The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
www.seattlep-i.com

Sunday, July 30, 2000

By SOLVEIG TORVIK
P-I COLUMNIST

Mannfjell, an imposing ice-capped mountain, towers over the narrow valley in northernmost Norway where my mother was born and raised.

But there's a lot less ice on it now than when she was a child.

When I visited our family home in Kitdal some years ago, my mother and aunt, then both in their 70s, spoke of life in the old days.

"The ice came all the way down to there," my mother said, pointing toward the mountain from the kitchen window of my grandparents' home. The spot she pointed to was a long way down the barren face of a peak now mostly bereft of ice.

"It was blue and so beautiful," I recall my Aunt Ida adding with a sigh.

Their measurement of the glacier's size 60 years earlier surely wasn't scientific. But their memories of its reach down that mountain and into their lives were sharp as the ice crystals now melting on Mannfjell.

All over the world, scientists are stringing fancy instruments across icy mountaintops in an effort to confirm what these two women and everyone else of their age in that valley knew long ago: The ice is melting.

And it's happening fast enough to be obvious within one human lifespan.

Now comes the latest confirmation of my mother's and aunt's casual observations: NASA says the Greenland ice sheet is melting, too.

Scientists are honing in on a big unknown: the rate of melting. Equipped with aerial laser measuring devices unimaginable when my mother was a child, NASA scientists have compared results from five years ago with those obtained this year. They see a loss of more than 11 cubic miles of ice annually, which is creating 50 billion tons of new water each year.

If we could drink it, we might gladly raise our glasses to whatever's making the ice melt. We certainly need more water to sustain our growing numbers. Our species is proliferating wildly. India has now celebrated -- celebrated, mind you -- the birth of its billionth citizen.

The annual ice melt from Greenland is enough to sustain all 120 million households in this country for 141 days. But this stuff is draining into the sea. All it's accomplishing there is raising sea levels. NASA estimates Greenland's ice melt alone is raising sea levels by .005 of an inch annually.

Over the past century, sea levels rose 9 inches. That was back when the ice apparently was melting at a less impressive rate than today, which must be why no one seems to have noticed.

Now we seem to be on a fast-melt track. The ice we assume is safely locked up in Antarctica instead is plopping into the sea quite regularly in chunks as large as Jamaica.

The volume of the ice cap covering the Arctic Ocean has shrunk by 40 percent over the past 35 years, the Worldwatch Institute points out. The edge of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is receding by 400 feet annually, which may -- or may not -- be its natural rate of melting. Who's to know?

Climate scientists are much occupied these days with two vexing questions: How much of the Earth's warming, and subsequent ice melt, is due to human meddling -- as in burning fossil fuels in our autos -- in the planet's normal warming and cooling cycle? And how fast is all this the ice going to melt, anyway?

Leave aside the contentious debate about why the temperatures are getting hotter; we know they are.

No whining, people: We march well-warned to the edge of this abyss.

Just be advised that some scientists say that whether it's natural or man-made, at present rates of warming all the glaciers will be gone from Glacier National Park in 2030. So do go see them while the ice is still there.

There's another highly unappealing climate change theory. It holds the global climate mechanism can absorb only so much heat before the whole thing flips. If that were to happen, it could blanket Earth in ice clouds. For my money, that's the worst of all possible bad weather scenarios. But it's certain to end grousing about heat.

Antarctica has about 91 percent of the world's ice and Greenland 8 percent. But many scientists worry more about Greenland's ice melting than Antarctica's because Greenland is closer to the Equator, so more likely to melt.

The melting rate could depend on whether we humans bother to turn down the heat we're making with our infernal combustion engines. But who wants to hear about that?

Greenland, where ice is two miles thick in places, has enough of it to raise the world's sea levels by 21 feet were all of it to melt. (Seattle too lay under two miles of ice in days of yore, so ice melt can produce useful real estate.)

Greenland's ice already melted once before that we know of, 110,000 to 130,000 years ago during a little balmy episode known as an interglacial period. Scientists think Greenland's melted ice raised sea levels that time by a startling 13 feet to 20 feet. Of course, no one was living on waterfront property around there then, as far as we can tell.

Do not be alarmed. Time surely is on our side. It will take thousands of years for that much of Greenland's ice to melt again, scientists assure us. And by then, our rapacious species no doubt will have consumed this planet's resources and fled to another one anyway.