Final Stop

Hello everyone,

Every journey has to come to an end. I hope the past weeks of sharing has helped you learn as much as they have helped me. Previously, I have mostly been sharing on glaciers, but today, I want to look at the bigger picture.

I did a survey on environmental sustainability and asked who/what people thought had the most influence in combating climate change, along with other questions that I will elaborate on later. There were 34 respondents, all of whom were not students in the BES community, and had a wide age range, from 19 to above 65 years old.

Survey respondents

75% of people aged 19-26 thought that governments and corporations had the most influence, while only about 59% of the rest of the respondents thought that way, with more thinking that more influence lies with individuals, or that everybody has a part to play.

 

Climate demonstration. Image by Dominic Wunderlich from Pixabay

Perhaps this has got to do with the younger generation increasingly demanding more government action on climate change, like in other parts of the world. Is this focus on the government perhaps driving the disconnect that the younger generation have between their own actions and climate change?  50% of respondents aged 19-26 thought that their individual actions would have little effect on climate change, compared to 29% of older respondents, from my survey.

Honestly, I believe that the world has to change, but there was a point in time when I was not too convinced that individual actions had an impact at all. Sometimes it felt hopeless, and I often questioned what my actions stood for. But I still tried to make more sustainable decisions anyway, and today it has become somewhat of a habit where I subconsciously choose to live more sustainably.

The reusable food container I use to pack my food

 

Research has shown that social influence is a very powerful thing, and one sustainable person can influence many others, and those people can in turn influence more people, and so on. I believe that this, along with the widespread efforts by countries and corporations to reduce emissions, may just be what we need to save the Earth.

I wanted to see if presenting people with some impactful information (in my opinion) could have an effect on how they perceived their individual actions. I presented respondents of my survey with carbon emissions of flights compared to the average carbon emissions of people in several countries, according to a calculator by The Guardian, along with the information that air-cons consume 50 times more energy than fans. 79% said they felt they could contribute more to combat climate change after receiving this information. Perhaps more awareness along with social influence will be able to make all the difference!

 

Night flight. Image by Danilo Bueno from Pixabay.

Just one flight is enough to cause our emission levels to jump to several times that of average peoples’ emissions around the world. What does this tell us? That many of our lifestyles are unsustainable. Pretty much all of us are guilty, me included. I understand the yearning to travel for leisure, the end-of-year vacation to relief all the stress. But perhaps we should all take a moment to reflect on how much weight our actions can have.

Personally, I hadn’t flown anywhere in 2018 and 2019, only once in February this year to Bali, which produced 470kg of CO2. That is huge.

Researching and writing about glaciers, replying all the comments and reading everybody’s posts have been a refreshing way to learn and see things from so many different perspectives. One thing I have learnt from blogging and conducting surveys is that optimism for a more sustainable world is on the rise, and though I believe there is a lot of work to be done, I want to be a part of that change. Thank you for joining me on this part of my journey 🙂

Clive

 

Ice cores and history

There is a plethora of information we can learn from glaciers. In my past posts I discussed the various ways glaciers are important to us. Today I will be telling you more about the importance of glaciers in helping us understand the Earth’s history.

 

Scientist base in Antarctica. Image by Eduardo Ruiz from Pixabay

 

Ice cores previously found in Greenland are about 130,000 years old and those in Antarctica about 800,000 years old, although an unprecedented find of a 2,700,000 years old ice core was found in 2017. If you want to know more about the drilling and processing of the ice cores, the descriptions and videos here are worth a look!

An ice core. Image from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, by Ludovic Brucker with permission

 

The amount of information ice cores can tell us is astonishing, at least to me. The air bubbles in the ice tell us about the composition of the atmosphere at different time periods in our history. This includes the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere at those points in time. Other information that can be attained are temperature, precipitation and volcanic activity. Wind patterns can be determined when several ice cores are extracted from areas close to one another, and analysing where precipitation was moved by the wind.

 

So, why is all this important to us? By studying the climate in the past and how different variables like atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations affect our climate, we are able to predict the changes to come in the future based on our environment now. This is done by climate modeling, and by checking our predictions with what has happened in the past, we are able to better understand the problem of climate change and how to deal with it.

 

I could go on and on about ice cores, but the bottom line is that understanding our history is key to predicting our future. This is true for other fields of study as well, such as in paleontology, where fossil findings in some locations challenge the climate models in places like Alaska. These instances are when new discoveries are born and how we can better understand the Earth.

Fossil fish. Image by photosforyou from Pixabay

There have however, been criticisms on the reliability of ice cores, citing reasons such as the drilling of ice cores and their depressurising from being so deep greatly affects the chemistry of the ice cores.

All in all, glaciers are important in many ways, and their persistence is to our benefit.

Glechciers: Glaciers and technology

With the problem of melting glaciers, how do we solve the problem of the shortage of glacier runoff? Humans always have technology as a solution, don’t we!

 

Pangong Tso in Ladakh. Image by Jeevan Singla from Pixabay.

In Ladakh, a region in the Himalayas, the shortage of water has caused problems for agriculture, not allowing for farmers to grow their crops. In the 1980s, a civil engineer named Chewang Norphel came up with a plan to divert glacier runoff during summer into small reservoirs near the various villages with extensive canals and channels. This allowed the glacier runoff to be stored through autumn and frozen in winter. These artificial glaciers only melt when the temperatures rise in spring, before the natural glaciers melt; This is the period when the shortage of glacier runoff is the greatest. This is because the artificial glaciers are at a lower altitude than the natural ones, at about 3900m compared to natural glaciers at an elevation of about 5400m.

Sonam Wangchuk, an Indian engineer, saw that these artificial glaciers melted too fast as they have large surface areas which absorbed more heat from the sun. To solve this problem, Wangchuk draws water from glacial water sources in higher elevations with underground pipes which direct this water to lower altitudes near villages. The water spouts from a tall pipe pointing towards the sky, which freeze before contacting the ground. These artificial cones of ice are called Ice Stupas, and some stand 18m tall, storing about 2000000 litres of water. Taking the daily water consumption of a person in Singapore to be 141 litres, that is about 39 years of water supply, or almost the entire volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. This video from BBC News shows the very interesting process.

 

However, every solution comes with its set of problems. Villages downstream of this water diversion have raised concerns that this reduces the amount of water they have for farming. Does Wangchuk or Norphel have the right to intervene with nature by diverting glacier flows? As our impact on the climate and environment grows, I feel that we must increasingly take matters in our own hands and manage our problems before it becomes too late.

 

Pascua Lama: Politics and stakeholders

Today I’ll be discussing further the political conflict which occurred in light of the Pascua Lama project.

 

National Congress of Argentina
Image by Gabriel Cabrera from Pixabay

 

The Environment Secretary of Argentina, Romina Piccoloti, had passed a new law which prohibited the mining in and around glaciers, and in periglacial environments, which would mean legal issues for the Pascua Lama project. Argentina’s president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner vetoed the law, outrightly going against cryoactivism, which sparked outrage from both environmental activist groups and the director of the Argentine Institute for Snow Research, Glaciology and Environmental Sciences (IANIGLA). Mining was important to Argentina, as it provided jobs and gave tax revenue to the government, which made it essential for the country’s economic development.

 

The priority placed on mining over the protection of glaciers demonstrates how different stakeholders view the significance of glaciers in the world. In these cases, we must ask, are the ecosystem services provided by a glacier (rivers supplied by glacial meltwater) more important or is the economic value of mining more important? Or are they both important in their own ways? Perhaps there is a measure of the value of both systems which needs to be explored further.

The impacts of the damage to glaciers are complex and stakeholders that need to be considered include the people around the glaciers that rely on them for water and the ecosystems that are built upon the glacial meltwater. The long-term and short-term effects (economic, social, environmental) have to be intensively studied. The value of these impacts is difficult to quantify and compare to the economic benefits that would have come about from mining.

 

As the world’s first public glacier law was vetoed by Argentina’s president, the IANIGLA director, Ricardo Villalba, fed the media with facts about glaciers in Argentina and their significance, educating the public. This education allowed everyone to be equipped with the relevant knowledge to make informed decisions, and public opinion has been shown to push policymakers to act.

However, the technical names like ‘rock glaciers’ and ‘periglacial environment‘ were taken by politicians who were in support of mining and warped to propose laws which gave more freedom for mining. These politicians took periglacial environments to mean the perimeters of glaciers, which is wrong, but it was difficult to explain such differences to these politicians. This is an example where ‘misinformation’ can be harmful, if people were to believe that this definition of ‘periglacial environment’ was true, it would have driven the glacier law to be very much different from what it is today.

 

After much debate, a new glacier law was enacted, which was funnily enough stronger than the one vetoed.

 

There are many instances when environmental conservation comes into conflict with economic interests. One such example would be the Three Gorges Dam in China, where it was built to harvest hydropower, greatly affecting the environment.

 

Today, the Pascua Lama project has been completely shut down, but if the environmental disagreements with the project had not been so strong, who knows how badly the environment would have been impacted.

 

References: Glaciers: The Politics of Ice by Jorge Daniel Taillant

The onslaught of Pascua Lama: A case study

Hello, I hope everyone has been well.

Today we’ll be discussing the conflict between humans and glaciers. As I was reading about glaciers, I came across this quote which really resonated with me-

“As glaciers are more and more iconized with climate change, everything else about a glacier seems to fall away — their immense diversity and their complexity. Glaciers are increasingly reduced, simplified and detached from environments, from people, from socio-political-cultural processes. Instead, they’re known more for their single association with climate change.”

This quote is from a Ted Idea article by the glaciologist M Jackson, which you can read here.

Many people have many different experiences with glaciers, some positive and some negative. Glacial melting is seen as a good thing by some Icelanders, who feel at ease knowing that receding glaciers would no longer be able to cause damage to them and their homes. There are many stories associated with glaciers, so let me share one with you.

 

Pascua Lama as seen on Google Maps

This story is set on the border of Chile and Argentina, where the mining company Barrick Gold started the Pascua Lama project, a mining expedition which was set to remove parts of glacier to get to the gold underneath it. It was a huge expedition, which planned to remove 10 hectares of glacier ice (about 18.7 football fields) with a thickness of 3-5 metres. This had not taken into account the roads that had to be made for access to the mining area which would impact even more glaciers. A glacier the size of a football field, with a thickness of 3 metres holds about 30,000,000 litres of water, enough to sustain a person in Singapore for 582 years, given that Singapore’s per capita household daily water consumption was 141 litres in 2018. Not to forget the fact that glaciers are able to replenish their water stores as more snow falls and compacts on the glacier as mentioned in my previous post. Furthermore, the dust and soot from vehicles around the area had darkened the glacial ice, expediting the glacial melting as the ice absorbs more energy.

 

In Argentina at that time, there were no laws protecting glaciers. Barrick Gold had only mentioned a few glaciers in its environmental analysis done before starting its work, but Juan Pablo Milana, a glaciologist, had found that there were 50 in the immediate vicinity of the Pascua Lama and several hundred that exist on the access roads there. The number of glaciers around the San Juan province had not been properly researched before. If people did not know these glaciers existed, how could they protect them?  Until 2010, no laws existed to protect glaciers.

 

The more well-known Perito Moreno Glacier in Patagonia, Argentina. Image by Peter Olexa from PixaBay.

 

 

From this, we can understand how the lack of awareness can be dangerous for our environment. There are many stakeholders involved in the protection of glaciers. The issue of glacial melting is complex, and from this event we learn how such economic motives can hinder our fight against environmental problems.

I will be discussing more on this issue next week, so until then, stay safe!

References:

Glaciers: The Politics of Ice by Jorge Daniel Taillant

“Cool” of the wild

Hey everyone, I hope you all are excited to read this week’s post, because I sure was to write it!

 

I want to start with a survey that I conducted in the past week. The survey I conducted previously showed that the most people thought glacial melting was very urgent, and that the loss of biodiversity was the least urgent.

I decided to combine these 2 problems and ask- How important is the impact of glacial melting on biodiversity to you?

I surveyed 41 respondents- 28 males and 13 females, with an average age of 23.2, of which 90.2% were either undergraduates or graduates not from environmental studies, and the other 9.8% being secondary and primary school students.

Designed with Canva

 

What I gather from this is that although people do see the importance in the problem of glacial melting, some of them do not see the importance in the potential loss of biodiversity. What do you think of this?

 

When I asked what they thought the impacts of glacial melting on biodiversity were, this is what I got:

Made with MonkeyLearn

How accurate is this? Let’s find out.

 

This week, I would like to investigate the role that glaciers play in sustaining wildlife.

 

As glaciers are barren and cold, with temperatures dropping to -55.4 degrees Celsius in the Greenland Ice Sheet, not many organisms live on them. Some animals that live on them include the Himalayan Wingless Glacier Midge and the Ice worm in New Zealand glaciers. They survive by consuming glacial algae and bacteria.

 

However, if we look at the animals that visit glaciers for other purposes, it paints a totally different picture! Animals visit glaciers for various purposes, like caching their food, for temporary escape from the heat, travel and even for fun. The wolverine caches its food in glaciers, preserving its food for periods when food is lacking. Animals like the brown bear and snow leopard have been seen travelling on glaciers, presumably because glaciers are easier to traverse than the mountainous surroundings.

Wolverine. Image by Andrea Bohl from Pixabay

 

Melting glaciers leave these animals with no avenue for these activities. However, looking at the issue from a different perspective, we can see how animals start to populate areas left behind by retreating glaciers. In Norway, beetles, spiders and springtails that feed on algae have been found residing in such areas.

This doesn’t make the melting of glaciers ok, but it shows us how resilient and opportunistic life on Earth is.

 

Of course, glacial runoff also flows into many rivers around the world (as mentioned in my previous post) and sustains many ecosystems.

 

The impacts of melting glaciers on wildlife are numerous and complex. The impacts go beyond the direct effects their melting will have on the wildlife that live on or around the glaciers. They affect wildlife indirectly, through the rising sea levels and global temperatures, which would lead to more frequent extreme weather events, such as floods and droughts, posing a danger to wildlife.

 

I hope this post has brought you some insight on glaciers and wildlife. I’ll see you next week!

(On a side note, here’s a video by BBC of cute otters around a glacier calving event.)

Perceptions: a continuation

Hey everyone,

 

This is a continuation of last week’s post, as I was inspired to find out how my investigations differed from other research about environmental perceptions.

 

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Firstly, let’s talk demographics. As I read other research materials, I realised that women were more likely than men to care more about climate change. I would think that this is because men generally hold higher positions in the socioeconomic ladder and therefore, they are more likely to care more about economic growth (which oftentimes occurs on a different direction from environmentalism). Also, studies have shown that women are affected by climate change disproportionately more than men.

 

Age of the people also matter, as younger people are more likely to be more concerned about climate change than older people (71% of those people aged 18-29 compared to 50% of those aged 50 and above). Why is this so? Is it because younger people think that they will face the brunt of the effects from environmental issues and older people don’t think that the problems will affect them? This study shows this. However, older people are gradually becoming more aware of these issues.

 

Education is another factor that plays a big part in the results. More educated people were more likely to be more conscious and care more about environmental issues, as they are taught about the importance of environmental responsibility and their role in this problem. However, that is not to say that less educated people are oblivious to environmental problems, as these people could be the populations that are directly impacted by environmental issues eg. farmers whose main income source is agriculture and such populations are shown to exhibit high levels of awareness towards environmental issues.

 

Connections between race and environmental problems have been found, with people of color being treated unfairly and given polluted land in the US. I don’t think that race is a defining factor of environmental awareness in Singapore’s terms, as I believe that in Singapore everyone is equally shielded from the impacts of climate change although this study does possibly show the existence and effects of racism here. What do you think?

 

My short ‘study’ didn’t take into account gender, age, race and education levels. It would’ve been more interesting if I had done that and compared my results to the researchers’.

 

 

Next, let’s look at the methods of questioning. This study includes questions which ask if the respondents personally do anything to help the environment (lifestyle choices) and even asked what they do to help the environment as an open-ended question. As mentioned in my previous post, does awareness translate to action? That was one aspect my findings failed to cover which is unfortunate. It would’ve been cool to investigate the links between age, gender, education, race, awareness and action. The lack of open-ended questions in my questionnaire does leave out an endless list of possible responses which could have shown a completely different finding.

 

All that digging gave me new insight into critically analysing data. What other factors impact environmental perceptions? Let me know. Next up, back to the topic of glaciers!

 

Clive

Perceptions

Hey everyone, it’s good to see you all again!

 

As mentioned in my previous post, I realised that a few of the people I spoke to were oblivious to the importance of glaciers. Therefore, I decided to do a quick investigation to find out what peoples’ perceptions of various environmental issues were! I made a google form and sent them to various groups of people. They were my peers from different courses of study (none from BES), as well as family members and my dad’s colleagues who were unaware of this blog. Here’s a quick breakdown from the 42 respondents.

84.6% of people listed the urgency of our environmental problems as urgent (4-5 on a scale of 1-5)

 

Individually, I listed 6 different environmental issues. Namely

  1. Plastic pollution in oceans
  2. Air pollution
  3. Glacial melting
  4. Land degradation
  5. Loss of biodiversity
  6. Overconsumption of non-renewable energy.

I asked for participants to rate their thoughts on the urgency of each issue and this is what I found: For the percentage of people rating the urgency of each issue as urgent –

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However, what’s interesting was the response I received when participants were told to rank the aforementioned issues by their perceptions of the urgency/importance of these issues on a scale of 1 to 6 (with 1 being the most urgent and 6 being least urgent).

Rankings of the various environmental issues

I took the average ranking of each issue and this is what I got:

Plastic pollution – 2.17

Air pollution – 2.24

Glacial melting – 2.71

Overconsumption of non-renewable energy – 2.88

Land degradation – 2.93

Loss of biodiversity – 3.17

 

This was contrary to what I expected, as from my conversations with people around me, I had expected the awareness around glacial melting to be lower. However, it seems from my findings that glacial melting has the most people (57.1%) listing it as being very urgent.

 

Despite that, people still ranked plastic pollution in seas and air pollution above glacial melting when it came to urgency/importance! This makes me think that the distinction between peoples’ perspectives of the different environmental issues becomes clearer when people are made to compare them in this manner. Of course, these results are not representative of the general population as the sample size is tiny, but it does give us some interesting insight.

 

In Singapore, where we are not physically close to the problem of melting glaciers, I had expected less awareness of the issue. Media coverage of environmental issues has also been found to be lacking here, where a study has found that the reporting of scientists’ and activists’ opinions is significantly lower in Singapore than in other countries due to The Straits Times drawing information mostly from official sources. However, in this day and age of social media where information is easily accessible and so abundant, perhaps such information can transcend the physical and societal boundaries that such problems used to face in the past.

 

My findings showed that people are aware of the different environmental issues, but does this awareness translate to action? That is an aspect that I find problematic to quantify as it encompasses many factors. I think that the different environmental issues are part of a gargantuan problem, and sadly, fixing one requires fixing everything.

 

In my next post, I shall explore the importance of glaciers to wildlife. See you!

Clive

Lifeline

Hello everyone, I hope all has been good for you! The weather in Singapore has been cool lately due to the monsoon, but typically it is so much warmer. If you’re someone who loves cooler weather like me, imagine this – What if we woke up with a giant glacier right in the vicinity? That would be like waking up in this Norwegian cabin! How magnificent (and how cool) would that be?

 

In my previous post, I briefly mentioned how glaciers are essential to human lives. I will elaborate on their importance today.

Glacier runoff (water from melting glaciers) brings up water levels during warmer months (in drought) and is less when the weather is cooler. The runoff provides drinking water and irrigation. During cooler periods, the glaciers melt more slowly, and snow is able to accumulate. This is seen in regions like the Indo-Gangetic plain, where 129 million farmers are reliant on glacier runoff for agriculture during drier periods.

Farmers in the Indo-Gangetic plain

Therefore, glaciers are a renewable source of water. Imagine having an automatically refilling tray of ice to quench your thirst!

 

Despite this, glaciers have limits. What happens when the rate of melting is faster than the rate of snow accumulation? Such is the case with the Greenland Ice Sheet, where it is found to be adding the most to sea level rise.

Greenland Ice Sheet
Image by Bernd Hildebrandt from Pixabay

As with glaciers in Alaska – where degrees of melting that would normally take centuries happen within months.

This breath-taking video from National Geographic showcases that very vividly.

This puts countries like China and Indonesia at risk, where much of their population resides in coastal areas. Singapore’s sea levels have risen 14cm since 50 years ago, and this will only accelerate!

Increased rate of melting for glaciers will increase glacier runoff at first. After a period of time, the volume of runoff will decrease, and this will lead to lack of water resources. This can be seen in the very well demonstrated case of 2 towns in Northern India – Stongde and Kumik. Stongde has experienced a greater supply of water from melting glaciers, while Kumik’s water supply has stopped completely, leaving farmers distraught.

 

Over the past week, the topic of glaciers has come up several times in my conversations with my friends and family. What I have realized is that not much about glaciers is known to them despite their significance.

Next week, I shall investigate and tell everyone more about my findings! Stay safe.

Regards,

Clive

An icy issue

Hello, my name is Clive. I am a first-year student from the Bachelor of Environmental Studies program in the National University of Singapore (NUS).

Living in Singapore, we have the luxury of being in close proximity to beaches and the sea. Thus, I have spent many mornings and evenings strolling along the beach with my family (afternoons are too hot), exploring the marine life when the tide recedes. Here are some photos from a visit to Pasir Ris beach last December.

Hermit crab peeking from its shell
A starfish
My brothers and I

While at the beach, my family decided to do a clean-up, both as a form of education for my younger siblings and to do something for the environment. As I was picking through the sand for rubbish, I felt saddened at the sheer volume of trash on our beaches. This was on a microscopic scale compared to the vast expanse of the environmental problem we have.

My brother picking up trash

Within an hour, my family had run out of bags to store the trash in.

 

Experiences like these push me to question the environmental impact our actions have. What other problems are we causing to our environment? How do these actions affect us and the world around us? As familiar as I am with Singapore’s beaches, I still have a lot to learn about the world’s environmental crisis. As I thought about my theme for this blog, I wanted to explore a world far separated from my bubble in Singapore. Therefore, I decided that I should learn more about glaciers and share my knowledge with everyone!

 

Glacier in Argentina
Image by Adam Derewecki from PixaBay

 

Glaciers are structures of ice made from fallen snow, compacted after a long period of time. Glaciers are an essential part of ecosystems and human society. Glacier runoff support rivers and many human activities like agriculture, acting as a significant water source for many. But glaciers are melting fast. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting at 6 times the rate as compared to 30 years ago. Keeping at this rate, sea levels will rise between 0.29m and 1.1m by 2100. Water scarcity will be an even greater problem as well.

During the course of my learning, I aim to share my discoveries with everyone, and find out exactly how important glaciers are to the Earth. This will be a blog about Ice and Us. Stay with me to learn more in the following weeks!