Weekly Post, GREENLAND, LABRADOR, and BAFFIN ISLAND: A Climate Change Research Expedition in the North Atlantic

GREENLAND, LABRADOR, and BAFFIN ISLAND:  A Climate Change Research Expedition in the North Atlantic by Robert Glenn Ketchum

 

In 2006, I was invited to participate in a Zegrahm expedition sponsored by the Harvard Museum of Natural History, The Nature Conservancy, and the World Wildlife Fund. I was to lecture aboard the ship, and to participate onshore, when visiting Inuit communities to discuss the effects of climate change on their lives. The trip would travel along the coast of southeastern Greenland, crossing the Labrador Sea, to the northwest coast of Labrador, and the southwest coast of Baffin Island.

~Robert Glenn Ketchum

Monday, July 4, 2022 

GREENLAND, LABRADOR, and BAFFIN ISLAND:  A Climate Change Research Expedition in the North Atlantic, #91

GLB #91:  

We arrived in the harbor of Iqualuit precisely at the highest tide, so our large party, and all of our gear, were loaded into numerous Zodiacs and taken ashore, allowing our clipper to retreat to deeper water before the tide turned. It was still morning, and our flight home did not leave for several hours, so a bus was arranged to take our luggage to the airport, and we were free to wander about the town. Hysterically, we had street maps to help us find points of interest, but they were useless. Not only were the street names unintelligible, such as Kangiqsliniq, or Niaqunngusiariaq, but all the signage was written in Inuktitut), the Inuit alphabet, which as you can see here is quite bewildering. A humorous several hours was had by all.

photograph(s) © copyright, ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM, 2022,

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Trustees for Alaska Needs Our Help

The Arctic got hot early this year. Klawock hit 70 degrees Fahrenheit in March, the earliest 70-degree day ever recorded in Alaska.

Arctic sea ice has hit a record low. Temperatures surged 30 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit above average across the Arctic Ocean. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 415 parts per million for the first time in human history last weekend--the highest level in at least 800,000 years, and probably over 3 million.

We face a time of crisis, yet live in an age of distraction. We need to focus on how to make the changes we need to survive, yet we bounce from tweet to insult to faux pas to disinformation to GIF to tweet again.

The internet peddles in distraction, according to Nicholas Carr in his book, "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains." It's not just that the online world distracts us, but that it alters how we think so that we remain in the shallows of thought.

Distraction is now the tool, the method, the tactic, the commodity, and the ultimate goal. The business of distraction seeks your attention, not depth of content or deep thinking.

The same goes for our political and social systems. Those with and in power have latched onto distraction as the means to holding power. They bump and derail thoughts and conversations like pick pockets exploiting a crowded street. They throw shade on people whose ideas and solutions threaten their power. They fund disturbance to keep people from unifying around their connections, common purposes and goals.

But we need deep solutions, not shallow ones.

The culture of distraction may alter our brains, but we have the choice to not let our brains be duped. Each of us chooses what we want to spend our time absorbing and lifting up. Each of us can turn our attention to where our values lie.

My values do not align with the Trump administration's, so I don't need to put attention on his tweets. There is very little that's meaningful in his 280-character blasts anyway--they're driven by his need for attention and to distract from his misdeeds and what's important.

We need to be mindful of how we spend our time and energy. We need to set time aside to turn off the chatter. We need to concentrate on the climate crisis and all the interconnected challenges on our doorstep. The question isn't whether we should reduce emissions, stop the burning of fossil fuels, invest in sustainable energy, and support those on the front lines of violent storms, erosion, floods and droughts.

Those things are no-brainers. We must think deeply and act quickly to address climate change. Take a break from your online world and demands to focus on solutions. Mother Earth needs you!!

Vicki Clark
Executive Director
Trustees of Alaska
PS: Your support of Trustees for Alaska is critical now more than ever.

Abstract, The Bolivian Climate Justice Movement: Mobilizing Indigeneity in Climate Change Negotiations by Kathryn Hicks and Nicole Fabricant

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The Bolivian Climate Justice Movement: Mobilizing Indigeneity in Climate Change Negotiations 
by Kathryn Hicks and Nicole Fabricant

The Bolivian Platform against Climate Change is a coalition of civil society and social movement organizations working to address the effects of global warming in Bolivia and to influence the global community. Many of the organizations use indigenous philosophy and worldviews to contest normative conceptions of development. A study of the growth of this movement drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in 2010 reveals a complex relationship between state and nonstate actors that has had a striking impact on the global community despite the failure of multilateral climate change negotiations.

Abstract, Unsettling Times: Living with the Changing Horizons of the Peruvian Andes by Mattias Borg Rasmussen

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Unsettling Times: Living with the Changing Horizons of the Peruvian Andes 
by Mattias Borg Rasmussen

As in many other parts of the Peruvian Andes, the peasants of rural Recuay report receding glaciers, altered patterns of precipitation, and disappearing species of plants and wildlife among the many things that may unsettle the everyday. Susan Whyte’s concept of uncertainty highlights the fact that climate change emerges in different ways in particular situations. It informs water politics and local lives but is not a priori the most important part of the story. Rather than adapting to climate change, people adapt climate change to their social worlds.

The Environment's Wildlife Dangers by Robert Glenn Ketchum

Before I began to use Facebook (FB) as an autobiography with my photographs, those of you who follow me know I was posting stories and data related to specific environmental issues. I have now reserved my Saturday-Sunday FB postings to announce my various public events, AND to occasionally re-visit some of those important environmental issues of interest.

A recent series of articles in the Los Angeles Times (LATimes) reminded me of a Facebook post I put up awhile back, entitled 'Thunderheads', in which the Smithsonian Channel brought together 250 international researchers take part in a unique collective project studying thunderstorms. The pertinent part of their many discoveries for me was the fact that hailstones, especially large ones, form around a VERY particular particle of matter – the particle matter put up in the air by wildfires! I've embedded the 'sneak peak' video, as it's going to air early August. Check your local listings for the next time this show airs, as it's a must see!

So the LATimes stories that triggered my recall of this Smithsonian show were a sequence of articles – these are worth a complete read not only because they are informative, however I have ALSO HIGHLIGHTED A MORE SUBTLE THREAD OF THOUGHT that ties these articles together in a disturbing way.

(Photograph © 2013 Irfan Khan, Los Angeles Times, October 2006)  

To the Arctic Intimate Photographs of Arctic Wildlife by Florian Schulz, December 26, 2011

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Florian Schulz’s To the Arctic Intimate Photographs of Arctic Wildlife

by Florian Schulz December 26, 2011 No Comments  Columns, Earth View

Throughout the course of several years, award-winning wildlife photographer Florian Schulz has traveled to remote locations in the American and European Arctic to photograph their astounding diversity of life. His new book, To the Arctic, includes expansive images showing the incredible size of the Arctic wilderness as well as some of the most intimate photographs of Arctic wildlife ever taken. To the Arctic is the official companion book to the upcoming IMAX® film To the Arctic 3D – a co-production of Warner Bros. Pictures, MacGillivray Freeman Films and IMAX Corporation – to be released in 2012.

Images of Change Documenting a Warming World by Gary Braasch, October 28, 2011

Images of Change Documenting a Warming World 
by Gary Braasch, Fellow, International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP), October 28, 2011

My work as a professional journalist and environmental photographer led me to climate change 11 years ago when I found my first independent funding source – a small environmental foundation – and established World View of Global Warming. This science-based photojournalistic documentation project is about global warming and its broader implications around the world. It is a witness, in words and pictures, to the scientific evidence of Earth’s significant changes affecting people and landscapes, as well as a chronicle of solutions undertaken.

Look For Gary Braasch's Climate Change Exhibit at Reagan National Airport

Many of the 50,000 passengers passing through Reagan National airport in Washington DC daily will now see a different kind of advertisement in the concourse:  a new public education initiative has installed a photographic billboard of ongoing climate change today.

Serving as Witness to Environmental Change by James Balog, August 29, 2011

Iceland / Svínafellsjökull Glacier An EIS team member provides scale in a massive landscape of crevasses on the Svínafellsjökull Glacier in Iceland. Photograph © James Balog

Serving as Witness to Environmental Change

by James Balog, Fellow, International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP), August 29, 2011

The world is seeing gargantuan change the likes of which people haven’t experienced since the dawn of agriculture 8,000 years ago. Changing temperatures, rapid loss of ice and snow in arctic and alpine regions, water and drought stress, increased forest fires, and the loss of plant and animal species are no longer due to natural forces alone – and are certainly not the result of natural variation. Current conditions on spaceship Earth are increasingly the product of humankind’s world-altering pressures to sustain lifestyles, access natural resources and make room for our ever-expanding population.