Trump Says Climate Change Isn't Real. My Trip to the Top of the World Proved Otherwise.
By ERIC SCIGLIANO November 27, 2018
It felt like the top of the world in more ways than one. It was my last evening in Barrow, now Utqiagvik, Alaska, the northernmost community in the United States. I borrowed skis, a skijoring harness, and an eager young husky named Namik and set out onto the shore ice that extended for two miles into the Chukchi Sea.
It was such a night and such a light as cannot be imagined at lower latitudes. The unsetting late-April sun shimmered through floating ice crystals. I thought I glanced colors—blue, pink and gold—glowing teasingly in this translucent scrim, but when I stared I saw only soft light and shadow.
When the way is smooth, joring is a blast—the ski equivalent of cycling with one hand gripping a truck gate; the dog pulls, you pole and kick, and the two of you fly over the snow. Plus, I thought shamefully, Namik would likely smell a polar bear before I saw it and distract it while I got away.
I’d hoped to get within sight of the ice’s edge, but the ridges pushed up by the shifting ice finally grew too steep to cross and too numerous to go around; I marveled at how the old explorers had labored, pushing heavy sleds over hundreds of miles of the stuff. And so I turned around.
The next day I flew back to Seattle via Prudhoe Bay and Fairbanks. Late that night I received an emailed link to a University of Alaska site that showed an animated sequence of aerial radar images of the Barrow Peninsula and surrounding waters. For six days the sea ice along the shore held steady while odd bergs and chunks darted about in the open water beyond. Then, on the seventh, a strong wind rose from the east. Shortly before 1 p.m., while I was airborne, the ice shelf I had skied on 16 hours earlier blew apart. Two big sections skittered around the open lead and out of the frame. Luckily, or wisely, the Inupiat hunters who had camped out on the ice for their annual bowhead whale hunt had noted the wind and gotten off. Perhaps they sensed the ice’s vulnerability.
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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/11/27/trump-says-climate-change-isnt-real-my-trip-to-the-top-of-the-world-proved-otherwise-222691
= new reply since forum marked as read
'cause that gaudy Mar A Lago monstrosity will be underwater one of these days
