The End And Beginning Of The Arctic

This story originally appeared on Ensia. In the winter of 2013–14, hundreds of milk-white birds with luminous yellow eyes and wingspans of up to 5 feet descended on beaches, farmers’ fields, city parks and airport runways throughout southern Canada and the United States. Traditionally, snowy owls spend most of their time in the Arctic and subarctic regions. But every four years or so when populations of lemmings — among the owl’s favorite foods — cycle downward, a small number of young, inexperienced birds that are less adept than their elders at hunting will fly farther south than they might normally rather than starve to death. No one, however, had seen an irruption as big and as far-reaching as this one, which was the second major such event in North America in three years. By the first week of December, the big birds were spotted from North Dakota to Maine and from Newfoundland to Bermuda. At one point, owls collided with five planes at Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark airports. Snowy owl irruptions are not in themselves a sure sign that something extraordinary is happening in an Arctic world that is warming nearly twice as fast as the global rate. But given the rapid-fire fashion in which similar, unexpected events have been unfolding throughout the circumpolar region, it’s clear that the Arctic we know is coming to an end, and that a new and very different Arctic is taking over. What happens in the Arctic matters. The ecological, cultural and economic shifts t...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news