Sunday, August 10, 2008
Imagining the North The uncharted North fired the imagination of Europeans and North Americans in the 19th and early 20th century. Many believed in a warm open ocean existed, on the other side of a ring of ice. John B Sheldon of Hillville, New Jersey believed that the pole was made out of diamond. But the idea of a perpetually frozen landscape was alien to farming peoples in the warm and fertile south. Few people, in Russia or the West could conceive of a life among the sophisticated hunter gatherers who had lived in the Arctic for millennia. Credit: Face to Face Media
Norilsk, originally build by slave labour, is the largest of the mining and smelting cities built above the Arctic Circle. With a population of more than 250,000, the it was a model city in the Soviet plan. But the smelters emit a million tons of sulphur a year, polluting the Arctic and damaging the tundra. The cost of maintaining the northern cities has proven prohibitive and more than a million residents are expected to leave. Photo credit: AMAP (Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program)
A Saami family of reindeer herders, on the Kola Peninsula, ca 1910 . The mild climate, rich nickel deposits, and strategic location of the Kola peninsula attracted the attention of the new Soviet government. Settlers began moving north in the 1920s and collectivization of reindeer herds began before World War II. The current Saami population in Russia is around 2000, largely concentrated in the village of Lovozero. Photo credit: Lovozero Museum
Arctic boreal forest
Boreal forests have more wetlands area than anywhere else in the world, with Russia and Canada each containing an estimated one million to two million lakes and ponds.
Temperatures are rising
The Arctic’s average temperature increases are nearly twice that of the rest of the world. Over the past 50 years average temperatures in the Arctic have increased as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit. In the next 100 years some areas in the Arctic may see an increase in average temperatures as high as 13 degrees Fahrenheit.As temperatures rise in the Arctic, sea ice and glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate. Over the past 30 years, 386,000 square miles of Arctic sea ice have melted away, an area larger than Texas and Arizona combined. The latest observations suggest that Arctic sea ice could completely disappear by 2020.
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