The Front Lines of Climate Disruption - Dahr Jamail and Derick Jensen

Essential listening

Dahr Jamail and Derick Jensen in discussion on the oceans

Dahr Jamail is an award winning journalist and author who is a full-time staff reporter for Truthout.org. His work is currently focusing on Anthropogenic Climate Disruption.

The latest from Dahr.

The Front Lines of Climate Disruption: Alaskans Witness Collapsing Mountains, Shattered Lives

Dahr Jamail

The impacts of anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) across Alaska are devastating to witness.

In late June, due to glaciers melting at unprecedented rates, the side of a mountain nearly a mile high in Alaska's Glacier Bay National Park, which had formerly been supported by glacial ice, collapsed completely. The landslide released over 100 million tons of rock, sending debris miles across a glacier beneath what was left of the mountain.

This is something that has been happening more often in recent years in the northernmost US state. While Alaska's local conservative media often tend to feign ignorance of the cause of such phenomena, what's causing it is all too clear. 

The state has been hitting and surpassing record temperatures over the last year, and the same can be said for the globe. It's plainly obvious why ice is melting at record rates.

Mountains that have been largely covered by glaciers for eons are losing their ice cover and the soggy, unstable land underneath is giving way. The landslides are usually large enough to cause seismic tremors and sometimes, when close enough to the ocean, tsunamis.

Also in June, Arctic sea ice had melted down to a record low, with 29,000 miles of it disappearing each day. By month's end, the sea ice was 100,000 square miles below the previous record for June -- set just six years ago -- and more than half-a-million square miles below the 1981-2010 long-term average, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Excepting March, every single month of this year thus far has set a new record low for ice cover in the Arctic.

To Alaskans, at least those who are not making a living off the oil industry that dominates the state's financial and political economies, the evidence before them is impossible to ignore....[ ]



To read the article GO HERE