The last time I was in the island nation of the Maldives – nearly 400,000 people scattered among 1,200 tiny islands running south for a thousand miles off the tips of Sri Lanka and India – the place was on edge. It was early in 2005 and the tsunami waves had rushed over the islands just a few weeks before. Fortunately for the Maldives a combination of deep channels running between islands and the sizable coral reefs that surround many of them prevented the giant wave from sweeping its entire population into the sea. Only about 100 people were killed, far fewer than drowned on the coast of Somalia hundreds of miles further west.
I came to report on the post-tsunami impacts for the New York Times and as I wandered among the homes badly cracked by the wave and saw decades-old garbage dumps swept into the sea by waters that rushed over the islands – which rise less than six feet above sea level – everyone was talking about the possibility of another such incident. “What can we do to prevent the next wave from taking us all,” was the collective concern. “What if there is a second wave coming?”
Today I’m back for a couple weeks of scouting – we’ll shoot a documentary film here later in the year – and the subject has changed. No one is talking about tsunami waves, but everyone is talking about rising sea levels. Both are obviously legitimate concerns in a place where all of life lives just a couple feet above the sea. Talk is heightened by a variety of recent reports that sea level rise around the globe is now anticipated to come faster, reach higher … and the fact that the Maldives new president, Mohamed Nasheen, is talking louder than any elected official in the world about the need to do anything we can to slow the seas from rising. He obviously has a vested interest.
As I flew into the Maldives, President Nasheen was going public with plans to make the Maldives the first country in the world to go “carbon neutral” by 2010. (He’s in a race of sorts, leaders in Costa Rica, Iceland, Norway, the Netherlands and New Zealand have previously laid claims on the same title.) Leading by example, he hopes to wean his country – tourism is its biggest economy – away from fossil fuels and towards a mix of wind turbines, solar panels and coconut-burning back-up generators. He is not the first president to gamble on an eco-friendly policy to help promote eco-tourism, but his case may be the direst. If sea levels rise as now predicted – three feet by 2100 – his people will soon have to seriously concentrate on finding a new home (Nasheen’s predecessor talked with Australia about moving his people there; Nasheen has suggested he will look into some kind of land-for-fishing-rights swap with India or Pakistan …).
I’ll be moving around the Maldives a bit during these next two weeks, by boat and float plane, and expect to hear more from the people about their hopes and plans for the coming decades. A first sign of life here just feet above sea level: My room came complete with a life jacket … just in case.
The Times has a great story today about water fights in northern Chile. Long regarded as the “driest place on earth,” due to a lack of rain, the region is sucked even more dry by the voracious mines that run pipelines criss-crossing the Atacama desert draining any river or aquifer of water needed to run their 365-day-a-year operations. We did a big expedition – 2003’s Into the Altiplano – which took us to many of the big copper mines that are the economic lifeblood of the area. This video clip is from Chuquicamata, the second largest copper mine in Chile, which generates $25 million dollars a day. In it the company p.r. man – I doubt he’s still got that job – admitted that the mines were draining any existing water off and killing all the small towns, but rationalized that since “copper is king” in Chile, there was no option. We made two very fun/provocative films about the region called simply “Into the Altiplano.”
I’ve seen that story repeated across the dry north of Chile; coincidentally water is a big issue in the southern region of the skinny country too. The big power company that owns most of the electric utilities in Chile (Spain’s Endesa) wants to dam many of Patagonia’s biggest rivers for hydropower to be used further north.
Some suggest water may become the next oil, in the sense that rights to it or ownership of it may lead to both civil wars and international conflict. Keep an eye on Chile; as its water right fights mount, they set an example for the rest of the world.
I read a story the other day in a Scottish journal that prompted the cynic in me. It’s an incredibly relevant story in regards to my posting of a couple days ago about the coming nationalistic fights over who owns what in Antarctica. As the Antarctic Peninsula continues to change – warmer temperatures, more rain, less ice – it is becoming yet another place on the planet that individual countries are trying to make their own.
Drilling for ice cores and rock samples
The story in the Scotsman News was titled “Giant Drill Probes Land Time Forgot” and went on to detail how scientists from Edinburgh have been given the okay to drill through two miles of Antarctic ice in search of a prehistoric lake that lies below. Ostensibly they are seeking signs of microbial life in the three-hundred-foot deep Lake Ellsworth, a subglacial lake long covered by ice. A big debate about this project, and other drilling efforts – specifically mounted by Russian scientists - is that man’s exploration could instantly pollute the pristine lakes, spoiling them for science.
Since Antarctica is supposed to be all about science, it’s a great opportunity, exactly what nations are supposed to be doing on the seventh continent. The report dubs it potentially one of “the greatest discoveries of modern times.”
It’s not the first time I’ve heard about – or seen – drilling in Antarctica. I’ve been in a few of the Russian bases in eastern Antarctica where there always seems to be some kind of drilling project going on. The super cold weather and drill bits breaking off in the hardened ice deep below the surface most often frustrate them. Americans are doing the same, based out of McMurdo or the South Pole station, taking ice cores and rock samples for scientific study.
The cynic in me, of course, wonders if there might not be an ulterior motive for fine-tuning the ability to drill in Antarctica. Today maybe it’s ice coring to help assess climate history or a microbial subglacial lake that is the goal. But once you’ve figured out how to drill through two miles of ice, might not oil or diamonds be a next logical search?
It reminds me of a visit we made to Palmer Station a year ago, the American science base on Anvers Island. We spent the day with a fascinating marine biologist who’d been coming to Antarctica for a decade; his specialty was an algae, which he thought could be useful as a cancer-curing agent. His work can be arduous, diving into the cold Southern Ocean on a near-daily basis; the project is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the university in Florida where he teaches. It is a valid, serious, long-term scientific effort. But when I asked who else funded his months-long studies, he admitted he couldn’t do the work without the support of private pharmaceutical companies, which – if his work is successful – will claim part ownership, and potential profit from, his discoveries.
The Antarctic Treaty was updated in 1991 to reinforce the notion that the continent is to be off-limits to exploitation for minerals and other commercial ventures. That line of course is tested on a daily basis down south, especially as the temperatures warm and ice slowly disappears.
The Scottish lake-drilling project is estimated to cost $10 million; if successful there are another 150 subglacial lakes under the ice in Antarctica. Their wonders are possibly soon to be exposed. Who knows what else will be discovered during their probing.
Both the New Scientist and Scientific American have rich reports today regarding the climate change conference that began in Copenhagen this week. The meeting is a run-up to December’s international climate talks, where officials are set to draft a successor to the Kyoto treaty to limit carbon dioxide emissions.
The highlight so far? Confirmation that the rise in the world’s sea level predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change two years ago was wrong. The IPCC estimated a rise by 2010 of eight inches to two feet; in Copenhagen the new estimate is more than three feet.
Why the new estimate? The glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster than previously predicted.
“It is now clear that there are going to be massive flooding disasters around the globe,” said David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey. “Populations are shifting to the coast, which means that more and more people are going to be threatened by sea-level rises.”
Most at risk? Florida. The Netherlands. Bangladesh. And the Maldives … where I’m headed on Sunday …. and where recently-elected president Mohamed Nasheed has announced a plan to buy land elsewhere in the region – most likely Pakistan or India – to move his 386,000 citizens before sea level rise makes his island nation uninhabitable.
The unique treaty that governs Antarctica – written in 1959, signed by 46 countries in 1961 and amended in 1991 to keep the seventh continent off limits to oil and mineral exploitation until at least 2041 – is facing its most severe test yet.
In November 2007, the United Kingdom, citing decades-old territorial claims, claimed for itself 385,000 square miles of the continent, including the 600-mile long Peninsula and – most importantly – the coastal shelf that lines it.
When the treaty was written after the successful International Polar Year of 1957-58 it defined Antarctica as all land and ice shelves south of 60 degrees south. No mention was made of the continental shelf, nor specifically who had rights to it. By international law every coastal nation “owns” 230 miles off its coastline. But if no one “owns” Antarctica, who owns its continental shelf? Today a fight has begun over who owns what in Antarctica, a struggle that promises to last long into the future.
Which is why in historic manner lawmakers from long-squabbling Chile and Argentina flew to Antarctica last week to publicly denounce the U.K.’s claim and instead suggest that those same icy plains – and shelf – belong instead to the two South American countries. Last Thursday they met at the Chilean base of Eduardo Frei and on Friday jumped to the Argentine base known as Jubany to announce their very rare collaboration.
The Antarctic claims of Argentina, Chile and Britain are particularly difficult to sort out since they are all claiming the same sizable pie slice of the continent. The British territorial claim goes back to 1908. Another eight countries (Russia, Brazil, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, France, Spain and Norway) also still claim pieces of the continent, which, according to treaty, is supposed to be unclaimed and open only to science. The U.S. has never (not yet?) made a claim in Antarctica, though it operates the largest science base on the continent (McMurdo) and controls the South Pole (Scott-Amundsen).
It’s long been thought that Antarctica and its coast was too foreboding, too far away and chocked by too many 15-mile-long icebergs to make drilling for oil and gas possible, or cost-effective. But as we are witnessing in the Arctic as its ice disappears, as the ice along the Antarctic Peninsula lessens – thanks to temperatures that have warmed more than anywhere on the planet during the past fifty years – territorial battles have begun.
I’ve been up and down the Antarctic Peninsula for many years and can testify there is still lots and lots of ice both on land and afloat. Today it still looks like a tricky place to put up oilrigs. But who knows how technology will change – and how Antarctica will change – in the coming years? All of these nations are simply planting new flags all over the continent … just in case.
When I was growing up a fish dinner equaled just one thing: Fish sticks. Or, on very rare occasion, a trip to the local Howard Johnson’s for an all you can eat Friday feast of fried shrimp.
Today, thanks to an expanded palate and the notion that fish is better for you than red meat, we’ve come to expect far more. Walk the fish section of any supermarket and you find dozens of fish from all over the world laid out on the crushed ice, some caught in the wild, some farmed, often boasting tags of the faraway nations they come from. In restaurants we now expect far more than a ‘fish of the day,’ anticipating a page full of options ranging from mollusks to white fish, red fish, cephalopods and more.
So when you read headlines announcing that fisheries are fast becoming depleted – that seven out of ten of the world’s major fisheries are already over exploited, that by 2050 all of the fish species that we currently know will be gone from the seas – it should come as no big shock. The ocean is not finite, its fishes not unlimited. And a major responsibility for that change should be laid at our feet, each and every one of us fish-eaters. Our big and still-growing demand around the world is a huge part of the problem.
On Monday, the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization will issue a “State of the World Fisheries and Aquaculture” report; I’ve had an advance look and what’s inside this biannual report is not too surprising: The world’s wild catch is in steep decline and fish farms are taking over as the world’s prime supplier of seafood.
The environmental group Oceana is releasing a simultaneous report called “Hungry Oceans: What Happens When the Prey Is Gone,” focusing on three threats to the smaller species of the world’s seafood supply:
– Over fishing of prey species is going unregulated, including immense stores of squid and krill. Whole schools of fish that feed tuna, whales and other long-lived animals and drive migrations are caught in nets, particularly by industrial fishing vessels.
– Fish farms are driving the need for small species, which are turned into oil or feed. They use more of the ocean’s protein than they produce. An estimated 4 to 11 pounds of prey fish are consumed to grow 1 pound of farmed salmon.
– Warming ocean temperatures in the past century – and projected to rise in the coming decades – affect sea life survival. Changes in temperature and prevailing currents may sweep away newly hatched eggs and larvae, and hurricanes can wipe out a generation of larval fish.
Oceana also reports that climate change is also interfering with the timing of life cycles. The food for seabirds and salmon, for example, must be available when they need it. If not, seabirds don’t reproduce or their offspring die, and salmon don’t survive when they get to the ocean. Oceana has lobbied for bans on commercial fishing of krill in the Antarctica, Japan and British Columbia and the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada.
Where do all these reports point? Moderation. Choosing wisely. Eating more vegetables.
1 Comment
