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Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
From the weather is not climate department, the sea ice is in early and thick in Alaska. It makes me shiver just to look at the picture. They had to use an icebreaker to get fuel to Nome.
Figure 1. The Bering Sea region in Alaska. Anchorage is at the upper right. The Aleutian peninsula and chain runs down to the lower left. Ice covers all of Bristol Bay, and extends well out from the shore to the west. Photo Source
I fished commercially up there, in the Bering Sea. Ive lived in a container in the Peter Pan Cannery boatyard in Dillingham, and gill netted for the noble salmon in Bristol Bay, drunk too much and worked it off laughing in a blazing hot steam bath with some Yupik guys trying to roast me out the door by cranking up the heat. Ive made great money in driving sleet arguing with the herring regarding the eventual fate of their roe in Togiak, and seen the walrus hauled ashore in their thousands on Round Island. Those fisheries kill a man or two a year, plus the usual crushed hands and feet and the like. But I havent fished the January Bering Sea crab fishery, the one made famous as The Deadliest Catch. Figure 1 shows why I dont do that.
The Bering Sea ice this year is in early, and its thick. Not only that, its moving south fast. The crab fleet has some $8 million dollars of gear in the water, and the ice is moving south at twenty miles an hour. Usually ice comes in later and thinner, and moves south at three miles an hour. Boats are tied up to the Dutch Harbor docks. At St. Paul Island, out of the photo to the left, the crab boats usually sell their loads to the processor boats. It is also totally iced in. Millions of dollars have already been sunk into moving the crab boats and the processor boats and the crab pots to Dutch. If this cold continues, the season will likely be a total bust.
My point in this post? Awe, mostly, at the damaging power of cold. As a seaman, cold holds many more terrors than heat. When enough ice builds up on a boats superstructure, it rolls over and men die. The sun cant do that. The Titanic wasnt sunk by a heat wave.
The thing about ice? You cant do a dang thing about it. You cant blow up a glacier, or an ice sheet like you see in the Bering Sea above. You cant melt it. The biggest, most powerful icebreaker cant break through more than a few feet of it. When the ice moves in, the game is over.
Now me, Im a tropical boy. My feeling is that well-behaved ice sits peacefully in my margarita glass, making those lovely cold drips run down the outside, and giving me a brain freeze when I hold the glass to my forehead.
But when ice jumps out of my glass and starts running all around painting the landscape white and solidifying the ocean and falling on my head and freezing my begonias, well, at that point the funs over. I call that water behaving badly.
And if you want to worry about a climate related occurrence, I certainly wouldnt worry about the dread Thermageddon, the long-foretold and ever-receding premature heat-death of civilization.
Id worry about water behaving badly
Best of the cold to my friends in Alaska, stay safe on the ocean, and my regards to all,
w.
I guess Alaska is getting the cold, because here in the Middle Atlantic states, the winter has been unusually mild.