Hello worm lovers! 

This weekend I am at Ben & Jerry's Sundae on the Common music and ice cream festival (26, 27th July) in London.  I have worm bins, T-shirts and other sweet prizes to give away so if you're in the area, do stop by the Climate Change College / Worminator stall for a chance to win! 

If you can't make the festival itself but still would like to acquire a worm bin, check out Original Organics online.  If you see something you like, email them and mention The Worminator Project and they might just sort you out with a discount! 

Thanks for taking an interest in global worming...reducing food waste going to landfill by turning it into compost!

www.originalorganics.co.uk

  

Based on the data for England and Wales, WRAP estimated that householders across the UK throw away £10.2bn of avoidable food waste every year.

Using the same extrapolation, they also estimated the average UK household needlessly throws away 18% of all food purchased. Families with children throw away 27%.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7389351.stm

4/5/08

Fairbanks to Healy.  In spite of eye-stinging exhaustion, I couldn’t bring myself to sleep because the scenery outside our coach window was just too stunning.  This is the Alaska I know and love: wide open tree-lined highways with snow-capped mountains in the distance, wide, shallow rivers, clean crisp air, hardly ever another car in sight.

8am pit-stop at the Chevron gas station in Nenana.  At the drinks corner (which apparently also serves as the local DVD library), we got chatting to Rick and Monica, two local residents.  As we made introductions, Rick said “Hey we’ve got a daughter named Erika!” then proceeded to tell us the names of all 7 of their kids (all hyphenated “Erika-Jean” etc), which took a while because he seemed to have some difficulty remembering all of them so his wife had to pipe in and help him out every now and then.

Jakob asked, “So do people up here tend to have big families?” to which Rick replied, jerking his thumb in the direction of his wife, “It gets real cold and dark up here in the winters and she’s warm!”

 

I love the dry and understated sense of humour up here.  Next to the toilets was a hotdog machine with a sign reading: “Grab your buns here”. 

 

The toilet itself was peculiar as there were two toilets in the one room, without any divide!  The new batch of media crew who joined us for this leg of the trip included two women filming for Dutch MTV, and so we kicked off our friendship by taking photos of us holding hands in this very communal setting.

 

We pulled into the driveway of the place we were to stay for the next 2 nights: Denali Dome House, a wonderful wooden igloo-shaped honeycomb structured B&B owned by Anne and Terry Miller.  It turned out to be a Buckminster Fuller designed house, and the interior was even more impressive than the exterior, with huge airy windows built into the honeycomb, a panoramic fireplace and wraparound windows looking out onto the woods and mountains of Denali.  It was a beautiful example of a home perfect for these parts, with a roof shaped to not collect snow, double glazing all over, thick carpets, high ceilings with a mezzanine level, wide windows with mountain views, and lots of surrounding land.

3/5/08

Drove back to BASC, stopping en route to take some final photos on the arctic sea ice.

Between the high winds and snowy weather and our jam-packed schedule, we hadn’t been able to work on the short video clips we’d been hoping to shoot up here.  We decided to make use of our last hour to do so. 

 

I donned my hot pink worm suit and stood out in the snow to be interviewed by the Portuguese press about my project, then Cara and I got some shots of us together: she in her Green DIY project get up and me as Wormy the mascot for The Worminator Project.

 

Check out www.greendiy.ie for more information on how to DIY greenly in Ireland!

 

And check out www.theworminatorproject.com for more information on vermicomposting!

3/5/08

Mad scramble to get everyone gathered and into the van in order to make it to the local meteorlogical station’s bi-daily weather balloon release.  2:55pm, power-walked through a snowy field toward a lone tall shed with a massive “garage” type shutter entrance.  Briefly made introductions with John Hinsberger, meteorlogical technician, before he ushered us into the building where a huge white balloon was inflated and waiting to go. 

2:58pm, John opened the shutter and walked the balloon outside.  3pm sharp, the balloon was released.  It shot up into the white sky, with a shoe-box sized data box dangling from the end of a length of string.  The balloon will swell to around 10 meters in diameter and burst at around 33,000m altitude, but not before it has sent back to a nationally-shared computer information on such things as temperature, moisture, altitude, pressure; factors with which forecasts can be made and conditions documents.

When we checked the computer about 15 minutes later, the balloon was at 5836 meters and the temperature up there was minus 27.3 celsius.

Up to date data can be found on the National Climactic Data Center @ www.ncdc.noaa.gov

2/5/08

Winds of over 50 miles per hour.  Unlike the blue skies of yesterday, conditions were pretty harsh to the point where our guides were uncertain that we could safely stay out for too long.  Nevertheless, we got into our heavy duty gear with yet another layer added in addition to what we wore yesterday.  When I stepped out of the building I could tell immediately that this was some serious cold; without balaclavas, goggles and gloves our extremities would succumb to frostbite in no time.

 

10 minute walk to what used to serve as the community’s theatre; it still has the words “theatre” stencilled onto the side, but other than this it would just be a huge upside down half-pipe of corrugated metal.  Awaiting us was Anne Jensen, archaeologist.

Anne gave us a briefing of her work here in Barrow, which focuses on salvaging and studying an ancient (around 1000ad) Inupiat burial ground being lost to sea due to coastal erosion.  The situation is so dire that she’s been awoken in the middle of the night by anxious townspeople who have come to her having happened across newly revealed remains of their ancestors about to be lost to the sea.

 

Anne has the support of the community to do her excavations.  “They prefer to keep these remains buried on land, perhaps because their ancestors clearly went to great pains to bury them in the first place; using only crude tools such as shovels made of walrus and seal bones to dig into frozen earth.”

 

This frozen earth is called “permafrost”, and is rapidly thawing due to the warming of the climate.  In 1998 the ground in this area was mainly permafrost.  Today, you have to dig fairly deep in parts before you come across it.  This thawing is wreaking havoc on buildings that have been built upon permafrost, so much so that many houses built today are built on stilts so that the heat generated indoors in the winter doesn’t contribute to the warming of the ground beneath!

 

After Anne’s talk, we got onto snow mobiles and sleds pulled by snow mobile and set off for Point Barrow, the northernmost point of the USA.  With visibility so bad today, we were particularly cautious about looking out for polar bears and about not straying too far from the group.

The average annual rate of coastal erosion was 2.1 meters in 2001.  But since then until the last bluff edge measurements at the end of 2007, a whopping 41.1 meters have been eaten away, bringing the current average rate of erosion up to 6 meters per year.

 

A number of factors are contributing to this coastal erosion: thawing of the permafrost, longer summer/ice-free water days, and harsher storm waves hitting the coast due to this larger expanse of open sea water due to retreating sea ice.

 

Anne hastened to add, “Of course coastal erosion would be occurring anyway, but climate change is certainly contributing to the acceleration of the erosion we’re seeing today.”

 

We attended a talk by George Divoky, sea bird expert.  Retreating arctic pack-ice is affecting the food chain and chick-rearing patterns of the Black Guillemot, a small pigeon-sized arctic diving bird. 

 

For over 30 years George has been coming to Cooper Island, near Barrow, to live among and study these birds.  The guillemot has a complex society, complete with “breeders”, “singles”, and even a waitlist system for nesting cavities!  They have a 95% chance of returning to the same box with the same mate each breeding season, which is mind-blowingly in synch with the typical dates for the first snow melt and the first snow fall—on average an 80 day window.  There is a direct correlation between the first snow melt and time that the birds start to ovulate; that’s how in tune these creatures are with nature.

These birds dive for arctic cod, which live under the sea ice.  Under the sea ice are several hundred types of organisms, such as microscopic photosynthesizers, algae, kelp, shrimp and fish.

 

Retreating pack ice is causing a sudden drop in these arctic organisms near Cooper Island, and so the guillemots are having to fish for spiky bottom-dwelling fish or for sub-arctic fish that are now migrating up to these now warmer waters.  These fish are new to the guillemot and are often too large uncomfortable for chicks to ingest and so mass numbers of chicks are not surviving.  With sub-arctic fish moving into the area, so are sub-arctic birds such as the horned puffin.  The entire balance is shifting with the retreat of the ice.

 

They are an innovative and highly adaptable species, but even they cannot keep up with the changes that are so rapidly occurring with their ecosystem.

Some figures: winter ice extent is decreasing by 2% per decade.  Summer ice extent is decreasing by 7% per decade.  Ice volume has decreased by 40% in the last 5 decades.  This is not just very bad news for the guillemots, but for the entire arctic ecosystem.

 

Seals feed on these fish as well, and polar bears in turn feed on seals.  Cut off the source of food for one of these creatures and…you’ve got yourself a diminishing species.

 

Retreating pack ice is also leading to more and more walrus and polar bears being stranded on land when they cannot swim the distance to the ice.  This is wreaking havoc in multiple senses, from hungry bears coming into towns in search for food, or eating up (for example) entire populations of guillemot chicks.  The carcass of a 3 year old female polar was found on land; cause of death: starvation.  Since 2006, there have been increasing amounts of cannibalism amongst bears, desperate to survive.

 

George said, “I didn’t think I’d see ice retreat to this extent in my lifetime; this ecosystem is going to collapse before we know it.”

31/4/08

 

Today we put our heavy arctic gear to the test by going out onto the sea ice off of Point Barrow a few miles north of the BASC centre, to help scientist Chris Petrich gather final pieces of data for his study on the relectivity of sea ice, or the albedo effect.

Apparently, snow has a reflectivity of 1 (nearly 100 %), whereas sea ice has reflectivity of 0.65 (65%) and puddles have 0.35 (35%).  This is relevant because the ice and snow of the arctic acts as a giant reflector of the sun.  With less relectivity happening from these “darker” patches of sea ice and puddles, extra heat absorbed by these contribute to the melting of arctic sea ice.  This reflectivity is called the albedo effect.

 

As more rays are absorbed, the speed of melting increases.  The depth of these puddles are not so relevant as much as the area of absorbtion.  Currently climate models take into consideration the impact of greenhouse gases on sea ice melting but do not take reflectivity into account, so Chris’ studies will help to develop a climate change model that will.

 

Temperature: minus 13 degrees Celsius. Wind chill: minus 23 degrees Celsius.

 

The wind chill was such that even with liner gloves on my hands hurt from the cold after just a few seconds of being removed from their mittens when I had to take photographs.  It was a gorgeous, blue skied day to begin with, but this lack of cloud insulation probably made it that much colder.  Even with 2 pairs of thermal underwear, top and bottom, wind pants, 3 jackets, a balaclava and a woolly hat, I could still feel the cold on my torso.  About the only parts of me that were warm for most of the time were my feet and hands, so when the physical side of data gathering began it was a welcome means to get the blood circulation going.

I started off being on the team that were to drill holes in the sea ice to determine the depth of the snow cover layer, the thickness of the sea ice itself, and the water level.  We selected two types of areas:  flat, snow-packed areas and raised “snow dune” areas.  We then shovelled the snow layer away and commenced drilling with a hand-cranked drill.  When I first saw the drill, which was about 2 meters long, I secretly wondered what the point of using it was as I didn’t think it would be long enough to reach the sea below.  I was astonished to find that we hit water on average just 1.4 meters through the sea ice!  This vast, 8 mile expanse of sea ice that could so easily be mistaken for land, was actually just 1.4 meters thick where we were.  The local guy who towed my sled onto the ice told me that as little as 20 years ago the ice would’ve easily been between 10 and 20 feet thick.  What a difference.  We’re literally skating on thin ice here, climatically

I then paired up with Filipe, the Portuguese ambassador, strapped a GPS pack on his back and armed with a probe and a notebook and pad, we walked off into the nothingness to measure the depth and location of as many snow dune peaks we could find in a 100 sq meter area.  We were glad of our polar bear patroller who diligently circled us from afar on his snow mobile, especially after we came across a patch of bloodied snow with white fur embedded in it…

 

The weather started to turn, the clouds rolled in and wind picked up.  We could see “water clouds” looming in the distance, indicating the moisture of the open sea below. 

 

It was time to head back.

30/4/08

 

To the BASC (Barrow Arctic Scientific Council) centre for our induction.   Interesting local coastal erosion, sea ice ratio, temperatures, whaling impacts, local environmental and wildlife issues etc. info adorn the entire hallway.  This is where scientists come to work on projects and to use the labs and equipment for their studies.

 

Turns out that they’re short on staff to drive us around, so they took a photocopy of my US licence so that I’d be covered by their insurance and just like that I became one of 2 drivers for our group in Barrow!  I climbed into the cab of the massive 4-door Ford pick-up, ignored the looks of trepidation my fellow ambassadors were giving me, and set off behind Alice to the Inupiat Heritage Centre.

Inupiat Heritage Centre.  Diana, our guide, gave us an amazing oral history of the Inupiat and their roots in Barrow.  A lot of focus on whaling and native traditions that stem from all aspects of whaling, from prayer to clothing.  This community clearly revolves around this particular tradition, and their heritage is alive and well here.

 

They don’t like their whaling to be compared to whaling in other nations such as Japan.  They emphasise that the whale meat is a staple in their diet here, and that they do not hunt for financial profit.  The whaling ritual is an intricate one, and it is clear that there is an immense amount of respect for the whale that is hunted.  For example there is no shouting or celebrating until the creature is dead, and they are sure to make use of every aspect of the whale in some way.  They return the remains to the sea, so that the spirit of the whale can tell the other whales that it was treated respectfully in death, and so they will continue to be around to be a part of this cycle.

 

Their catches are carefully monitored, and they have a strict quota of 22 whales per season, with Spring and Autumn hunting seasons.  There are also very strict regulations, such as to not hunt a mother with a calf. This ensures that their subsistence-based way of life can continue, while not jeopardising the balance of the whale population.

In the spring hunting season, the Inupiat men and sometimes women go out in crews of around 9 and camp out on the sea ice with traditional seal skin boats.  The harpoon is thrown by hand, and they now use an inbedded explosive devise in order to get a faster kill and to minimise the chance of their catch getting away and having it sink below the ice to die and go to waste.

 

But in recent years due to warmer climate, the people have been getting more wary about going out on the sea ice for unlike 20 years ago when the ice would be 6 to 8 feet deep, it is now thin and unpredictable.  There have been cases of entire crews being stranded on the wrong side of a piece of ice that has broken off from the main sheet.  This warming trend has also affected the seal and walrus hunt, without which these people cannot make their traditional vessels.

Diana later took us out to where the shore would be, and spoke further on effects of climate change and its impact on their hunting culture.  When asked what would happen to the community if the sea ice were to one day disappear completely, she went very quite for a while before giving this pragmatic answer: “We’ll have to make some changes I guess.”

 

Before things come to such a pass, I think it’s time WE all made some preventative changes.

30/4/08

Barrow, approximately 300 miles into the Arctic Circle and on the coast of the Chukchi Sea.  We came in from a light flurry of snow and into the “airport”.  An assortment of characters, probably waiting for their shuttle flight, were hanging out in the small square room that constitutes the “lobby” and check in counters and arrivals and departures all in one.  Hardly a Caucasian face in sight; the vast majority of the population of Barrow are Inupiat Eskimos, although apparently there is quite an international community here as well.

 

An interesting point about Barrow: it’s a “damp” town, meaning that prohibition is in effect except for those who have a permit, and even then it is a strict ration system where these people can put in a limited amount of orders for alcohol per year.  

 

Friendly guys from BASC (Barrow Arctic Scientific Council) were there to greet us.  They loaded us up into their trucks and gave us a mini-tour of Barrow as we drove through all 5 minutes of it.  It is a small, tight knit community of just over 4,500 that clearly revolves around traditional hunting of whales.  As we drove by houses they pointed out which ones were whale boat captains’, and said that just two days ago the there had been a successful catch.  Nok, one of the BASC guys, was clearly happy about this for although he hadn’t gone on this hunt, because he was part of the team and because it was their first catch of the Spring season he would be getting a share of the meat.  We pulled up outside Pepe’s, where we were to lunch, and as I climbed out of the truck and onto the packed-snowy ground I looked around to see houses with caribou antlers adorning the entrances and people zipping around on snow mobiles, animal pelts hanging out to dry…we’re definitely not in Manchester anymore, Toto!

Lunch at Pepe’s, a rather colourfully decorated Mexican restaurant ran by a lively woman named Fran, who, upon finding out that we were all brand spanking new to Barrow, brought us all commemorative certificates that made us officially: “Fully accredited, lifetime members of the ‘Arctic Circle Club’: 71° 17” North 156° 47” West”.

 

 

Alice of BASC joined us and told us about the community and about their whaling traditions.  On the back of her jacket was an intricate embroidery of her uncle’s whaling crew logo.  She told us that in bad weather conditions, people take GPS locators with them when they go out hunting in case they get accidentally swept away on an ice floe.  I guess it’s an occupational hazard, getting stuck on an adrift ice floe.  I’m never going to complain about eye strain from looking at the computer screen again. 

 

Having said that, I guess I should stress that hunting is NOT an occupation for these people.  They have their regular jobs, and take unpaid leave in order to carry on their tradition of hunting whales and seals and walrus, ducks, geese, caribou, etc.  This is a culture based on community and sharing, and the sharing of these meats and skins and pelts is an important and inherent part of this community’s infrastructure.  These are a people who live in balance with nature, which is why changing climate patterns and changing ice thicknesses and seasonal timing is directly impacting their lives.