years. A 1999 study using sonar data from nuclear submarines argued
that the sea ice that remained in the Arctic was as much as 40 percent
thinner than it was two to three decades ago.
The IPCC offers a number of predictions for future temperature
increases, the resultant changes in Arctic environments, and the con-
sequences for the region’s biota. It suggests that, ultimately, Arctic
land regions will on balance receive considerably more snowfall in
winter (although that snowfall will melt more quickly) and that the cli-
mate will be markedly warmer, with warming most pronounced over
North American and Eurasia. Spring is likely to arrive, on average, 7
days earlier, and fall a week later. The tundra may decrease by up to
two-thirds of its present size. The Arctic Ocean, too, will likely become
warmer and wetter. Sea ice will continue to thin and retreat, to the
extent that by 2050, sea-ice cover in the Arctic Ocean may be reduced
to about 80 percent of the area it covered in the mid-twentieth century.
Such sea-ice declines may well have negative repercussions for many
species of marine wildlife, including seabirds and marine mammals:
seal species, for example, that use the sea ice as a platform on which to
rest, and polar bears that prowl the ice to prey on seals.
Changes as a result of rising temperatures are much more than an
inconvenience to the peoples of the Bering, Beaufort, and Chukchi
Seas. They are a profound threat to the very way of life they have prac-
ticed for centuries. Thinning and retreating sea ice, for example,
makes it dangerous to hunt walruses, seals, and whales; in 1998,
whalers from the village of Wainwright had to be rescued after the ice
floe they were on broke up and drifted out to sea. Sea ice also provides
protection for coastal villages from the storms that ravage the Arctic
coast—and which themselves are predicted to increase as a result of
climate change. Without the protection the sea ice offers, those
beaches are subject to erosion, and the villages are at risk of elimina-
tion. Gambell, a village on a gravel spit on St. Lawrence Island in the
Bering Strait, is being repeatedly moved inshore as a result of erosion;
residents of the nearby village of Shishmaref attempted to salvage their
home after a series of powerful storms in 1997 before eventually elect-
ing to abandon it altogether.
108 Kieran Mulvaney