Planning my summer vacation, I am, and this year it's going to be something a little different. I had previously reported on last summer's adventures on these pages, involving sailing and single malts in Nova Scotia, and the original concept for this summer was to be more of the same. But then I saw this, while web crawling for possible destinations.
Iceberg!
Drift below the fold for the full itinerary.
As long as I can remember, I have loved to go on travel adventures. Through some chance genetic flaw, perhaps, I am especially drawn to barren, desolate places. Like the arctic tundra. My sons both inherited this wanderlust for the edge of nowhere, with a side order of danger that I do not share. Nevertheless, planning this summer took an ominous turn when a maritime sailing excursion morphed into whale watching, and then iceberg watching, to a trek up the barren Labrador coast.
I realized that this vacation was turning into both a citizen science expedition, and a multi-faceted lesson plan for our eight year old granddaughter. We had unintentionally aimed our itinerary toward the ground zero epicenter of climate change.
Icebergs, of course, have their own special lingo (doesn't everything?). There are tabular bergs with vertical sides and flat tops, resembling a western mesa. These include the largest of their kind, labelled ice islands. The smaller, non-tabular forms, include the self-explanatory pinnacles, wedges, domes, and blockys, which are flat topped but narrow, like a fishing bobber. And of course I must mention the amazing but true cliche that often as much as two thirds or more of the iceberg's mass lies below the water line, hence the expression tip of the iceberg.
Here is a link to a clip of Dr. Richard Alley speaking at the 2012 Smithsonian Symposium commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the Club Of Rome's Limits To Growth report.
http://www.youtube.com/...
Dr. Alley is a glaciologist by trade, at Penn State, and has written many books on climate change, including the one I am reading now in preparation for our trip, entitled The Fate Of Greenland.
The icebergs we will be witnessing come down the Labrador current from northwest Greenland, as the glaciers in the Greenland fjords melt ever more rapidly, pouring freshwater into the ocean and raising sea levels. As the icecap on Greenland inexorably melts away, it will raise sea levels worldwide an estimated twenty-six feet. If you add Antarctica into the mix, then perhaps ninety feet when all of the ice is gone.
These are projections for the end of the century, though some scientists fear that a tipping point has been passed whereby the process is already accelerating much more rapidly.
In fact, we may even be seeing identified icebergs from the Ilulissat glacier in Western Greenland, which calved an enormous ice island in 2010 and again in 2012. The later was captured live on video by the team that produced the award winning documentary Chasing Ice.
These icebergs calve into Baffin Bay, drift north and then west, before looping back in the Labrador current, eventually to melt in warmer waters to the south, except for the many which run aground on the Newfoundland and Labrador coastlines, to be gazed at by insane families whose idea of a good time is to learn some Inuttitut and chase icebergs. It will take some serious parenting (and grandparenting) to strike a balance between having fun, on the one hand, and teaching our young ones some serious environmental awareness of what we will be bearing witness to.
I am soliciting any ideas for a young girl who is always comfortable in new and exotic locales, and loves to try new things. Museums tend to bore her, however, unless they're hands on and run around places, like last summer's pet the octopus exhibit. She loves stuff like that. Inuit culture is definitely in the cards. And I look forward to giving a full report in August when we return.
Post Script: I had way too much trouble with the links, as I am not used to cutting and pasting on an iPad. The Youtube double parentheses technique didn't work (old FAQ?), but at this point each link apparently will get you where it's supposed to, though in a somewhat ugly fashion. I actually was better at this in my younger days. Even had a website, before bluetooth, wifi, quad core, hell, I remember Hayes 1200 baud modems. I need a replacement iMac.