15 August 2019; DW: Visiting Canada's melting Arctic, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has said Europe has an "extraordinary" task to slash fossil fuel emissions. If it didn't, climate warming would rob polar regions of more ice cover.
Maas on Thursday toured Canada's far-north, a vast but fragile region coveted by the United States as a potential defrosted "Northwest” shipping passage between the Atlantic and Pacific. Little publicized is that since 2016 a German-Canadian research team coordinated by Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute has been testing a "passive radar" method intended to help ships navigate shoals and narrows of the Northwest Passage.
Last May, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stumped an Arctic Council summit in Finland by welcoming "steady reductions in sea ice" that he said would open "new opportunities for trade" via the Arctic by shortening voyages.
His demurral led to the failure of the eight-nation council, which includes Canada, Russia and Norway, to issue a final statement on climate change as a serious threat — likely to have included a warning that the Arctic's Barents Sea was nearing a "tipping point" as waters turn warmer.
Germany is among 13 nations with only observer status at such biannual meetings of the eight immediate neighbors of the Arctic, where temperature are rising two or three-fold faster than the world average.
Inuits alone can't stop ice melt
Maas, first making a stopover at Iqaluit (pictured above), the main town on Canada's Baffin Island, told reporters that its 7,000 population — half Inuit — themselves on their own had "no chance" to stop ice melt in their local Frobisher Bay.
"That is our responsibility — and to witness that here and focus on it — is extraordinarily important," said the German minister.
Warming in the bay had become all too evident, said host Iqaluit hotel manager Stephen Sullivan.
"We've had a really warm summer period ... 18 to 22 degrees Celsius (64 to 71 degrees Fahrenheit) here. And that's not normal."
Remote Pond Inlet
On Thursday Maas was due to fly 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) across the vast island to the settlement of Pond Inlet to witness more ecological impacts in Canada's Nunavut territory.
Visiting the Nunavut Research Institute (NRI) at Iqaluit Wednesday, Maas was told by lead scientist Mary Ellen Thomas that the disappearance of sea ice in the bay had deprived families of traditional transport routes and hunting grounds for fish and seals.
German ethnologist Torsten Diesel, at NRI for the past six years, said sea ice cover had become increasingly "dangerous" because of strong currents and tides.
"One can drive in the morning over the ice but by the afternoon an open water gap has emerged. Every year we lose hunters who venture on to the ice," Diesel told German public Deutschlandfunk (DLF) radio.
No longer 'theoretical discussion'
The location's ice loss showed that climate change was "no theoretical discussion" and made clear what would happen "if we don't change our behavior," said Maas, referring to fossil fuel cuts promised by nations at the UN's 2015 Paris summit.
Professor Markus Rex, head of Atmospheric Physics at Germany's Alfred Wegener polar and oceanic institute (AWI), said he often experienced Arctic visitors such as Maas transformed by encountering the changes first hand.
"They come back [thinking] differently compared to when they set out."
German ship to drift near pole
From next month, Rex will head a major winter expedition. The German research ship "Polarstern" (Polar Star) will drift across the Central Arctic by tying itself to a large ice flow for months through the winter dark.
"We'll be north of the 80th parallel the entire time, and for much of it, we'll even be in the direct vicinity of the North Pole," said Rex.
Aside from Norway's 19th century explorer Fridtjof Nansen few had conducted ice-drift winter analysis so far north in the "epicenter of global warming," he added.
Norwegian researchers warned the Arctic Council in May that the North's chilled stratified waters — vital for unique fish life — was already "shifting" to resemble mixed Atlantic waters because of temperature rises.
