Earlier this week, New York City broke its 701-day streak without significant snowfall — meaning 1” or more of accumulation in Central Park — which has provoked some cognitive dissonance here at my New York City desk. Partly, I am taking it with a measure of relief — “See, it does still snow in New York and we’re going to get more later this week and everything is fine!” — even though I know full well that one snowfall is no reassurance at all, as if breaking the pattern, which is one of warmer, rainier winters than the ones I grew up with, which were warmer and rainier than those seen by kids before me.
Over the last few weeks, before the snow began to scatter down, I’ve been periodically checking the weather in the coldest cities on earth — I recently read an essay in which the author said Winnipeg, Manitoba was one of the coldest cities in the world, which sent me searching for an official ranking (it doesn’t exist). I’m not sure why this seemed like a good use of my time, except that it provided that same kind of reassurance of normality — that it might not be cold and snowy here right now, but it is somewhere, for whatever that’s worth.
For example, right now in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories (Canada), it’s -24ºF at 12pm, and the high for today is -6ºF. In Dudinka, Russia, a city of about 20,000 people above the Arctic Circle, the average daily low temperature in January is -28ºF, and the high is -12ºF. Right now, at 3am, it’s -35ºF. Tomorrow’s high will be -23ºF. It’s hard for me to imagine what it would actually be like to live in such a place, for such extremes to be normal.
But such extremes, though they may always occur in Dudinka or somewhere else, at some moments in time, it’s unlikely that “normal” will continue to mean much — climate change/global warming mean more variability, less predictability, less of the world looking like it has for most of human history.
A small snowstorm in New York City shouldn’t really be a relief — 1.6 inches of snow so far in January is far below historical averages (2 inches less than average for the month to date; 7.6 less than average for the season) — and it has significance beyond my own personal feelings. In the Northeast generally, the decreasing amount of snow — and its unpredictability and quick disappearance because of whipsawing temperatures and winter rain — means a lot to animals and plants that depend on winter rhythms for their lifecycle (Pity the poor apple tree I saw on the Great Lawn and its early-January bloom!), to our water quality, also to those in the Northeast whose livelihoods depend on snowfall — people who live in ski areas, for the most part.
In the American West, the change in snowfall goes beyond people’s ability to earn a living or live how and where they planned (which is not nothing!): snowpack is critical for western water supplies, and changing melt rates (caused by warm temperatures and unseasonable rainfall) can and do leave reservoirs far below where they have been in the past. Millions of people now depend on this water — directly, for drinking and cooking and cleaning and irrigation, and indirectly, for the rest of us who eat the food grown there all year long. The West was largely settled by colonists during an especially wet/non-desertlike period in the deep history of the west, and its water allocated according to those anomalous historical standards, a problem which is being exacerbated by climate change — hotter temperatures, prolonged drought, etc.
Not to mention a recent paper which found that the relationship between warmer winter temperatures and snowpack is non-linear. In other words (theirs), there is a “snow-loss cliff,” which they describe as a temperature boundary above which snow loss dramatically accelerates with each degree of warming. (That temperature boundary is an average winter temperature above 17 degrees Fahrenheit, the study’s authors found.) Here’s a longer piece on the study in The Atlantic.
If you look up Antarctica now on Google News, you’ll be met with a flurry of headlines about how parts of the United States are colder right now than Antarctica. (This is not that meaningful — Arctic air is hovering over the US because of a wobbly polar vortex, likely a result of climate change; it’s summer in Antarctica right now, so it gets about 24 hours of sunlight each day. At the South Pole, it’s currently -22ºF at 7pm, and the average monthly temperature in summer is -18ºF.) What’s more meaningful about Antarctica: it has lost ice at a rate of 142 billion metric tons per year since 2002; in Greenland (the world’s other ice sheet), the rate of change is -269 billion metric tons over the same time period.
I’ve been rereading an excellent book about mass extinctions and deep time (more fun than it sounds) by my former Vineyard Gazette colleague Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World, which keeps reminding me that Earth, in its current condition is just that: in a current condition, one that, over the last several billion years, has become periodically unrecognizable to whatever came before because of external forces (asteroids) or changing chemistry (mostly levels of carbon dioxide). The problem now, in more than one way, is us: the change we’re experiencing is, if not deliberate, at least known in advance with a directly attributable cause that could be stopped, and is happening incredibly quickly (over decades and centuries, rather than many-million-year epochs).
In these moments of spiraling catastrophizing about deep time and the nature and rate of change, I remember how amazing it is that we are here at all, that life is possible, that snow exists and people thought of skiing and the fleeting wonder of snow-quiet New York City. It’s the feeling I had last year, while skiing the American Birkebeiner, the longest cross-country ski race in North America. After hitting rock bottom, praying for the sweet relief of a broken ankle so I could stop, I felt such gratitude for the snow, for the quiet, for the mind of winter.
As I crossed Lake Hayward, the only flat portion of the race, I felt so incredibly lucky to live on this planet in a moment in time in which this is all possible.
From “Can A Ski Race With 800 Year Old Roots Survive 21st Century Winters?” by Tatiana Schlossberg, Outside, March 2023
For those of who would like to revisit my profound humiliation, please find the article I wrote about it last winter for Outside magazine.
This was originally posted on Tatiana’s Substack News from a Changing Planet, a free twice-monthly newsletter about what on Earth is happening, with articles and essays about climate change and the environment.
Photo by Aditya Vyas on Unsplash.