The Disappearing Cold

Greenland is getting greener and Iceland's ice is shrinking. The Arctic is losing its chill. According to Dr. Hans Ahlmann, professor of geography at Stockholm University, all the cold lands around the northernmost Atlantic are entering a balmier climatological era.

Dr. Ahlmann has been collecting evidence from a variety of sources: temperature records, glaciers, trees, fish. In the Scandinavian countries, he says, the winters have been getting milder since the 19th Century. The change for the better amounts to only a degree or two, but that is enough to make all the difference in countries that fringe the Arctic.

Retreating Glaciers. Mountain glaciers, "very sensitive to climatic changes," also support Dr. Ahlmann's theory. In central Norway, Lapland and Greenland, the glaciers have been drawing back their long tongues of ice. Some have disappeared entirely. Icelandic glaciers are yielding up farmland which they have overridden for the last 600 years.

Norwegian and Russian scientists believe that the Gulf Stream, Europe's warm-water heating system, is flowing faster and farther into the north, tempering the climate, driving back the pack ice. In 1909, the Spitsbergen coalfields had an annual shipping period of only 95 mid-season days. In 1946, the last ship got safely away on Dec. 6.

Advancing Fish. In the 19th Century only a few cod were caught off southwestern Greenland. Now they are schooling far north of the Arctic Circle, where grateful Greenlanders and Eskimos are hauling them up by the ton. Many times in geological history, over long periods of years, the ice has piled up in the north and crunched down into the temperate zones.

Perhaps this time the glaciers are shrinking in earnest, looking toward an age, many million years in the future, when the earth will be warm all the way to the poles. More likely, this is only the latest "interglacial period."

Scientists do not agree on the causes of these fluctuations. One theory: the sun's radiation may vary at different periods. Another: the sun may have drifted through belts of cosmic dust which kept some of its rays from reaching the circling planets.

Between the great cycles come lesser cycles, when the cold advances or retreats a little. This is probably what is happening now; it may be only a short spell of fever, to be followed soon by chills. But there are cheering precedents in history.

In the heyday of the Vikings, before 1300 A.D., the populous republic of Iceland lived largely by agriculture; the Norse raised sheep in Greenland, where no sheep graze today. After 1300, the cold crept down and the Icelanders gave up farming. The Greenlanders were exterminated, perhaps by starvation, perhaps by glacier-fleeing Eskimos. Now that the tide has turned, Dr. Ahlmann, a good Norseman, hopes the warm cycle will last for at least a few centuries.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.