This lecture was given by Veijo Pohjola, Professor at the Department of Earth Sciences at Uppsala. He’s been working with glaciers for about 40 years. These are my rough notes and paraphrased questions/answers.

Background - Svalbard and Kebnekaise

Pohjola worked extensively in Svalbard, on the large ice areas and small ice caps - Lomonosovfonna, Vestfonna

Some of his first studies were in northern Sweden, in the mountain range of Kebnekaise, where the highest peak in Sweden is. 5 years ago, its highest peak used the glaciated southern peak. However, that peak has now shrunk, making the Northern peak the highest. Pohjola worked there for 10 years, where he came in contact with, Prof. Roger Hooke.

IPCC’s first climate assessment report

He spent time as a PhD student in Minnesota, taking courses with Roger Hooke. During this time, the first IPCC climate assessment report was finished. The work had been started a few years before to make the first assessment of climate change on Earth. In Minnesota, everyone was all fired up. Many geologists were saying that we can’t change climate on the kind of scale suggested. But environmentalists and meteorologists thought otherwise. The latter turned out to be right.

Sediments and erosion

Roger Hooke said he doesn’t know the meteorological balances, he only knows glaciers, but one thing he knows is how much sediment non-human nature transports. His conclusions:

• All the Earth’s rivers, glaciers, slopes, wave action, wind, etc carry up 21 gigatons of sediment per year.
• Through transport of gravel, cement for construciton, etc, Hooke calculated that humans account for 45 gigatons of sediment per year.

Hooke was quite surprised by this. He said that we are the gods that form the planet now. It’s not the geology - it’s us.

The present picture

The cold areas of Earth are changing the most at the moment. 2025 was third warmest year on record. Most warming is in the Arctic (Arctic amplification).

This is due to the heat pump effect.

The heat pump

• 90% of the anthropogenic excess heat is stored in the oceans. Global heat content in the oceans has increased steadily.
• Polar areas have winter half the year, so in energy amounts the tropics are the receivers.
• But that energy should then by physical laws be distributed evenly over a surface. Most of this happens via ocean currents. Ocean currents from Caribbean carry all that energy up to the north. That heat melts ice and eventually gets cold and salty, sinking again.
• From 1950 to 2015 we lost 1/3 of area of sea ice in the Arctic. With continuous warming, if we can conform to the Paris Agreement, we can save maybe a third of that ice. If we drill more, it was thought we will be ice-free in 2050.
• The last reporting came out some years ago, but new data showed that loss of ice is much faster than predicted. We may have our first ice-free day in the Arctic within 10 years.

Sea levels

Ice shelves are glaciers that have been moving out to the ocean so much that they float on the sea. They are like shelves that spread themselves, but are still connected to the ice sheet which feeds them.

But it isn’t just melting glaciers that contributes to rising sea levels. 1/3 of sea level growth rate is that sea itself is warming up. When water gets warmer it expands. This means lower density, but higher volume.

Reindeer

Many examples of effects were mentioned, but the one that especially stood out for me was the reindeer.

Starvation from compromised snowpacks

Due to the warming of the Arctic, reindeer have problems moving around in the terrain to find food. I’d heard this in passing before, but never really knew exactly how warmer temperatures would decrease their food supply - I figured it was because the vegetation or some other species dependency failed, resulting in there not being enough food. It turns out that’s not actually the case. The issue is apparently that the warmer temperaturse cause ice.

Normally, you havec a snowpack that is made of snow all the way down. Reindeer traverse this terrain and can sniff through the snow to locate food. Scent and pheromones from moss and othr vegetation can make it through the snow, and the reindeer can dig through it to graze.

But with warmer temperatures comes rainfall. And if rain falls during winter, it will freeze in the snowpack and create layers of ice. When ice layers become too thick, the reindeer can’t feel where the food is because they can’t smell it, and they can’t break through the snowpack as they hit ice. They starve.

Infrastructure

The problem above is real, but apparently no longer the biggest issue. The biggest problem is the infrastructure.

There are paths where reindeer can and must travel from winter to summer. They don’t stay in one spot, moving with the seasons to find cool places that help protect them from mosquites, find safe calving grounds, and reach food. But roads, railways, and mines cause problems for these herding routes. The reindeer herders can’t move them because the infrastructure causes too much disturbance to the reindeer - not just physical problems getting from one place to another due to the surrounding infrastructure, but stress and scared herds from the blasting, trucks, etc. The sprawling infrastructure is apparently the largest cause of loss of calves.

Question (Liza): Can efforts to work with herding communities ever be enough? I had heard that mines have to get many environmental permits, find compromises with the reindeer herders to ensure there’s not too much disruption, etc. How effective is this? Can anything ever be enough, or is mining just inevitably going to be damaging to the reindeer without any way around it?

The answer was an example.

In northern Sweden, a new graphite mine was being opened. The current goverement is quite pro-mining as it’s important not to rely on Russia, China, etc for natural resources. And Sweden has an abundance of natural resources, including lithium and rare earth metals. The development process for this new mine had/has all these protocols for making the mine environmentally sustainable, working with local people, etc. But all the most important sites for the mine are also where the reindeer herders transport reindeer.

This graphite mine did everything in a “good” way. Still, the nature of the mine being there will mean that so many roads that will be built for trucks to transport goods in long caravans, and so much future blasting in the area right where reindeer routes have always been. It’s impossible to do this in a way that wouldn’t impact the herds.

The compromise

Finally, the mine came to an agreement with the local indigenous people and said they won’t blast when reindeer are in the vicinity. But they would continue to truck things. So it will still be very noisy when they move sediment with dumpers, throw it on trucks and transport them in these long caravans.

So yes, there are discussions with the herders and attempts to make it work, but the herders will always be the weaker party at these negotiations.

May as well have cows

Reindeer herders are the only people that are called indigenous in the way that still works with old habits and old ways to live. Herders live in a traditional way. But when they can’t move their herds, they aren’t living in a traditional way anymore. They end up having to feed their deer in place, or having to move them from one site to another by trucks. Some have expressed that at that point, they may as well have cows.

While these mines have to do all these environmental assessments and such, and get approvals from relevant governmental bodies, usually these assessments consists of nice words and descriptions but are conveniently worded in vague and hard to “pin down” ways.

Question: What if fewer people were concentrated in the northern hemisphere? Would warming in the north change or is this just a consequence of emissions regardless of where the emissions originate?

Everything mixes in atmosphere very fast. The differences in carbon dioxide are extremely short-term. This is a global problem and population distribution won’t affect much.

Oil companies

In the 1970s, Exxon made breathtakingly accurate climate predictions. The discovery was hushed. Oil companies began engaging in climate denial.

Oil companies used same playbook as tobacco companies: hush it down, accuse scientists of being dishonest.

Neoliberalism says the market will always fix things, since if rich get rich the richness will spread to rest of population. That might be good as long as resources are infinite. It isn’t.

Photo by Nicolas Lafargue.