Roaming the Arctic
When shards of glaciers crashed into the sea to become icebergs, my seat shook. When wolves howled as they pursued bison across frozen tundra, my ears rang. When immense polar bears roamed broken ice fields in search of prey, primal fear erupted.
Not long ago, I received an email announcement from the Pacific Science Center about a special exhibition called Polar Science Day. The highlight of the event was an IMAX presentation of Arctic: Our Frozen Planet, a stunning film about how climate change is radically transforming the far north. Introducing the film and providing a question and answer period afterwards was Dr. Eric Regehr, an ecologist with the University of Washington Polar Science Center. He also appears in the film as part of a team of American and Russian scientists studying polar bears on a remote island off the coast of Siberia. He is an example of a proxy that perennial nomads can look to when they are unable to personally travel to particularly restricted places. Another example of a proxy would be an Apollo astronaut who landed on the moon, or NASA scientists who lived on the International Space Station, or oceanographers who descended in tiny reinforced vehicles to the depths of the sea. They go places we can't go and report to us what it is like there, and then we can enjoy their adventures vicariously and benefit from what they learned.
In the film, the impact of global warming was presented in map displays, in explanations of how the melting of sea ice impacted the animal populations, and in scenes of indigenous people attempting to cross ice fields that in the past were solid but now are broken up into unstable slush. It reinforces the realization that global warming and climate change are not beliefs or dogmas that you can choose to accept or not accept; they are realities, and they are happening whether you choose to cover your eyes or not. This caused me to reflect upon the importance of sustainability for the perennial nomad. Whether you travel with a backpack, in a car, in a camper, or in a boat, it is imperative that you do whatever you can to protect our home planet.
As for the Arctic, most of us will probably never see it up close; nevertheless, the choices we make and how we behave in the planet's warmer portions directly impact the Arctic, and in turn, the changes the Arctic undergoes directly impact us. We work in symbiosis with our environment whether we realize it or not.
Before the film, I wandered past exhibits where teams of scientists demonstrated various facets of Arctic realities. At one, for instance, they had an ice core from a Greenland glacier in a cooler. As soon as I paused, a scientist eagerly pulled the core out and explained what some of its details meant. It was early and as yet this wing of the building was sparsely populated; I hoped, though, that as the day progressed, swarms of curious preteens and teens would find their ways here to benefit from the available expertise.
Perennial nomads who find it difficult to travel far, remember this: often experts in demonstrations or exhibitions can bring the world to you.