Locals to document climate change

BY ERIC LINDBERG
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

In maritime lore, the fabled Northwest Passage is considered the Holy Grail.
For three centuries, ship captains sought to map the ice-laden seas to the north of Canada, looking for a viable shipping lane that would cut the journey from Europe to Asia by 4,700 nautical miles. With ice 50 to 60 feet thick blocking their way, vessels turned instead to the Panama Canal.
However, that bypass may not be necessary in a few years, Edward Cassano warns, as the warm fingers of global climate change slowly creep northward.

Today, Cassano leaves Santa Barbara to lead a team on the initial reconnaissance mission of a four-year project to catalog the impacts of climate change on the Northwest Passage and the Arctic ecosystem as a whole.
“This is the story,” Cassano said, pointing to a map depicting the size of the Arctic ice in 1979 and in 2005. “Human activities are driving this change.”
A huge gap loomed between the 1979 outline and the edge of the ice on the 2005 map. Some models predict an ice-free Arctic Ocean in 2020, Cassano said. The Northwest Passage is likely to be ice-free during summer months in the coming decade, he said, even as early as the next five years.
“Every decade we are losing eight percent of the Arctic ice pack,” Cassano said.
A former Lieutenant Commander in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Corps, Cassano founded and managed the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum and has led more than 100 research expeditions throughout the world.
His interest in the Arctic Archipelago sparked in 2000, when a small Royal Canadian Mounted Police vessel stopped in Santa Barbara after completing a voyage through the Northwest Passage. Cassano said the captain described to him an ice-free passage and profound changes to the Arctic that have equally profound implications for not only the Inuit people and wildlife living there, but for the whole planet as well.
Cassano formed a nonprofit organization, Integrated Marine Education and Research Expeditions (InMER), in 2006 to implement a four-year exploration of the passage.
Today’s departure from Santa Barbara Municipal Airport marks the beginning of a week-long reconnaissance trip to five Inuit villages to meet with town leaders and Inuit elders to bring them into the fold.
“We expect to hear about and probably see some change,” Cassano said. “For the Inuit who live in these areas, global warming hasn’t been a question, it has been a reality.”
He described how high tundra and permafrost ecosystems are facing erosion, ice is melting sooner in the summer and freezing later in the fall, and animal hunting grounds are shifting with the changing climate.
While the opening of the Northwest Passage has obvious monetary benefits for shipping companies that currently use routes through the Panama Canal or around Cape Horn, Cassano also warned that pollution from those ships will have a major impact on the Arctic Archipelago.
“It is a fragile ecosystem,” Cassano said. “You don’t want an accident to happen up there.”
Cassano is accompanied on the trip by Richard Theiss, a cinematographer who will shoot high definition video for a National Geographic show called Wild Chronicles that airs on PBS. Also along for the journey is Kyle Ogden, who will pilot the two-engine King Air C90 plane lent to the project by the Duncan family of Santa Barbara. The crew will also pick up copilot Clayton Neufeld in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Cassano and his team will spend six days familiarizing themselves with the passage and key villages, and collecting images and video for outreach efforts and the InMER website, www.inmer.org. The team will stop at the Inuit villages of Gjoa Haven, Cambridge Bay, Kugluktuk, Holman Island and Sachs Harbor.
However, the focus of the four-year project is an icebreaker expedition planned for 2009, which will take a much larger group of researchers through Baffin Bay and a series of straits below Victoria Island to Barrow, Alaska, before turning around and nudging into McClure Strait, an area north of Victoria Island that has been navigated by sea only once or twice.
Bryan Crane, a friend of Cassano and a member of the BlueWater Advisory Group, which helped fund the project, said Cassano is dedicated to addressing the planet-wide climate change crisis.
“He’s not in this for the money,” Crane said. “This is all on a shoestring budget. It’s genuinely out of his commitment to the environment.”
Cassano plans to involve as many different groups of people in the InMER project as possible, from musicians and poets to religious leaders, politicians and athletes. A month-long youth expedition, which will take place concurrent with the icebreaker mission, will involve Cassano’s 13-year-old daughter as well as other youth representatives.
Major funding for the mission is provided by the Duncan family, Dr. Sylvia Earle and several other anonymous donors. Cassano hopes the trip will raise the visibility of global climate change and help develop policy solutions to address the issue.
“We need to act quickly and decisively to stem human-induced change at this scale,” he said, “not only for the Arctic and the people who call it home, but for all of humanity.”