By Allison Bush, bushalli@msu.edu
Great Lakes Echo
June 16, 2009
Minnesota native and nationally renowned polar explorer Will Steger has watched ice melt practically under his feet in the coldest regions of the world.
“About 15 years ago, scientists predicted that changes in global warming would first be seen in polar regions,” Steger said recently. “So unfortunately, most of the changes people have not seen yet.”
But Steger, who has traversed both Antarctica and the Arctic, and has spent more than 40 years leading and participating in polar expeditions, says that he has seen the changes first-hand.
Along with five other explorers, he crossed more than 3,700 miles of Antarctica in 1989 and 1990. Temperatures were at average 80 degrees below zero, and the team spent six months at an altitude above 7,000 feet.
“I’m from Minnesota – most of us like the cold weather,” Steger told about 100 people gathered in East Lansing, Mich., to hear his tales of exploring the arctic regions.
Global warming refers to an increase in the average temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere from the addition of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases.
“There was a so-called debate years ago where (the carbon) was coming from, … but it’s real obvious now,” Steger said. “It’s not rocket science, it’s the massive amount of carbon we’re putting into the Earth from fossil fuels.”
Fossil fuels include gasoline for vehicles and coal and oil used to produce electricity.
One of the changes Steger has noticed during his adventures is the disintegration of ice shelves, which are thousands of feet thick, and buttress the continent of Antarctica to keep the ice on the continent steady.
“As long as the ice shelves are in place, Antarctica is stable,” Steger said. But the Larsen ice shelves, which bordered the Antarctic Peninsula, the northernmost part of mainland Antarctica, have already disintegrated, he said.
Steger witnessed running water as high as 5,400 feet in Greenland last summer. That’s another consequence of climate change, he said.
“Water does not flow right to the ocean, but flows down through the ice cap,” he said. “It lubricates underneath the glaciers, and makes the glaciers move faster.”
The purpose of Steger’s Greenland expedition was to document rising summer thaw levels.
The solution to climate change comes from decreasing dependence on fossil fuels, Steger said.
“Our investment in fossil fuel gets us cheap energy, which we all prosper from,” he said. “But it’s also an investment to get worse – we get inflation, and we have a climate that’s almost going out of control.”
Americans are defined by their ingenuity, Steger said, and need to use that ingenuity to switch the focus from fossil fuels to a new, clean energy economy.
This could be done by developing cars that get up to 60 miles per gallon of gas, and by working to make America self-sufficient when it comes to energy, he said.
If people fail to take action, an ice-free Arctic Ocean could be as close as 10 years away, which would radically change the heat balance of the globe, Steger said.
In 2007, half of the ice on the Arctic Ocean broke up, which was something scientists were predicting would not happen for another century, he said.