It’s winter in Ontario, and for thousands of people that means it’s snowmobiling season. Snowmobiling is extremely popular in our province, and with over 30,000 km of trails, it’s not hard to understand the appeal.
However, there is a dark side to this pass time, and that is the potential for severe injury and death when safety isn’t taken seriously. The Ontario Provincial Police and Ontario Federation of Snowmobile Clubs recently held their jointly-sponsored Ontario Snowmobile Safety Week and shared two sobering statistics:
There have been seven snowmobile fatalities since the beginning of this season
Three of those seven victims died as a result of falling through ice
Be sure to also follow these additional snowmobile safety tips from the Ontario Ministry of Transportation.
A few years ago, the Canadian Institute for Health Information reported that two-thirds of serious snowmobile injuries occurred in adults ages 20 to 49. In 2014-2015, there were 235 hospitalizations in Ontario due to snowmobile accidents. And Maclean’s magazine reports that “as many as 50 people die in snowmobile accidents annually in Ontario and Quebec alone”.
Don’t be a statistic. If snowmobiling is a passion of yours, play it safe and do it right.
Sea surface temperatures today are strikingly similar to those during the last interglacial period, when sea levels were six to nine metres above their present height, according to research.
The findings provide compelling evidence that Greenland and Antarctica’s continental ice sheets are highly sensitive to slight increases in ocean temperatures, and raise the prospect of sea levels continuing to rise for many centuries.
Previous research had shown that sea levels rose by several metres during the last interglacial (LIG), between 129,000 to 116,000 years ago, but until now the picture of how sea temperatures had varied over the same period had remained patchy.
The latest research, based on marine sediment core records from 83 sites, concludes that sea temperatures towards the end of the LIG were comparable to those seen today.
Rob DeConto, a climate scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was not involved in the research said: “This tells us that the big ice sheets are really sensitive to just a little bit of warming. That’s a really powerful message.”
During the LIG, the Earth’s climate warmed due to a shift in the tilt of the planet, which led to average temperatures around 2C warmer than today. The hippopotamus was found as far north as the river Thames and forests reached well into the Arctic Circle.
Scientists view the period as an important reference for how the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere might respond to the current warming trend in the future.
The study, published in the journal Science, compared records from 83 marine sediment core sites to data from 1870-1889 (pre-industrial times) and 1995-2014.
Records of both the local surface temperatures and global sea levels are locked into the layers of sediment. Surface-feeding plankton act as natural thermometers as the ratio of magnesium to calcium accumulated in their shells depends on the water temperature. Another plankton species acts as a gauge for the extent of continental ice shelves. The ratio of two different forms of oxygen (O16 and O18) is different in continental ice sheets and seawater, so by tracking these ratios in the plankton, scientists can work out how much ice there was at a given point in time.
The analysis found that, at the onset of the LIG 129,000 years ago, the global ocean sea surface temperatures were similar to the 1870-1889 average. By 125,000 years ago, these had increased by 0.5C, reaching a temperature indistinguishable from the 1995-2014 average.
Sea levels respond directly to global temperatures, both through the melting of ice shelves and through the expansion of water as it warms. However, the process happens slowly, so the full extent of sea level rises may only become apparent hundreds or thousands of years into the future.
Professor Andrew Watson, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter, said: “The good news is that with luck it will continue to rise slowly, so that we have time to adapt, but the bad news is that eventually all our present coastal city locations will be inundated.”
A crucial unknown is the rate at which the ice sheets will melt in the future, and the latest findings do not have a direct bearing on this question, according to Jeremy Hoffman, a climate scientist at the Science Museum of Virginia and the paper’s lead author.
During the LIG, warming occurred over more than 10,000 years, meaning that changes to the global ice sheets could happen in parallel. The current warming trend has occurred over decades, and it is not clear how far behind the melting of ice will lag.
The UN estimates that global sea levels will rise between 13cm and 68cm by 2050 and a high profile paper by DeConto’s group last year predicted a two metre rise by the end of the century.
Louise Sime, head of palaeoclimate research at the British Antarctic Survey, said: “The rates of ice sheet loss are really difficult to predict. Estimates are anything from 200 to 7,000 years.”
The Science paper also highlights apparent deficits in most climate models, which fail to replicate the warming of the oceans seen in the sediment cores when they are applied to this period.
“This refined picture really clearly identifies that the modelling experiments do not create enough warming during the last interglacial,” said Hoffman.
One explanation is that the models are underestimating feedback mechanisms in the Earth’s system, such as the reduction of sunlight that is reflected back as ice melts, leading to an underestimation of how quickly ocean temperatures ramp up.
“We think there might be some process missing that we’re just not capturing,” said Hoffman. “If we’re missing something from this period of the Earth’s history, what might we be missing from future projections?”
The good news is that B.C.’s prolonged deep freeze is about to end, replaced by more typical wet West Coast weather.
The bad news is that a long stretch of heavy rain is expected to hit the province’s South Coast early this week, resulting in an increased chance of flooding in the Metro Vancouver area.
“It actually looks like we’re going to see a pineapple express developing with temperatures warming up to nine or 10 degrees,” said Environment Canada meteorologist Trevor Smith.
A pineapple express is an informal term for an atmospheric river of moisture and warm air that flows north from the tropics.
The turn in weather is a dramatic change for the South Coast, which has seen freezing temperatures and higher-than-normal snowfalls for the last six weeks.
Warmer, rainy weather makes comeback
Smith said to expect rain “all day and all night” on Tuesday and Wednesday. He added that these kind of rain warnings are issued if more than 50 millimetres of rain is expected in a 24-hour period.
There’s also a heightened risk of flooding because the ground is frozen and less likely to absorb the rain.
Smith said residents can take precautions by ensuring that storm drains are cleared of debris or ice.
Some municipalities have already begun to prepare. Rob Costanzo, Surrey’s manager of engineering operations, said crews have been checking catch basins, inlets and culverts to ensure they’re clear.
Costanzo said city officials are concerned about the flood threat “especially since we had sub-freezing weather for a long period of time.
“That water has nowhere to absorb because the ground is frozen, lawns are covered in ice.”
Outside the South Coast, inland regions such as Howe Sound, Whistler, Squamish and the eastern Fraser Valley could see snow and freezing rain on Monday, Smith said.
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