Arctic Science Journeys
Radio Script
1997

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Arctic Data Comes in from the Cold
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STORY: During the Cold War, the Arctic was a hot place indeed. Nuclear submarines played a dangerous game of cat and mouse beneath the shifting polar ice. Their captains knew slight changes in water temperature disguised their huge ships by scattering enemy sonar. Sub captains also knew where to find thin ice, just in case the order came to surface and launch their ballistic missiles. But such knowledge wasn't the product of instinct. Scientists working for both Russian and American intelligence services were engaged in a cold war of their own. For 50 years their top-secret studies of the Arctic's ice, oceans, and atmosphere were used for military purposes.

Now that the cold war is over, the data--on Arctic Ocean temperatures, ice movements, and weather--promises to be a virtual gold mine for civilian scientists. Professor Norbert Untersteiner heads the atmospheric sciences department at the University of Washington.

UNTERSTEINER: "This is a very large number of observations. I think they estimate it at about 1.2 or 1.4 million individual observations of temperature and salinity, going back to the Soviet's drifting station North Pole 2 in 1951, all the way up to NP 31 in 1991. The Russians have never shared the physical oceanography data with us before, and now they have."

The observations were made public in an agreement to share Cold War science, reached between U.S. Vice President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin. Professor Untersteiner chaired the scientific group that lobbied to make the information public. He says the data is like finding a puzzle's missing pieces.

UNTERSTEINER: "We've had a lot of oceanographic observations in all the marginal seas, in the Bering Sea, the North Atlantic, the Greenland Sea, Norwegian Sea, and the Barents Sea, but not in the marginal seas along the continent of northern Europe and Asia, and not about the eastern side of the Arctic basin. That new collection of data really fills that hole."

Scientists eager to get the information have flooded the National Snow and Ice Data Center, in Boulder, Colorado, with dozens of calls. Gunter Weller, a climatologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, says the measurements may help confirm widely held beliefs that the arctic climate is getting warmer.

WELLER: "It's a long-term record that will be very useful in interpreting climatic trends. And that's very critical, firstly because we have very little data about the Arctic Ocean. The Russians have been the most diligent collectors of data over the last 50 years or so. So they're sitting on a big data set. Now the implications of the data are quite interesting because as you know most of the climate models predict that the amplification of climate signal is going to be largest in the high latitudes, in the Arctic Ocean. So to look for first trends, first indications of change, you'd have to look at the Arctic."

Andreas Munchow is a professor of coastal studies at Rutgers University. He hopes newly public data on Arctic ocean circulation will help him follow the spread of chemical and nuclear wastes leaking from Russian dump sites.

MUNCHOW: "The question is how do these potentially radioactive materials distribute in the Arctic Ocean. Those rivers turn right around the corner, and about 500 kilometers downstream you have Alaska. So that was the hypothesis, that there might be a potential impact for fisheries on coastal communities in northwestern Alaska. The Canadian also are worried that eventually it will end up on their shores also."

Most of the data comes from Russian observations made from aircraft, submarines, and from research stations on drifting ice flows. Fifteen scientists spent a year transcribing 900,000 pages of Russian measurements. Once found only in top-secret archives, the data is now available on CD-ROM from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, in Boulder, Colorado.

Reporting from Fairbanks, Alaska, this is Debra Damron for Arctic Science Journeys.