SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
arctic
Norwegian Deep-Sea Mining Threatens Arctic Biodiversity With 'Irreversible Harm'
"Norway's plans not only directly threaten species and habitats on the seabed, but also the wider marine ecosystem, from the tiniest plankton to the great whales," one Greenpeace scientist said.
Sep 20, 2024
Norway's plans to move forward with deep-sea mining could do irreparable damage to unique Arctic ecosystems and even drive unobserved species to extinction.
That's the warning issued Friday in a Greenpeace report titled Deep Sea Mining in the Arctic: Living Treasures at Risk. The environmental group argues that Norway's mining plans contradict its previous ecological commitments, such as its 2020 pledge to manage 100% of its ocean area sustainably by 2025.
"The measure of a nation's success is not how many promises it makes, but how it honors them and how much of its ecosystem is safeguarded for present and future generations," Greenpeace Nordic campaigner Haldis Tjeldflaat Helle said in a statement. "While Norway claims to be a respectable nation with responsible policies on ocean management, it's rolling out the red carpet for deep-sea mining companies to deploy machines that will cause irreversible harm to the Arctic's unique and vulnerable biodiversity. Somehow Norway's words and ocean commitments get forgotten when profit opportunities arise. We cannot let that happen."
"Mining will cause permanent damage to those ecosystems and it will remain impossible to assess the full extent of those impacts, let alone control them."
Norway's parliament sparked global outrage when it voted to explore its Arctic seabed for minerals in January 2024. Its Ministry of Energy then released a plan for the first round of licenses in June. The country aims to extend its first licenses next year and see mining begin by 2030.
Now, the Greenpeace report details what would be at stake if it does so.
"The Arctic is a unique and vital marine environment, home to one of the world's most fragile and diverse ecosystems, crucial for global climate regulation and supporting a wide array of species found nowhere else on Earth," Greenpeace International executive director Mads Christensen wrote in the report foreword. "The recent decision by Norway to open up 281,200 square kilometers of its claim to an extended continental shelf to deep-sea mining is putting ocean life and the livelihoods of those who depend on it at grave risk."
The mining would threaten life at all levels of the ocean and all nodes in the marine food web. Norway is hoping to mine for metals in the manganese crusts around hydrothermal vents, but these vents have also enabled a diverse array of life.
"They are home to creatures such as stalked jellyfish, tube worm forests, fish that produce antifreeze, and hairy shrimps hosting colonies of bacteria that can convert toxic hydrogen sulphides and methane into energy," Christensen wrote. "These are unique habitats with endemic species that can be found nowhere else on Earth, including ones that have yet to be scientifically described."
Deep-sea species like sponges, stony corals, sea pens, sea fans, lace corals, and black corals are also particularly vulnerable because they grow slowly, mature late, reproduce infrequently, and live for a long time. The habitats they form are therefore classified as Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems. Mining would disturb these ecosystems directly as "underwater robots" would both damage and remove them in the hunt for metals.
However, the impacts of deep-sea mining extend beyond the seabed and included sediment plumes, the release of toxins, the alternation of the substrate and its geochemistry, noise and light pollution, and moving some organisms from one part of the sea to another. These could harm both marine and human communities, as unique conditions in the Arctic Ocean create a spring phytoplankton bloom that feeds important fisheries like herring, mackerel, and blue whiting. The area also draws migrating seabirds and several species of marine mammals.
In particular, 12 species of marine mammals are commonly found in the area slated for mining: minke whale, humpback whale, fin whale, blue whale, bowhead whale, northern bottlenose whale, sperm whale, orca, narwhal, white-beaked dolphin, harp seal, and hooded seal.
"Although it has long been documented that whales and dolphins live in this area, we still know remarkably little about their abundance, distribution, and behaviors, including how much they rely on healthy ecosystems around seamounts," Kirsten Young, a science lead at Greenpeace Research Laboratories at the University of Exeter, said in a statement. "Mining will cause permanent damage to those ecosystems and it will remain impossible to assess the full extent of those impacts, let alone control them."
"What is clear is that Norway's plans not only directly threaten species and habitats on the seabed, but also the wider marine ecosystem, from the tiniest plankton to the great whales," Young concluded.
Norway's plans also come as the region is already undergoing changes due to the burning of fossil fuels and the heating of the atmosphere and oceans.
A 2023 assessment of the ecosystems of the Norwegian Sea found that both water temperatures and ocean acidification had increased.
Acidification in particular is of "grave concern" in the sea because it is moving more quickly than the global average.
"As the waters of the Nordic Seas become more acidified, there will be impacts to species, ecosystems, and ecosystem functioning as a result of changes to organisms' structure, distribution, and ability to function," Greenpeace wrote.
Greenpeace is calling on Norway to abandon its plans for deep-sea mining and add its name to a list of countries backing a moratorium on the practice.
In addition, the group urges Norway to instead facilitate more scientific research in its Arctic waters and to protect a network of 30% of them by 2030 in keeping with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and work with other nations to preserve all marine environments under the global ocean treaty.
"Now, when six of the nine planetary boundaries have been exceeded, is not the time to be opening up a new frontier to extraction, but one when we should all be doubling down on doing what is needed to safeguard the wildlife and ecosystems that we share this wonderful blue planet with," Christensen said.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Arctic Summers Could Be Virtually Ice-Free Within a Decade, Study Warns
The fossil fuel-driven climate crisis is causing Arctic sea ice to disappear more rapidly than expected, according to new research.
Mar 06, 2024
The Arctic could be almost completely without sea ice during the summer within the next decade, according to a new study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.
The study states that rising temperatures from the human-caused climate crisis are leading to increasing reductions in sea ice during the summer.
"These reductions are projected to continue with ongoing warming, ultimately leading to an ice-free Arctic," the study says. "In the September monthly mean, the earliest ice-free conditions (the first single occurrence of an ice-free Arctic) could occur in 2020–2030s under all emission trajectories and are likely to occur by 2050."
Well, I certainly wouldn't bet against this.
In fact, given the pace of change, I would be surprised if it didn't happen.https://t.co/7DPdhMi2ti
— Bill McGuire (@ProfBillMcGuire) March 5, 2024
An Arctic that is nearly completely without sea ice for the summer months would be an environment that is quite different—and dangerous—for indigenous animals like polar bears and seals. Though the Arctic is expected to become ice-free eventually, the study states that when this will occur will depend on how quickly humans stop burning fossil fuels.
“This would transform the Arctic into a completely different environment, from a white summer Arctic to a blue Arctic. So even if ice-free conditions are unavoidable, we still need to keep our emissions as low as possible to avoid prolonged ice-free conditions," Alexandra Jahn, an associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and a lead author of the research, toldThe Guardian.
Jahn said that if humans are able to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the future, the sea ice would eventually return. Many scientists are studying different ways to accomplish carbon removal—an approach that many climate advocates have criticized as a false solution—butexperts say reducing greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible is the main priority.
A study from last year found that ice-free summers in the Arctic had become an "unavoidable" future due to climate change. Ice is also disappearing in Antarctica, which is warming more quickly than scientists had anticipated.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Year Without a Winter
We’ve just come through the warmest December and January ever measured globally, and February seems certain to follow.
Mar 01, 2024
I don’t write that often about developments in the actual climate in these pages—it’s uniformly depressing, and it is the part we can do the least about. None of us has the power to change how much heat a molecule of carbon dioxide traps, nor can we alter how the jet stream reacts to changes in polar temperatures. All we can do is determine how much carbon dioxide and methane there is up there in the air—and so that’s what I concentrate on.
And yet the changes underway on our planet are now so extreme, and so remarkable, that sometimes we do need to stand back and simply gaze in awe and sadness. At my latitude (43.97 degrees north, or very nearly halfway between the North Pole and the equator) the changes in winter may be the most dramatic signs yet. And the most dramatic in my heart for sure, because winter is the time I love the most.
We are bleeding away the chill that is one of the hallmarks of our planet.
This year in North America has been about as close as we’ve ever come to a year without a winter—the geological obverse of 1816, the year when an Indonesian volcano put so much sulfur into the air that there was no real northern hemisphere summer. We’re the volcano now, and the gases we produce increase the temperature: it was 70°F in Chicago Tuesday, in February—which was also the day that the Windy City decided to join other American cities in suing the fossil fuel industry for damages. But that was just one of a hundred heat records broken in the course of the day, from Milwaukee to Dallas (94°F). But it wasn’t a single day of heat—it’s been an almost unrelentingly warm winter, with by far the lowest snow coverage for this time of year ever recorded (13.8% of the lower 48 as of Monday, compared with an average of more than 40%) and with the Great Lakes essentially free of ice.
We can surmise that this year’s puny winter has something to do with the strong El Niño in the Pacific, but of course the far deeper problem is the ongoing warming of the Earth—we’ve just come through the warmest December and January ever measured globally, and February seems certain to follow. There simply is a smaller supply of cold air in the Arctic than ever before. As The Washington Post put it on Tuesday:
The amount of cold air above the Northern Hemisphere this winter is near a record low, an unambiguous signal of the planet’s warming climate, according to a new analysis of 76 years of temperature data from about a mile above the ground.
The depleted cold-air supply means blasts of Arctic air generally lack the vigor of the past, while incursions of unusually mild weather—such as the one swelling over the central United States now—can be more frequent and intense.
The cold-air supply in the Northern Hemisphere is being evaluated using temperature data from about 5,000 feet high in the atmosphere. For about a decade, Jonathan Martin, a professor of meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, has analyzed the size of the cold pool at this level—or the area of the hemisphere covered by temperatures at or below 23°F (minus-5 Celsius).
We are bleeding away the chill that is one of the hallmarks of our planet.
That comes with serious pragmatic consequences. In the high Arctic, previously unheard-of thunderstorms are melting ice faster than ever. As Ed Struzik reported last week from Greenland, “surface crevassing, which allows water to enter into the interior of the icecap, is accelerating, thanks to rapid melting. And slush avalanches, which mobilize large volumes of water-saturated snow, are becoming common: In 2016, a rain-on-snow event triggered 800 slush avalanches in West Greenland.”
Further south, those record winter temperatures let forests and grasslands dry out fast. That’s why Canada’s boreal forest burned at a record rate last summer, and it’s why huge blazes are driving Texans for cover today—the Smokehouse Creek fire in the Panhandle, which only started Monday, is already the largest blaze in the state’s history; it forced the evacuation of the country’s biggest plant for disassembling nuclear weapons.
The higher latitudes need the annual rest that winter provides. It’s how these places—and the creatures in them—evolved. In Maine, which has the largest moose herd in the lower 48, 90% of calves died last winter because they were sucked dry by ticks that can now last all winter long. Biologists find moose with 90,000 ticks; they rub their hair off trying to shed the pests. “Ghost moose” is what they call these hairless beasts. You can’t have the Earth that we’ve known without some cold at the north and south; it’s functionally required, a part of the Pleistocene.
It’s not functionally required that we be able to glide across the surface of the Earth—but losing that is a deeply human cost, at least for some of us. Winter is the most whimsical season by far: Nature releases friction for a time, and all of a sudden you can skim across the ground. I was in Minneapolis two weeks ago for the Nordic skiing world cup race—the first held in the U.S. in a quarter century—and two days beforehand the first substantial snowfall of the Minnesota winter rescued the proceedings, letting 20,000 people come out for a stinging cold day to watch the fittest athletes on earth sail across the trail. This weekend I’ll be helping man the finish line here in Vermont as 700 little kids from around New England show up for the annual cross-country festival at our local ski area. Or at least I hope it will—it was pouring rain Wednesday afternoon, and the forecast for race day is 55°F.
All of which is to say that the impact of the climate crisis is psychological as well as physical. The deepest patterns of our lives—the ways our bodies understand the cycle of the seasons and the progress of time—are now slipping away. The fight to slow the warming of the planet is the fight to save billions of people and millions of species, but it’s also the fight to hold on to profound beauty and profound meaning, not to mention sheer gorgeous powdery magic.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular