Alaska's Big Ice Melt
CBS World WeatherWatch takes an in-depth look at climate changes around the world. From Alaska, CBS News Correspondent Bob McNamara reports on the big ice melt and what it may mean.
Like libraries of ancient atmospheres, Alaska's glaciers and arctic ice are poked, studied and sampled for global warming trends. And as climate experts see glaciers melting faster now, there's suddenly a race against time.
In a cold-storage vault at Denver's National Ice Core Laboratory, 16,000 tubes of centuries-old arctic ice give researchers pristine records of the world's environment over the ages.
They are the cold facts of a change some might find alarming.
"Temperatures today are significantly warmer than they have been for the last thousand years, so global warming, whether you want to argue it's human-caused or not, is a reality," says Jim White of the University of Colorado.
While many experts agree to a global warming trend, others say it's not exactly worldwide. In Alaska the average temperature may be up at least a degree, but in Greenland it's actually becoming colder.
"Global warming is just a global average, and within that average there always have been and probably always will be regional differences," says glacier expert Mark Meier.
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Will Harrison of the University of Alaska was skeptical that global warming may be caused by humans, but after 30 years of studying Alaska's glaciers, he is a believer. "It is probably going to turn out to be a wake-up call," he says.
Bob Bartlett has seen the thaw in his Fairbanks neighborhood where houses are bowed and buckled because the permafrost, a permanently frozen layer of earth, is now melting, too.
"I've seen permafrost houses that fell down because they're so heaved so badly and the walls caved in," says Bartlett.
It comes slowly but spring is returning to Alaska as many hope that the Earth's warming is just a cycle of climate and not a catastrophe to come.
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