Alaska is world's laboratory for climate change research
Published: October 5, 2013
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y JOHN LIPPERT ”” Bloomberg News
When Jerry Otto started hunting for Alaska oil in 1980, his tractor-trailers barreled along ice roads that were up to 10 feet thick for 180 days every year.
Last winter, when he set out to drill for Australia's Linc Energy, regulators opened the roads for 126 days. The rest of the time, warm weather left the routes too mushy for vehicles, according to Bloomberg Markets magazine.
Then, in January, in a twist that embodies the perplexing reality of life and commerce amid a changing global climate, the temperature dropped suddenly to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, encasing drilling rig components in ice as Otto waited for roads to solidify to ship the gear to Linc sites.
After thawing the equipment with blowtorches, he discovered that the cold was reducing oil flowing into Linc's well. With 200 workers standing by, the company lost $300,000 a day with each delay, ending 2012 with a $61 million deficit.
Otto plans to try again in December, this time drilling sideways into a hill to get underneath 1,000 feet of permafrost and up into reservoirs he says hold 1.2 billion barrels of light, sweet crude.
"It's getting more unpredictable," said Otto, 59, who runs Linc's drilling rig in Umiat, 80 miles south of the Arctic Ocean, which is within the National Petroleum Reserve that President Warren G. Harding created in 1923 to guarantee oil for the Navy.
"We're in a race against Mother Nature. If we don't get cold weather early enough, or if it gets too warm too fast in the spring, it could stall the project."
FORCED ADAPTATION
Otto and others already braving such extremes are experiencing a new phenomenon: daily life navigating the risks and opportunities of climate change.
The Arctic has heated up twice as fast as the rest of the planet in the past three decades. By August 2013, sea ice had lost 76 percent of its volume compared to 1979, according to the University of Washington's Polar Ice Center.
And the three main gases blamed for global warming -- carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide -- are at their highest level in at least 800,000 years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported Sept. 27. The United Nations group cited core samples taken from ice sheets.
On Alaska's Arctic coast, 30-foot-high cliffs that haven't budged since the last ice age are tumbling into the ocean overnight and village coastlines are eroding. Lightning-sparked forest fires have charred more than 1 million acres in five of the past 10 years. By midcentury, the average area burned by wildfires each year is likely to double, the EPA says.
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