Climate Change Is Hell on Alaska's Formerly Frozen Highways

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-08-02/the-alaskan-highway-is-literally-melting

by blondie9x • 10 years ago

53 77 10 years ago

CWuestefeld2• 10 years ago

I have trouble interpreting stories like these as anything other than scare tactics. I'm not a "denier". I'm acknowledging that there's been an increase, generally in the range of 1-2 degrees F.

But given an increase of that magnitude, I find it very hard to blame for the kinds of problems being described here. 1F to 2F is well within the normal range of variation, and so if the roadways are suffering from it, it must be that the roads weren't properly designed for the expected variations to begin with.

JustUhThought3• 10 years ago

1-2 degrees globally. Celsius.

And the predictions are consistently outpaced by reality.

JustUhThought3• 10 years ago

So, you were talking about temp change to date. Not predicted. My comment speaks to your commenet incorrectly. Sorry about that.

I can't revise or delete my comment on this device, or I would. My bad.

gruez• 10 years ago

To add to this, it's not as if temperatures everywhere went up by 1-2 degrees. polar areas are more affected than average by global warming

csours3• 10 years ago

I don't know if you've been to Alaska, but a large part of the lowland is swamp that happens to be frozen most of the time. The current roads are basically a pile of gravel on top of that. If the swamp is frozen for less of the time, the gravel moves more.

So yes, the road was not engineered with these conditions in mind, but building a road on a swamp is not easy to do, even if engineered correctly.

Barely mentioned in the article, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was built with cooling pipes to keep the ground it is built on cold. [1][2]

1. http://dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a073597.pdf [pdf]

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_Trans-Alas...

monknomo• 10 years ago

Not even a pile a gravel. A pile of frozen swamp ploughed higher and higher until it quit sinking, then sprinkled with gravel and topped with asphalt

The Tok Cutoff is particularly bad these days

lamarkia• 10 years ago

An increase of 1C globally means that the planet gets hotter by a gazzilion of Watts.

Imagine how much energy is needed to increase the temperature of a glass of water by just 1C. Then, a swimming pool. Finally, a planet.

Gravityloss• 10 years ago

I wonder, if a road lasted for seventy years, and then became unusable because of changes within ten, one could say that it's not within the "normal" variation anymore?

Probably someone has an article that is a lot more exact and involves a lot more statistics...

maxerickson• 10 years ago

We don't have a clear picture of normal.

This page has some graphs of ground temps the last 100 years:

http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/arctic-zone/detect/land-permafrost....

They are for areas north of the highway, but it shows temps in 1950 higher than they are today. The text also mentions that the ground has cooled slightly in the recent 20 years.

lkrubner• 10 years ago

You are in fact a mild denier. Merely writing "I'm not a denier" doesn't change the implications of what you are writing. While world wide changes might so far amount to 1-2 degrees F, it is well known that the warming is concentrated in the northern and southern latitudes, so the changes in Alaska are much more than the global average.

dagss• 10 years ago

So what are you saying happened -- somebody went in with machinery and created the cracks in the road, then go and pretend it is warming?

Others have pointed out that avg(Alaska, Summer) != avg(World, All Year)

ChrisClark• 10 years ago

1 to 2 degrees increase in the global average is disastrous in the long term.

Diederich5• 10 years ago

The temperature increase isn't evenly spread across the globe, it's concentrated toward the poles.

mikestew• 10 years ago

the roads weren't properly designed for the expected variations to begin with.

Considering that the road has been there for seventy-years, I'd argue that it was designed just fine. I mean, yeesh, who am I going to pick for my SME on road construction, the anonymous dude/dudess on a forum devoted to work that will never involve a shovel or leave a callous on your finger, or the U. S. Army Corps of friggin' Engineers who have built roads in places you or I wouldn't survive more than a day or two?

But all appeals to authority aside, let's assume for the moment that the road was built to account for a variation in temps. Problem is, that variation window moved by a few degrees. You get that, right? That the average temp was (just making up #s) 28F +/- 2F and now it's 30F +/- 2F? With my made up numbers, the road never reached the freezing (EDIT: melting, actually) point even with variation. Now it does.

dragonwriter4• 10 years ago

A change of X degrees in the global average temperature does not mean a uniform, across all times and locations, increase of X degrees in local temperatures.

scatters• 10 years ago

The problems affect a fairly narrow band of latitudes; specifically, those where the average long-term temperature was just below freezing i.e. the southern margin of the permafrost. 1-2F is indeed within natural variation, but historically a warm year or two was followed by a harsh winter to refreeze the surface so that the deep layer stayed frozen.

Now, the average temperature is just above freezing or close enough to it that the heating effect of the asphalt pushes the local average temperature above freezing. This means that deep layers are now thawing for the first time in thousands of years; they will stabilize eventually, but in the meantime they're going to be near impossible to build roads on. And the thaw line continues to march north, year by year.

JustUhThought3• 10 years ago

We are in for a shtt-storm.

But go over to Bloomberg news, and they're wondering why the Japanese won't make the tough cultural sacrifices needed to increase immigration, to stave off stagnant GDP caused by declining population and the accompanying demographics. (I get the workers to non-workers issues in play. Even with that, I believe it is telling, which solutions are put forth. Increase immigration. Not, decrease consumption.)

Seriously, our roads are sinking. Record temperatures. Record droughts. Record greenhouse gasses. But how many times were "jobs" talked about at the DNC and RNC? "Global warming"?

We, are so, f-cked.

superswordfish• 10 years ago

It seems like we're discovering a bunch of technologies that involve removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere now (and even using it as a resource). That isn't the only problem gas, but I'm optimistic that we will solve the "greenhouse effect" problem through this sort of climate engineering before the real disaster of rising sea levels gets too far. In a century people will probably be freaked out by a host of issues we've barely even thought of today (things like the Kessler syndrome that are not so top-of-the-mind).

vkou5• 10 years ago

The real disaster isn't rising sealevels (except in Bangladesh). Homes can be rebuilt. Its just a question of money. The real disaster is agricultural collapse in the tropics and subtropics.

Either way, it would be far cheaper to switch our energy production to renewables, then to geo-engineer on a planet scale. We aren't doing that in any meaningful way.

Instead we pat ourselves on the back for reducing US coal energy generation to 37%. Never mind that this entire reduction comes from burning natural gas...

mc327• 10 years ago

I agree climate change has to be taken seriously and we need to study ways to mitigate the effects of our GHG output. No doubt.

On the Japan question. No, I think and hope they continue to be uniquely stubborn. Why? Because we are all going to be there (we would have been there if we'd be as strict as Latin American countries are about their own immigration). Japan can lead the way for us and for others on how to deal with this issue (population decline).

Japan is in fact dealing with their issue head on by not importing workers. By not importing workers they are not defraying the issue. They are doing the opposite of dealing with consequences later.

hx87• 10 years ago

Besides, population decline could very well be a large part of the answer to the problem of automation and labor redundancy. Who cares if you have less workers if you /need/ less workers?

intopieces2• 10 years ago

In what way is importing workers "defraying the issue"? Also, why would the population of the US decline? White people aren't having babies like they used to, but other groups don't show the same trend. It's the reason why the US is on track to become a majority-minority country long before the original estimated 2050. California's already there.

People are still clamorimg to get into the US, and fighting tooth and nail to stay here.

You are the first person I've read that considers not importing workers a solution, rather than a symptom of cultural insularity that threatens to bring down their economy through the burden of an aging population.

rpgmaker3• 10 years ago

Why? Because we are all going to be there (we would have been there if we'd be as strict as Latin American countries are about their own immigration). Japan can lead the way for us and for others on how to deal with this issue (population decline).

Why isn't immigration a valid solution to population decline? This seems like a classic paean to the old white country to me.

Immigration in Latin America is actually not very restrictive. Organized crime (from anywhere in the world) can come and go as it pleases in the region. Whatever you may have read on right-wing media, illegal immigration is rampant in Latin America.

The irony of some Americans complaining about Latinos now is rich. You didn't care much about them when the US govt was promoting dictators and doing everything it could to undermine the democratic will in the region (predominantly left wing in response to the incredible levels of legacy inequality) and why would you? It made many of your companies super rich which in turn provided you with nice, cushy jobs managing your "banana republic" natural resources. The local population though was saddled with no voice and (usually) murderous psychopaths as their "leaders". As a result they migrated in droves to the US, the richest nation on earth that also happened to be the closest. And now you complain. It would be funny if it wasn't racist too.

hedgew2• 10 years ago

Increased immigration from poor countries to rich countries will increase consumption and pollution.

Third world aid has a similar problem. The more wealthy people become, the more they eat meat and pollute.

Cases like Sweden where more than 90% of third world immigrants stay unemployed are likely the worst of all.

immist• 10 years ago

Cases like Sweden where more than 90% of third world immigrants stay unemployed

Do you have a source to back this claim?

antisthenes• 10 years ago

I usually find your sentiment to be buried somewhere deeper on most HN threads that touch on these issues.

I'm honestly baffled at the endless optimism and belief of others in our ability to innovate and disrupt out of this crisis, whether it be technological advances or some market solution.

Some people even go so far as to suggest that we'll be moving beyond this planet in the next 100 years and all resource problems will be solved. It's hard to reply to them without sounding snarky, but I can't help but wonder in what circumstances those people were raised with that line of thinking. They just sound completely ignorant of both history and basic physics when they make those statements.

kaybe2• 10 years ago

Here is one little positive thought:

At least there won't be an ice age, which, according to the timeline, should happen soonish (on geological timescales). An ice age would be very problematic too, and we've averted that easily.

Diederich5• 10 years ago

That's true enough. The key point, though, is that the cold would have come at a typical rate. Typical being extremely slow, by human standards. We would have had many generations to prepare for it.

There is growing agreement that what we are facing is going to happen very quickly, even by human standards.

_qbjt• 10 years ago

The political and corporate establishments don't give a fuck about us or climate change. We need to stop looking to these selfish demagogues within the Republican and Democratic parties as if they have anything in common with us. These people and their families will be safe and sound even if the planet and environment goes completely to shit. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if many of them would wipe out the majority of life on Earth if their political donors pushed for it.

Be the change you want to see in the world. If you're worried about climate change and you're not vegan, you need to realize you're contributing to one of the largest causes of biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions on the planet. Consider adopting pets or children instead of breeding them into this world. If you're an activist, fight for local political change to bring sound environmental policy to your community and work to expand to surrounding regions. If you're an engineer or scientist, don't forget that you have the key to making this world a better place (and no global warming denier can take that from you). Finally, I believe Tesla sets a good precedent for manifesting these sorts of ambitious ideas within a system of free market capitalism.

You say we are so fucked, but I'm not so quick to agree. I'm not going to say I'm a total optimist, but I think the potential exists, within our lifetime, for weird and exciting technologies that could allow us to solve these problems in ways we could have never imagined. As long as CERN doesn't destroy all life as we know it, I think we're good.

omegaworks• 10 years ago

Annual repair costs for one section that runs through the Yukon are C$30,000 ($22,900) per kilometer

Delicious, delicious externalized cost. It's time for a carbon tax.

parsnips• 10 years ago

Classic propaganda. Fissures on the Alaskan highway are caused by temperature variance. This has been happening since the highway was built in the 40's.

Example:

Winter frost is extremely hard on the roads. Do not be surprised to see deep fissures across the highway.

http://www.dangerousroads.org/north-america/canada/747-alask...

So when the author says:

Scientists say they’re the crystal-clear manifestation that permafrost -- slabs of ice and sediment just beneath the Earth’s surface in colder climes -- is thawing as global temperatures keep rising.

I become extremely skeptical. This is the danger of lazy journalism and ultimately lazy readers confirmation bias.

scarygliders• 10 years ago

Is HN now going to be taken over by climate change stories?

I honestly thought I'd gotten away from all that when I stopped reading Slashdot. Now it seems to be infesting here too.

I await the inevitable downvotes.

csours3• 10 years ago

FYI the downvotes are for not contributing to the discussion.

dharma14• 10 years ago

The "fun" starts when the feedback loops really start going

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate

Depending on how fast we'll see arable land being lost, food supply for 9 billion people in 2040 could be quite problematic

nibs• 10 years ago

We need to create a market for halophyte plants that can be grown using salt water in dessert/saline conditions. It requires extensive marketing investment and skill in order to create a market at each level of biomass (biofuel, animal feed, people food, niche health products, pharma).

dharma14• 10 years ago

Interesting. I had to Google it - it looks like 2% of plants tolerate salt water to different degrees. It looks like an interesting field for breeding or potentially GM to cultivate seawater tolerant food crops

rybosome• 10 years ago

Is there any reason to be optimistic about our ability to deal with climate change? I have to admit that this topic depresses me deeply, as the United States' tepid response does not match the magnitude of the problem. It is shockingly easy to imagine scenarios resulting in the collapse of civilization (agricultural collapse places significant pressure on a few areas which leads to a domino effect of instability triggering nuclear war).

lisper• 10 years ago

Is there any reason to be optimistic about our ability to deal with climate change?

Yes: because failing to be optimistic about it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Also, you never know what will make people come around. In any process of winning hearts and minds there is always a time before which things seem hopeless. Look at the Sanders and Trump campaigns: when they started, no one believed they could succeed. Bernie came very close, and Trump actually won. (Not that I want to hold up Trump as a model of how to proceed, but just as a data point to show that the unexpected can happen.) Maybe if we get enough "thousand year floods" like just happened in Maryland -- say a dozen of those events in a year or in a month -- people will suddenly wake up and realize the gravity of the situation and find their sense of duty and planetary patriotism.

You also never know what's coming down the technology pipe. This, for example, looks promising: http://phys.org/news/2016-07-breakthrough-solar-cell-capture...

We can still fix this. Don't lose hope.

agentultra2• 10 years ago

We can still fix this. Don't lose hope.

I think it's beyond our capabilities to "fix" in any meaningful amount of time. However we can still survive. If we remain optimistic and plan to adapt to the coming changes.

Diederich5• 10 years ago

This is the correct answer.

We don't know if or how we can deal with the problems coming up. But giving up will surely make things worse.

Further, we have to choose to not give in to excessive alarmism. I am typing as someone who struggles with this every day, since I've been watching climate change closely for quite a few years now. Things are objectively accelerating, so it's easy to give in to panic.

But that might be even worse than giving up.

We have to approach this with focus, an iron will and with an even temperament.

Every scary climate related news item should be practically drowned in data, as hard and objective as we can get it.

Because, these days, nothing puts people 'to sleep' the way unfounded alarmism does. Because people are numb to all of the alarm handles being pulled, all over the place.

placeybordeaux• 10 years ago

Currently the DoD does not think that stable states will be disrupted to the point of conflict, but unstable states for sure.

It's unclear who exactly they consider fragile states in their report, but I'd certainly put North Korea, India and Pakistan in there as states that have a potential for climate change based conflict. If China feels any real stress they will stop providing rice to North Korea and we could see nukes flying from there.

I personally don't see large scale nuclear war (above 5 nukes flying) happening unless it's Russia or the US that are feeling the pressure. Russia seems to be in the camp of countries that will gain aritable land and the US has a huge amount of resources and plenty of ways to cut back on consumption before it feels the pressure.

If you are suggesting a donimno effect of refugees then the answer is very different: I don't think a large influx of refugees would cause a state to go to war, more likely they would turn them away at the border and we'd see a horrible increase in a humanitarian problems, racism and xenophobia, but then again we seem to have already seen that with the end results of the Arab Spring.

bryanlarsen• 10 years ago

Yes. Before global warming, the big global environmental crisis was CFC's destroying the ozone layer. In the 1980s nations got together and agreed on the 1987 Montreal Protocol to phase out the use of harmful CFC's.

It was successful: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/06/antarctic-ozone-h...

Global warming is a similar problem. More difficult, sure, but essential characteristics are similar. We can do it, because we have solved similar problems in the past.

pinaceae• 10 years ago

Meanwhile in Russia, Anthrax spores are active again because of the thawing of (former) permafrost - http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36951542

Diederich5• 10 years ago

I decided to drive to the arctic ocean from California in 2014, and so traversed the north half of this highway by RV.

It was a magical, difficult, inspiring and sorrowful experience.

I had never seen a black spruce before (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picea_mariana), but they were enormous, pristine forests of them.

But a lot of them were NOT pristine. For dozens of miles at a time, most all of the trees would be at an odd sideways angle. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunken_trees) The permafrost they relied on for stability was melting.

More than two years later, I suspect that the countless trees I saw leaning steeply to one side are mostly dead.

On the Dalton highway, once past the Brooks range (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Range), there were enormously quantities of heavy rain. I didn't realize, at the time, how unusual that was. It turns out that the Alaskan tundra is typically extremely dry, and while I was up there, more than a years worth of (not very cold) rain fell, turning the road into a morass.

My goal was to put my feet into the arctic ocean, and the only way to do that is to first get to Dead Horse, Alaska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadhorse,_Alaska). The 'town limits' are several miles from the ocean, and it's rigorously patrolled private land in between, controlled by various oil companies.

They typically offer tours, but I arrived a bit too early, so I was thinking about hiking a few miles up the Sag River (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagavanirktok_River). Fortunately, I happened to talk to an oil worker guy at the gas station, and he said I would not likely survive such a hike. Polar bears, he said, had been getting extremely aggressive over the past few years. They were starving.

At that moment, I felt a unique feeling, that few people experience these days. In my four decades living, I've been in a couple of life or death circumstances. But it wasn't quite like that.

The idea that I had nearly found myself in a situation where I might have been hunted by an enormous, hungry animal. A creature who rightly considered me food, and little else. It was a curious feeling!

Fortunately, the tours started the next day, and I took a bus through the vast oil infrastructure, to a specific spot where tourists got to interact with the arctic ocean.

It was cold, gray and sleeting. The ocean almost seemed like a very large lake, with pretty small waves. The ice had melted early that year, again, and so was not visible from shore.

blaze33• 10 years ago

So, I've been curious: here's a chart of the mean annual temperature departure for Alaska (1949-2015)[1](source: [2]), the past two years have been particularly hotter there with anomalies > 4.5°F.

The NOAA has more detailed datasets but it's a bit more work to extract meaningful information.

Also I'm sick of hearing that people believe (or don't) in climate change when it's just factual data.

[1] http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/sites/default/files/ClimateTren...

[2] http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/TempChange.ht...

agentultra2• 10 years ago

It's already hell in many Northern Canadian communities that rely on ice-roads [0].

From what I understand we're on track for an unavoidable > 2C increase in global average temperatures this century. It's also quite likely that we'll be passing the extinction threshold if we don't take extreme measures to avoid it.

It's quite likely another Syria-like crisis could happen anywhere affected by climate change. I'm disconcerted that these issues are not the most pressing issues of our time. There are many valid socio-political issues to consider but extinction seems to be the most important one to me.

Maybe it's because the predictions are far enough into the future that we cannot fathom a solution right now... sort of like how smokers don't make the decision to quit today because it's not going to kill them right now.

[0] https://news.vice.com/article/canadas-ice-roads-are-melting-...

uptown• 10 years ago

So if fresh water will become scarce, and renewable sources of energy are essential, where can individuals invest to provide financial backing to companies addressing these issues?

Climate Change Is Hell on Alaska's Formerly Frozen Highways

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