieved from the Tibetan plateau show that temperatures of the last fifty years are the warmest of the past forty thousand. Blending the best of adventure and science writing, Bowen, a physicist and expert climber himself, is equally adept describing the perils of high-altitude science as he is explaining the implications of data from each strata of an ice core. Like the best narrative non-fiction, "Thin Ice" entertains as skilfully as it educates.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A well-known scientist, alpinist, magazine and popular-science writer, Mark Bowen holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT.

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Thin Ice

PART I

THE SAJAMA EXPEDITION

1

THE MOUNTAIN GOD

The Aymara are descended from the Tiwanaku, a mysterious pre-Incan people who once ruled an empire encompassing most of present-day Chile, Peru, and Bolivia from a city on the shores of Lake Titicaca, an inland sea on the high Altiplano. Like their ancestors, many of today's Aymara revere the snow-covered mountains as gods, for they produce the rare trickles of water that make life possible in this inhospitable land. The Aymara believe water is to the land as blood is to the body--the sacred essence of life and fecundity--and that mountain spirits show their wrath through ferocious storms or by holding the water back, in the sky. In the eerie, looming presence of Sajama, one can understand and even share in this belief.

Modern society also treats Sajama with respect. Commercial jets are forbidden from flying overhead, for the mountain's core contains an enormous magnet that may twist the needle of a compass more than twenty degrees away from true magnetic north.

When Lonnie Thompson arrived in small Sajama village, a few miles west of the mountain, with twenty-odd scientists, a fleet of outfitters from La Paz, the five Peruvian mountaineers who have supported his high-altitude work for decades, and six tons of equipment, the villagers decided they did not want him disturbing the local deity. Similar visitors from the University of Massachusetts, Lonnie's collaborators, had set up a satellite-linked weather station on the summit the previous year, and the subsequent growing season had been poor. The villagers were afraid alarger expedition might induce more severe retribution. Impassioned negotiations ensued.

Bernard Francou remembers the bargaining as the most engaging cultural experience of his six years in Bolivia. It fell to Lonnie to convince the people of Sajama--more baleful an assemblage than any grant review committee back in the States--that his work was relevant to their own lives.

He told them that the ice on their mountain could give him information not only about Bolivia's changing climate but also about El Niño, the mysterious change in the weather that visits the Altiplano every two to seven years. Their mountain and their dry vegetable plots, which provide a marginal existence even in the best of years, feel El Niño's effects quite directly.

Since it generally appears at around Christmastime, the phenomenon was named for the Christ child by anchovy fishermen living less than a thousand miles northwest of here, in the coastal villages of Peru and Ecuador. They noticed that the cold waters that they fished, normally one of the most productive fisheries on earth, rose in temperature with El Niño, and the anchovy disappeared. This disrupts the entire aquatic food chain and the economy based upon it. Seabirds, which feed off the anchovy and produce the mountains of guano that the local farmers use as fertilizer and export all over the world, disappear as well. And while the sea withholds its bounty, it drives huge thunderheads into the skies above the equatorial coastal plain, normally one of the driest places on earth, producing storms, flash floods, and the occasional deadly landslide.

Simultaneously, more than nine thousand miles to the west, New Guinea, one of the wettest places on earth, experiences drought, as do Australia and the Indonesian archipelago. The Asian monsoon generally fails, while, farther west, the Horn of Africa receives torrential rain.

El Niño's sister, La Nina, who usually visits on his heels, makes Peru even drier than usual and New Guinea even wetter. This climatic seesaw, which scientists have named the "El Niño/Southern Oscillation," or ENSO, spans the Pacific and has immediate collateral effects nearly everywhere on earth.

And ENSO is just one--though perhaps the most notorious--of the myriad oscillations and seesaws known to climatologists. Seesaws and oscillations, either in time or in space--some real, some perhaps imagined and the subject of intense debate--are the basic stuff of climatology. A cycle may span years, as with El Niño, decades, several centuries, or hundreds of millennia. Only a few have El Niño's global reach.

To find a particular cycle, a climatologist must generally tease it outfrom among dozens of others. Consider the motion of the sun across the sky, which can change temperature by as much as sixty degrees in a single day; the hourly or weekly changes we call weather; the seasons; subtle changes in our orbit around the sun, having periods of tens or hundreds of thousands of years; sunspots and other cycles in solar output--and all of these have different strengths at different latitudes and longitudes. It's like a kid playing with a yo-yo, bouncing on a pogo stick, in a car on springs, zooming along on a roller coaster--worse, actually.

The devastation wrought by the last few El Niños has made the phenomenon a household name in recent years. Its east-west, transpacific seesaw has become relatively well known; but Sajama, in Bolivia, stands at the southern end of a second, lesser-known, north-south seesaw with equatorial Peru. When El Niño brings storms to Peru, Sajama experiences drought; when La Niña brings drought, Sajama receives rain.

 

AT THE NEGOTIATING TABLE, LONNIE EXPLAINED THAT IF HE COULD FIND BETTER WAYS to predict the onset and strength of these climatic siblings he might help the people of Sajama choose appropriate crops for the corresponding wet and dry years. For some inscrutable reason, however--perhaps out of caution, for they are not yet entirely confident in their predictions--he and Bernard did not reveal that the Southern Oscillation Index was dropping and an El Niño was on the way.

But they did point out that a global change of another sort was taking place, that Sajama's glacier was retreating (as the locals had already observed), and that every glacier in the tropical zone will probably disappear within fifty years. Sajama lies just inside the southern edge of the tropics--the main reason Lonnie wanted to drill there. Its high glacier should outlast the others, which are generally lower and nearer the equator, but the odds are that it, too, will disappear while the children, playing as he spoke in the streets of that village, are still alive. And since Sajama's snow is their primary source of water, its disappearance stands to have a dramatic effect upon their lives.

Lonnie happened to have some idea just how dramatic that effect might be. Two ice cores he had recovered fifteen years earlier, on the summit of the Quelccaya massif on the northern Altiplano, in Peru, had shown that climate change had played a major role in the births and deaths of numerous Andean civilizations five hundred and more years ago--the ancestors of these very people among them.

Archeologists have long known that the Tiwanaku abandoned their city by the lake shortly after A.D. 1000. They had no written language, and there was no explanation for their demise until the Quelccaya ice coresrevealed that a severe drought had set in on the Altiplano just before the Tiwanaku disappeared. The drought persisted for about four hundred years, and when it withdrew, the first Aymara city-states emerged. Furthermore, the drought commenced about a century after a warm spell began on the Altiplano, and its span coincides with an event that is sometimes called the Medieval Warm Period, in which temperatures in many parts of the world, including northern Europe, rose for about four centuries. Based on this evidence, one might expect the present warming to cause another devastating drought in this arid land.

You can tell just by looking that the people...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Henry Holt & Company Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0805064435
• ISBN 13: 9780805064438
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 448
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar