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Episode 4 : Actic Diary
Think the winters in Ontario and Manitoba are tough? Hah! You don't know winter until you've
spent a little time in the Arctic. Just ask Chehala.
But the ice and snow, and the relentless bitter cold, aren't the real problems way up
there.
Even in the nether-regions, far from where any human lives, the destructive nature of human activity
is evident everywhere, with rubbish and industrial and military waste
reminding us of the fragility, brittleness and vulnerability of the Arctic
region.
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Highlights:
A motor raft tour of rockie shores populated by polar bears; listening to Justin Trudeau speak
about what we can all do to make a difference to the environment.
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The Cold War
The era of the Cold War is long over, but the damage it did in the Arctic is a legacy left behind
by military forces occupying a region for its deterrence factor. A line in the ice was drawn, and
a region long thought of as distant, pure, and natural was forever changed.
A very active Soviet nuclear-testing program and the western air-defence systems have scarred
the landscape, but more importantly it is often what you can't see that can hurt the most.
PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) from transformers used in the Distant Early Warning (DEW) and
North Warning Systems (NWS) threaten the arctic food chain at every level, and traces of these
cancer-causing elements have been found in the breast milk of Inuit women.
Fallout from the massive atmospheric nuclear weapons testing is still a major source of plutonium
isotopes in the arctic seas. From 1945 to 1988 more than 20 naval accidents involving nuclear-armed
or nuclear-propelled submarines or warships have occurred in Arctic seas. For more than three decades
the Soviet Navy has used the Arctic as a radioactive dumping ground.
BP, ARCO, Chevron and Exxon are lobbying Congress in the U.S. for the right to erect hundreds of
miles of pipelines, roads, drilling pads, gravel mines, and other industrial facilities in the
biological heart of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
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Other facts:
Canada's freshwater and saltwater ice belt advances and recedes over an area half the size
of the country's land mass. But each year there's a little less ice.
Most of the Arctic warmed significantly in the 1990s compared to the 1980s, and this trend is
continuing. Because ice reflects sunlight and open sea absorbs it, as more ice melts the
region becomes warmer, causing more ice to melt. You see the problem. The warmer it gets, the
faster it gets warmer. The seasons when sea ice melts, between early spring and late fall,
have gotten longer and warmer each decade. Arctic regions within North America have warmed
more per decade than other Arctic areas.
Some regions are warming faster than 2.5 degrees Celsius per decade.
Scientists have been monitoring ongoing changes in Arctic sea ice for decades by collecting samples
of ice as well as a wide range of satellite-based data to document the changes.
If the trend continues, Arctic sea ice may be gone before this century ends.
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