Journal Entry #5

I don’t think I’ve ever realized how much our world is connected and how one minor change in one area of the world can affect another area thousands of miles away. Our world has increased in temperature by 1⁰C which has been caused by an increase in burning of carbon fuel in our atmosphere. With this rising temperature are animals finding it easier to survive?

In Alaska the Porcupine River herds of caribou have been the basis of the Gwich’in tribes’ survival. This tribe relies on the crossing of the caribou for food, warmth and nourishment. Since 1989 over 600,000 caribou have disappeared due to the rising temperature of the area. Elders of the village are worried that the animals won’t adapt to the climate change fast enough. One of the biggest problems caribou face are mosquitoes, which can suck up to a tablespoon of blood out of the caribou daily. Caribou are forced to graze on top of mountains to avoid the mosquitoes causing them to exert more energy climbing the rough terrain. The rising temperature has caused more snow, causing caribou to have to dig for their food and put them a vulnerable state to predators like wolves. If the weather in the region doesn’t change the herd won’t recover which will result in the impoverishment of the Gwich’in tribe.

 

Zoaplankton and many other marine lives are also affected by the rising temperature in the oceans. Crabs in tide pools are almost at their threshold with the warmer waters, creating a scare that if they are to rapidly crash in population, it will have an extreme affect on the food chain in the tide pools.

The most interesting part of the video was the part on Lake Chad and how it has dried up over the past decades. It astonished me to see the boat that was once giving hope to a family, sitting on top of a dried up lake. This drought in Nigeria has led an increase in asthma in Trinidad; the Indian Ocean is beginning to warm causing the North Atlantic Ostalation to carry the Saharan Dust across the America’s. The correlation of these events shows that we are one world and everything that happens has a consequence either in the area where it is happening or in another part of the world.