Antarctica, with its miles-deep ice sheets, has long been seen as the frigid holdout on a rapidly warming planet. But a new analysis of temperature records on the Western edge of the continent challenges that notion, and says that the region is actually one of the most rapidly warming places on the planet.

In fact, says Andrew Monaghan, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, West Antarctica is warming about twice as fast as what we had thought, and three times the global average.

Monaghan is a co-author of the study, published last month in the journal, “Nature Geosciences.” He says a new analysis of temperature data in the region found that West Antarctica has warmed by roughly 2.3 degrees Celsius over the last 50 years, or about 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

Monaghan’s co-author on the study, Ohio State University geographer David Bromwich, says the most alarming part of their findings is how much of that warming is occurring during the summer.

“That means it’s easier to get the temperatures above the freezing point,” Bromwich says. “And the place that it matters is on the floating ice shelves.”

Bromwich says warmer ocean currents have already weakened those ice shelves, which are anchored to the shore of the continent. And if warming there causes the ice shelves to break up, the massive glaciers behind them would have a much speedier path to the sea. That’s a big concern, because those glaciers hold enough ice to raise global sea levels 11 feet.

Bromwich says there’s a strong precedent for such a rapid breakup of an entire Antarctic ice system caused by increased surface melting—the disintegration of the Larson B ice shelf east of the Antarctic Peninsula within a matter of days in 2002.

After the collapse of that ice shelf, the glaciers behind it sped up by a factor eight, putting much more water into the sea. Extreme climatic events like this are causing scientists to rethink future sea level projections.

University of Leeds climatologist Andrew Sheperd says there’s a significant difference in the amount of ice that’s being lost now as compared to 20 years ago.

Sheperd was a lead author on another new study, the most exhaustive assessment of polar ice melt to date, recently published in the journal “Science.” It found that the ice sheets aren’t melting in a gradual, linear fashion as many had predicted. The melting is actually speeding up.

Sheperd says the contribution of the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland to global sea level rise has gone up from roughly 10 percent in the 1990’s to about 30 percent today.

“That starts to be something that people are certainly more concerned about now,” Sheperd says.

And even more concerned about as we move into the future. Yet another new study, this one a survey of the world’s top 26 glaciologists, found that the scientists believe they may have seriously underestimated the potential for catastrophic sea level rise in the coming decades.

The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report projected less than two feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. But the glaciologists surveyed believe there’s a small but significant chance sea levels could reach three feet or more by 2100.

That’s a rise that would displace millions of people and jeopardize the future of cities from New York to Tokyo.

Still, despite all of this progress in understanding how fast polar ice is melting and how parts of Antarctica are responding to warming, the fate of Antarctic ice remains one of the greatest climate uncertainties.

University of Washington climate scientist Eric Steig says it’s important to be clear what the new data can and can’t tell us. “The confirmation that warming is happening rapidly in West Antarctica is not the same thing as projecting that it will happen in the future,” Steig says.

Steig is credited with being one of the first to detect the warming trend in West Antarctica. But he says the climate system that governs the area is so complex that figuring out what’s going to happen in the future is still anyone’s guess.

“What’s happening in West Antarctica is changes in atmospheric circulation, which are actually influenced by changes happening in the tropics, very far away,” Steig says. “And projecting what happens in the tropics in the future is one of the well known big uncertainties in climate projections.”

Throw in other influences like the hole in the ozone layer and the challenge becomes even more complex.

But Steig says while the current warming trend in West Antarctica doesn’t make projections of future warming or sea level rise any more certain, it also doesn’t give us any reason to worry less.

“It simply tells us that there’s a lot of processes going on and the uncertainties are large.”

Leaving the world with yet another big climate policy question mark—how much uncertainty about the future of our ice caps and our coasts are we willing to live with?

Months before both this year’s record Arctic ice melt and Hurricane Sandy, a climatologist identified changing weather patterns that suggest links between the two seemingly separate events. Sam Eaton reports from New Jersey. Read more>>

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, debate is again raging in the US about the dangers of climate change. Read more>>

An Arctic Climate Catastrophe?

As international climate negotiators meet in Doha, Qatar, scientists are issuing a stark warning of possibly huge emissions of the greenhouse gas methane from the warming Arctic. Read More>>

If you want to understand one of the ways that warming in the Arctic is affecting climate change, just light a match and stand back.

In a video taken in northern Alaska, researchers from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks recoil in amazement as one of them pops a bubble in the ice of a lake, strikes a light above it and watches as the spark explodes into a huge burst of flame.

The gas escaping from the lake is methane—basically the same stuff you might burn in your stove or furnace. UAF Researcher Katey Walter Anthony has become well known for these pyrotechnic displays. She says they’re a good test of whether methane is escaping from below lakes in the far north.

That’s important to know, because methane is a potent greenhouse gas. It doesn’t last as long in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, but in that shorter time it packs a much stronger warming punch.

It turns out there’s a huge amount of organic matter trapped in the Arctic region’s permanently frozen ground. And as this part of the world warms up, it’s starting to decompose and release methane into the atmosphere.

Walter Anthony says there can be hundreds of thousands of methane seeps under a single Arctic lake.

“And then when you look at a map and realize that the Arctic has millions of lakes, and those lakes all contain methane, the numbers start to really add up.”

And it’s not just lakes. Permafrost covers nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere. And altogether it holds twice the amount of carbon that’s currently in the atmosphere. So if even a fraction of it were to escape, as it’s expected to do, the warming effect on the planet would be huge.

It’s one of those nasty feedbacks scientists talk about that has the potential to cause runaway global warming.

Policymakers at the UN climate talks in Doha, Qatar this week are grappling with these very questions. New scientific warnings on climate change are coming fast and furious, including a stern warning this week from the U.N. Environment Program about the risks of methane escaping into the atmosphere from the melting Arctic.

The report’s lead author, Kevin Schaefer of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, says the message to negotiators of a promised climate treaty is simple.

“If the emissions targets negotiated by the treaty do not account for these emissions from thawing permafrost,” Schaefer says, “we’re going to overshoot our target climate of two degrees above preindustrial levels.”

Two degrees Celsius is the cutoff for avoiding the most catastrophic effects of global warming.

Current international projections for warming don’t take Arctic methane into account. And Schaefer says unlike emissions from burning fossil fuels, those from thawing permafrost are harder to stop.

“Even if we totally eliminated fossil fuel emissions today, the permafrost would continue to thaw for 20-30 years just responding to the temperature increases we already have,” Schaefer says.

Schaefer says current warming trends likely will add a huge amount of Arctic methane to the atmosphere, although no one can say exactly how much. His new report calls for nations with extensive permafrost to create monitoring networks to get a better handle on the problem.

Such an effort is already underway in the U.S.

Chip Miller is part of a five-year NASA project to monitor both CO2 and methane levels over permafrost.

At his office in Pasadena, California, Miller shows a video from a flight over an area of forests, swamps and lakes in the Inoko Wilderness, near McGrath Alaska.

He says the flights are helping put real numbers on just how much carbon is being emitted as the permafrost thaws. And some of those numbers are surprising. Miller says in this area of pristine wilderness, he and his colleagues found some of the highest concentrations of CO2 and methane that they’ve observed anywhere in Alaska.

“We’re seeing something that would be associated with concentrations like you might see in a city or around oil and gas production,” he says, “even though it’s completely out in the wilderness.”

Measurements like these should clear up some of the uncertainty surrounding Arctic methane emissions.

But that’s only part of the story. An even bigger wildcard lies under the Arctic Ocean.

What’s down there is something called methane hydrates, a frozen form of water and methane.

The deposits are really important, says Carolyn Ruppel of the US Geological Survey, because a small volume of them concentrates methane by about 160 times.

“So if you start melting those methane hydrates,” Ruppel says, “you can obviously release a lot of methane very rapidly.”

Scientists believe subsea methane hydrates hold roughly twice the carbon contained in all the world’s fossil fuels. So it’s easy to see why many are concerned.

“It’s sometimes been called the potential Arctic methane catastrophe,” Ruppel says.

Ruppel says she’s not worried about a sudden, massive release, because most methane hydrates are so deep under the ocean that any releases aren’t likely to make it to the atmosphere.

But she says it’s another story on the shallow continental shelves off of Siberia and Alaska.

Russian scientists have reported extensive methane seeps off of Eastern Siberia. And on the Alaskan side, Ruppel’s team of scientists is trying to quantify how much methane is escaping from these subsea hydrates.

She says the past couple of years they’ve been using an instrument that can measure methane in real time as their boat moves over the Arctic Ocean. And what they’ve found so far doesn’t look good.

“There’s some very provocative patterns that might imply that methane is higher as you cross this (submerged) permafrost boundary,” Ruppel says.

It’s an indication that that shallow frozen permafrost beneath the ocean may be thawing, allowing methane to bubble up to the surface.

Still, Ruppel says, there are big uncertainties about what’s going on with methane releases in the Arctic.

She says that means it’s too early to say whether there’s an impending Arctic methane catastrophe. But she says it’s also too early to say there isn’t one.

*Correction: The broadcast version of this story stated that the video of researchers lighting methane gas on fire was shot on a lake on the Alaskan tundra. It was shot in northern Alaska, but not on the tundra.

Stephen Wagner knows hurricane damage. He runs a flood restoration company and has been working in Louisiana since Hurricane Isaac slammed into the gulf coast last summer. When Sandy hit New York, he came straight to Breezy Point, a part of the city hardest hit by this fall’s storm. Wagner says in terms of sheer size, Sandy “blew Katrina away… The surge, full moon, high tide when it came ashore, nine-foot storm surge. There’s nothing that can stop it. Nothing.”

Scientists are debating just how much of a role climate change may have played in Hurricane Sandy’s devastation. But they generally agree that the storm was a glimpse of the future in a rapidly warming world.

For his part, Wagner says he’s worked long enough cleaning up after storms to be convinced that that future is already here.

“Everything is getting bigger, coming later and moving slower, that’s the menace,” he says. “The slower they go, the more destruction there is.”

Sandy drew global attention to the growing threats from climate change, and renewed the political debate over climate in the United States. But two new reports just out highlight the risk of those impacts becoming much, much worse in the coming decades.

The first came last week from the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based organization that advises industrialized nations on global energy policy and trends. The group issued a stark warning in its annual report: based on current energy trends, global CO2 emissions will push average temperatures up far beyond the two degrees Celsius limit that countries set to avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change.

Then this week, the World Bank issued essentially the same warning: that we’re headed for a world with average temperatures nearly four degrees Celsius hotter than today. In Fahrenheit that’s a seven degree jump.

World Bank president Jim Yong Kim painted a stark picture of such a future.

“There would be massive disruption in some of our most basic systems,” Kim said. “Water supply, the viability of coastal cities, entire populations that live in low-lying areas. And the window is narrow. We’ve got to take action now.

The question, of course, is how. The energy agency report says in order to avoid catastrophic levels of warming the world will have to leave some two-thirds of its remaining fossil fuel reserves in the ground between now and 2050.

Others take it a step further, arguing that carbon emissions will have to drop by eighty percent.

However you describe the challenge, it would mean a radical shift in our energy use.

But the problem, according to Klaus Lackner of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University, is that there are a billion people at the top in the world economy, and “nine billion people in the future who want to be in that same club. So that essentially makes energy consumption potentially ten times larger than it is today.”

Lackner says the conventional view that economic growth is driven by the availability of cheap energy, mostly from fossil fuels, is still very much alive, a reality driven home by President Obama’s comments last week that while dealing with climate change is a priority, he won’t take any action that would harm economic growth or job creation.

Significantly changing the energy status quo, Lackner says, is a very tough sell.

“You have to convince people that a solution exists, which I don’t think has happened yet. And that the solution is affordable. And that it’s worth spending that amount of money.”

Lackner is pessimistic about our ability to meet that challenge. But others say there are historic precedents.

Ben Orlove, of Columbia’s Climate and Society program, points out that in the 19th century, many countries finally refused to accept goods made with slave labor, even though they were cheaper. “They just decided it was inhuman,” Orlove says.

He says countries have often drawn stark moral lines on economic issues.

“People would not accept products that were produced by child labor,” Orlove says. “And we also respect the products produced with certain environmental standards. So I think there’s the hope that we could extend these agreements into the energy field.”

And some solutions do exist.

Renewable energy is surging around the world, while costs are plunging. Nuclear power, though tainted after Japan’s Fukushima meltdown, is still a low carbon option. Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency report says there are huge opportunities to cut energy use.

Fatih Birol, the agency’s chief economist, says the growth of global energy demand could be cut in half through greater efficiency, using only existing technologies “and pushing the button of the measures which make complete economic sense.”

Birol’s agency estimates that two-thirds of the world’s potential for energy efficiency remains untapped.

Progress is even slower for a fourth approach to reining in greenhouse gases, technologies to capture and store carbon.

That’s something Columbia University’s Lackner hopes to change. Lackner has a whole lab filled with machines that he hopes could someday cheaply suck carbon dioxide straight out of the air and store it underground. There are prototypes for fake trees and huge sails made of material that would soak up CO2.

Researchers around the world are working on similar technology. But many say so long as there’s no broad economic penalty for carbon pollution, there’ll be little incentive to adopt technologies like this.

“What’s still lacking is the political will to solve the problem,” Lackner says. “And I think that will require a change in attitude, that people actually see that the risks of not doing anything are starting to get big. The question is, when do we believe that it hurts enough that we will do something about it?”

With Sandy’s wreckage still piled across the coasts of New York and New Jersey, many people are saying that moment may finally have come, at least in the United States. But it’s no sure thing. Memories fade, and long-established ways of life can be extremely resistant to change.

Back in Breezy Point, Maureen Logar says even after Sandy badly damaged her home, climate change isn’t something she worries about.

“We’ve had other storms too,” Maureen says. “We don’t really think about it. We’ve gotten water. Not ever as bad as this, and hopefully we won’t have for another 70 to 80 years. And not at least in my time, my kids time. But it’s not going to change the way we’re living now. It can’t. You know, you live for today.”

David Robinson knows just about everything there is to know about climate change. But starting a borrowed chainsaw is another thing altogether.

“Ahh, this doesn’t look good,” Robinson sighs as he struggles with the cord, “this isn’t going to start.”

Robinson finally does get it started, and he and his son set to carving up a giant oak tree that fell in his son’s yard during Hurricane Sandy. He says chainsaws are one of the most common sounds around this part of New Jersey these days.

“I grew up in New Jersey, and my over fifty years in this state, nothing had come close to this in terms of tree damage,” he says.

But Robinson says things could have been much worse, despite the scores of deaths across the region and a price tag running into the tens of billions of dollars. If Sandy’s winds had been just twenty miles per hour stronger, he says, parts of New Jersey would’ve been without power for months.

“Your entire electric grid would have to be rebuilt. And quite likely you’d see an exodus, at least a temporary exodus of people from the state.”

Robinson’s concern is more than that of the average New Jersey resident. He’s the state climatologist. And he says increasingly extreme weather all across the world is testing the ability for even the richest nations to recover.

Here in New Jersey he says the weather isn’t just breaking records, it’s blowing right past them.

“We’ve had twenty one straight months of above average temps in New Jersey and the mid-Atlantic region,” Robinson says. “And then we’ve seen major storms. It was a year to the day before Sandy made landfall that central and northern New Jersey up into southern New England had an unprecedented October snowstorm.”

Climate scientists avoid blaming any single weather event like Sandy on global warming. But many say that climate change may well have played an important role in Sandy’s destruction, as well as other recent extreme weather events.

It’s not just that global warming is contributing to rising sea levels and warmer ocean temperatures off the northeast. There’s also growing evidence that weather in places like the United States is being affected by rapid warming far to the north, in the Arctic.

Climatologist Jennifer Francis, of New Jersey’s Rutgers University, says that warming in the Arctic may be altering the jet stream, which carries weather patterns across the northern hemisphere.

The jet stream is largely created by temperature differences between the Arctic and areas farther south, Francis says.

“So if you warm the Arctic more than areas farther south—which is what’s happening, there’s no doubt about that—then the jet stream should be weaker, because the temperature difference is smaller,” she says. “And that’s exactly what we see.”

Francis pulls up a time-lapse animation of the jet stream’s waves on her computer. It starts out showing waves of air moving quickly across North America.

“But then there’s this period where the waves get much bigger,“ she says. “We’re moving toward an increased tendency for the jet stream to get into these big wavy patterns that tend to move more slowly… So the weather that’s associated with them on the surface, either the storms or the high pressure areas, whatever it is, are going to stick around longer at a given location.”

That means a greater chance of ordinary weather becoming extreme events like last summer’s drought and heat wave in the American Midwest or last winter’s cold snap that killed more than 800 people in Europe.

“You can look at almost any extreme event of the type that I described,” Francis says, “look at the atmospheric pattern that was associated with it, and almost every single time it’s because there was one of these big swings in the jet stream.”

Hurricane Sandy was no different. Cold arctic air coming from one of these large dips in the jet stream to the west strengthened the storm, while a huge high pressure system to the north blocked Sandy’s movement over the Atlantic and drove it directly into the east coast.

Francis co-authored a study on these kinds of changes in a peer reviewed journal last spring, before this summer’s record Arctic meltdown and before Sandy. But the science hasn’t yet been widely accepted.

Gavin Schmidt, with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, is among the climate scientists who aren’t yet convinced of the connection between a warming arctic and recent extreme weather events.

Schmidt says global weather is “a very rich system, and we can find patterns in rich systems all the time… And they lead us into lots of interesting pathways for research. But for every 20 patterns that we think we see in a very complicated noisy flow, only one of them is going to actually turn out to be something that is a robust thing that we can use for predictions.”

Schmidt says findings like Francis’s need to be plugged into climate models and compared to other results. He says it’s too early to know whether there’s really a cause and effect link between the warming Arctic and weird weather to the south.

But Schmidt says there is definitely “something funky” going on.

“The funky thing that’s going on is that we’re increasing the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere beyond what they’ve been naturally in 800 thousand years, maybe millions of years. That’s a huge perturbation to the system. Everything in the system (is) being affected by that.”

But figuring out exactly how these complex systems are reacting to that disturbance takes time.

It’s a challenge Jennifer Francis is well aware of as she walks a beach down the road from her home near Buzzards Bay, in Massachusetts.

The area was spared from the deadly tidal surge that wiped out so much of New York and New Jersey, but Sandy still left its mark here. Francis points out a spot where the storm’s water came right up to the edge of a building near the shore.

Today, though, the same jet stream that shot Sandy into the east coast is bringing clear skies and unseasonably warm temperatures from the northwest.

“It’s the good weather side of the waves in the jet stream,” she muses.

Francis spends an awful lot of time crunching data in the lab, but she says she’s also starting to see the impacts of what she’s studying right here where she lives.

“There’s a lot of realism to what’s happening today and I think I’m not the only one that’s sensing that,” Francis says. “This is something that’s happening before our very eyes. It’s not something that we don’t have to worry about for another generation or two. And the fact that there’s this link to a place that’s so far away and so different from here—you know, the Arctic, people don’t think of it being relevant to them. But in fact it really is.”

The trick for scientists like Francis is teasing out just how powerful those changes in the Arctic are becoming, and how likely they are to contribute to more events like Sandy—or worse—in the years ahead.

The impact of this summer’s drought in the US may well be felt around the globe. That’s because the US is the world’s biggest corn exporter. As harvests fall and prices rise, many of world’s poor will feel the squeeze.

By Sam Eaton

You might not know it to look at, but farmer Ben Keil’s corn crop is in big trouble. The familiar tufted ears can look normal and make the usual rubbery pop when you pull them open, but, Keil says, even in late July most of them don’t have many kernels. And down below, the dirt sits loose and lifeless underfoot.

“It’s never had enough rain to melt back together,” he says.

Kiel’s 1,600 acres in northwestern Ohio have been decimated by this summer’s drought. He could be considered among the lucky farmers in this part of the country. At least his corn is still alive. This summer’s drought is even worse to the west in Indiana and Illinois. But Keil says the end result is pretty much the same.

“Realistically, you can’t expect the stock to even produce an ear that’s harvestable,” he says, “even with beneficial rains from here on out the rest of the summer. The corn’s already reached pollination and it’s pretty well done.”

Keil expects to get about a sixth of his usual corn crop. He’s already lost half his soybeans. And the outlook for the national corn harvest is getting bleaker almost by the day.

Dan Basse, an economist with the Chicago research firm Ag Resource Company, says he fears the US corn crop could end up being as small as 10 billion bushels—3 billion less than the latest USDA estimate and a drop of a third from the Department of Agriculture’s original projections.

Basse says that’s likely to trigger clashes between the country’s major corn consumers, with meat producers, food processors and even ethanol refineries fighting to get their share.

And other countries that depend on corn exports from the US could be in an even more precarious position, because the US is the worlds’ biggest exporter of corn and one of the biggest exporters of soy and wheat.

David Lobell, of Stanford University’s Center on Food Security and the Environment, says the US is crucial to global production of food.

“It’s almost twice as important for food as Saudi Arabia is for oil,” Lobell says. “So when something happens in the US, it really has implications for everyone in the world, especially for countries that rely on imports of things like corn or wheat.”

So far, few are predicting a return to an all out global food crisis like the one in 2008 that caused riots in some 30 countries. That’s because national grain reserves still provide some buffer to the markets.

But Lobell says that buffer may not last.

“The expectation is those stocks will be built back up, but we haven’t had a chance to catch our breath” Lobell says. “The demand keeps going up and we haven’t some good years of harvest to build up stocks. So the mechanism for the cushion is there, but basically our shock absorbers have been worn thin.”

Drought-stricken corn in Ohio. (Photo: Karen Schaefer)

Brill says that while US consumers spend an average of 10 percent of their income on food, people in the developing world can spend upwards of 70 percent. So even small price increases in grains like corn can put family meals out of reach.

“Think about places like Kenya or Uganda,” Brill says, “where ugali is made from corn meal, it’s a staple food. Or tortillas in Mexico is another good example. All of a sudden you can’t afford to buy it, you really see that impact in terms of rising poverty.”

Brill says the 2008 global food crisis plunged an additional 100 million people into extreme poverty.

Add climate change into the mix and the global food system looks even shakier.

Stanford’s David Lobell says there’s still a lot of debate as to whether the crisis in the Midwest is due to global warming. But he says the heat wave that’s accompanied the drought is exactly what the climate models have predicted.

Brill says this year is “kind of an illustration of the kind of thing we worry about with climate change. With climate change, the saying is you’re playing with a loaded dice now. And in a sense, this year was the US’s turn for a bad role of that dice.”

Climate scientists tell us to expect more and more such bad rolls in the future, with hotter summers becoming the new normal. And it’s the heat, even more than the lack of rain, that’s got farmers like Ohio’s Ben Keil in such dire straits—especially when it hits during the critical pollination stage.

“Crops don’t like heat,” Keil says. “And the plants know it. You can have nice tall and showy corn and still not have anything on the cob, because it didn’t pollinate well.”

Keil isn’t ready to blame his problems on global warming. But he says whatever’s behind this year’s bad weather, something is definitely changing.

“I always say I hope I can remember what normal is by the time we have a normal year,” Keil says, “because nothing’s normal anymore.”

Color-coded lines track seismic activity at Tokyo University’s Earthquake Research Center. The yellow and red clumps reveal a small quake in the Tokyo-area district of Tsukuba. (Photo: Sam Eaton)

Then, as if on cue, two of the lines start to jump violently, splashing the screen with red and yellow pixels. They’re tracking a very small earthquake, centered just outside of Tokyo.

Sakai says small quakes like this happen about ten thousand times a year in Japan, and for geologists like him, even the small earthquakes are worth paying attention to. He says there’s been a fivefold increase in small tremors around Tokyo since the huge quake off Japan’s northeast coast in March of last year. And that adds up to a mathematical omen for scientists like him.

In January, Sakai and the University’s Earthquake Research Institute crunched the new numbers and came up with a shocking prediction: a 70-percent chance that a major earthquake would hit Tokyo within the next four years.

University of Tokyo seismologist Shinichi Sakai’s controversial study predicts a major earthquake is likely to hit Tokyo within the next four years. (Photo: Sam Eaton)

Sakai and his colleagues are among the country’s leading seismic authorities, so the prediction itself gave the country a jolt. The Japanese government has also predicted a 70-percent chance of a major quake, but only sometime over the next 30 years. So Sakai’s new four-year timeframe has brought a huge backlash among both scientists and political leaders.

Sakai hasn’t retracted his prediction, but he now refuses to quote specific timeframes.

“I cannot speak,” he says, with an ironic chuckle.

The last major earthquake to hit Tokyo was in 1923. It had an estimated magnitude of 7.9 and killed more than 140-thousand people. Since then there’s been almost no significant seismic activity here, and Sakai says that means most people have forgotten the risk Japan’s capital city still faces.

But not everyone has forgotten.

97 year-old Yasuji Kamiya remembers it like it was yesterday.

97 year-old Yasuji Kamiya is one of the few remaining survivors of the last big quake to hit Tokyo, in 1923. That quake killed 140,000 people, and Kamiya says it left the city in flames and sent a flood of refugees fleeing the city. (Photo: Sam Eaton)

Kamiya is one of the few remaining survivors of what’s known as the Great Kanto quake. He was 7 years old in 1923, living with his family in what was then a farming area on the outskirts of Tokyo.

He was fishing in a river on a bright sunny day when the quake hit. He says it knocked him over and shook the ground so violently that it emptied the river onto its banks.

But Kamiya says it wasn’t until nightfall that he realized how serious it really was. The sky in the direction of downtown Tokyo glowed red from the fires consuming the city. And a procession of evacuees began to stream past his home. Some without shoes, all with stunned, empty looks on their faces.

Of course today Tokyo is a radically different place, a sprawling metropolis of some 35 million people. Every day, millions pack into the city’s spotless train network on their way to its forests of glass and steel office towers.

Modern Japanese buildings are among the sturdiest in world. After the 1995 Kobe earthquake, the country spent billions developing the most advanced technology for protecting structures. Still, the government estimates that a powerful quake in Tokyo today would kill nearly 10-thousand people, and leave more than half a million buildings in flames.

But seismologist Shinichi Sakai says accurately predicting potential damage is extremely difficult.

He says that’s because it’s not just a question of magnitude, which refers to the energy of the quake. The actual intensity on the ground can vary greatly, depending on whether the quake’s epicentre is deep or shallow. And new evidence suggests that a major fault line under Tokyo is much closer to the surface than previously thought. That means that a future earthquake here could cause more damage than the city has been planning for.

After last year’s massive quake caught the nation by surprise, the Tokyo government began scrambling to upgrade its disaster plans. So far that means providing more emergency shelter and urging citizens and companies to stockpile emergency supplies.

But these efforts offer little comfort for many people.

“We’re not ready for that yet,” says 43 year Toru Seno. Seno is an artist and electrician, and every day he navigates Tokyo’s labyrinth of elevated highways and corridors of glass towers in his small van.

Wherever he goes, he says, “if I look up, there’s another highway above me, so if something happens, all I can do is just stay here and get crushed.”

Some residents fear Tokyo’s labyrinth of highways and overpasses leave little route for escape in case of a major earthquake. (Photo: Sam Eaton)

“Probably the economy or industry somehow can be recovered,” Seno says. “But the damage for people would be hard… We would be feeling really weak.”

The government’s slow response to last year’s quake, tsunami and nuclear disaster has left trust in government here at all time lows. For Seno, that means he’s more inclined to believe Shinichi Sakai’s controversial prediction of a major quake in the next four years over the government’s longer timeframe.

And after recently visiting the fallout zone around the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant, Seno says the most important message to remember here is that people need to protect themselves from earthquake risks, rather than wait for the government to do it for them.

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Shinjuku district in Tokyo. (Photo: Kevin Poh/Flickr)

In the days after last year’s crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, though, these boulevards largely went dark. They lost their supply of electricity from Fukushima and elsewhere, as the triple meltdown there triggered a nationwide power crisis.

A year later, Tokyo’s lights are back on, but the way many Japanese think about the electricity that runs them may have changed for good.

Hironao Matsubara, of Tokyo’s Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies, says before Fukushima, the Japanese didn’t think much about the country’s energy sources.

“We can use energy very easily,” Matsubara says of the pre-disaster attitude. “Just switch on. But after the accident we start to think about our source of the energy.”

The Fukushima disaster made many Japanese deeply skeptical of nuclear power. Japan’s 54 reactors used to generate about 30 percent of the electricity here. But safety concerns have shut down all but two, creating a huge gap in Japan’s power supply. Matsubara says over the last year that shortage has been filled through a combination of conservation and firing up old conventional plants that burn imported coal, oil and natural gas. And the government is assessing the possibility of bringing some of the shuttered nuclear plants back online.

But over the long haul, Matsubara says, there’s only one viable option.

“We have no fossil fuels,” Matsubara says, “and also nuclear power is very high risk. So renewable energy is the final solution for our society.”

The question is how to ramp up renewables fast in a country that until last year had staked most of its energy future on nuclear power. Today, renewable sources only account for about two percent of Japan’s electricity. Matsubara says the country has enough wind, hydro, solar and geothermal resources to meet all of the country’s energy needs by mid century. But that doesn’t help in the short term, and Japan is facing potential blackouts this summer.

It’s a big challenge, but, according to Rikkyo University energy policy expert Andrew DeWit, also a big opportunity.

“The greater the challenge,” DeWit says, “the more painful the conditions are that you’re confronting, the stronger are your incentives to innovate as rapidly as possible.”

Reporter Sam Eaton inside the 12 mile exclusion zone around the Fukushima reactor. (Photo: Sam Eaton)

And then there’s the opportunity created by the need to rebuild hundreds of communities hit by last year’s earthquake and tsunami. In places like Kamaishi, 350 miles northeast of Tokyo, renewable energy is at the forefront of reconstruction plans.

Kamaishi official Takahiro Sasa says biomass from thinning the area’s forests could meet nearly a quarter of his city’s energy needs. Add to that solar panels on every new building, the potential for tidal power, and a major expansion of the town’s existing wind farm, and Sasa says Kamaishi could become a lot less dependent its big nuclear utility.

Elsewhere in the disaster zone there are plans for four new biomass plants to burn roughly five million tons of wood debris from the tsunami. But these won’t be online for at least two years, and the rest of the promised renewable energy economy will take even longer. That’s why economist Martin Schulz with the Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo says it’s crucial that Japan also learn to use less energy.

“Japan’s future over the next years will most likely depend on how energy efficient” it is, Schulz says, on “how much Japan will be able to become more productive with the energy sources it already has.”

Schulz says Japan has tremendous room for quick gains in energy efficiency especially in housing and industry. But he says doing this would require a major shift in political culture.

Despite all the talk about Japan's renewable energy future most investments since last year's earthquake have been in conventional generation and securing supplies of oil, coal and natural gas. This coal fired power plant in Fukushima Prefecture has been running at full capacity. (Photo: Sam Eaton)

And then there’s the question of Japan’s nuclear industry itself, an industry that includes both companies that operate nuclear plants and companies that design and build them. Rikkyo University’s Andrew DeWit says the industry has no intention of giving up its huge share of the two hundred billion dollar Japanese electricity market, the third largest in the world.

The tension was on display just this month, when the mayors of three major cities, Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe, called on their local utility to provide a specific timetable for phasing out nuclear power. The move came after the utility defended nuclear energy and only provided general assurances that it would pursue renewables.

The government has been sending similarly mixed signals. This despite what seems to be strong anti-nuclear sentiment among the Japanese people. A poll conducted this month found that 80 percent of Japanese want to phase out nuclear power.

Ultimately, DeWit says the momentum is building, and a new energy economy is all but inevitable here.

DeWit says “that structure of vested interests is in eclipse” over the long haul. “The question is how quickly does that process happen.”

Like so much of Japan’s recovery over the last year, change has been slow to come. But there are signs that the country is moving in a new direction. Just look at Tokyo’s giant electric billboards. When they came back on after last spring’s disasters, many of them had had their neon bulbs replaced with energy saving LED’s.

From the day of the quake, The World has covered the disaster, its aftermath and its global reverberations with reports from our correspondents on the ground in Japan and around the world, and as well as expert interviews and analysis from our newsroom in Boston.

For the first anniversary of the disaster, we sent veteran environment reporter Sam Eaton to northern Japan and Tokyo to explore the state of the recovery and cleanup, some of the fault lines and challenges the country faces, and the ways in which some Japanese people and communities are pulling their lives back together and looking forward.

Follow @eatonsam

Fears Grow of Big Tokyo Quake

Barely a year after a massive earthquake and tsunami crippled northern Japan, there’s increasing fear of a big quake hitting Tokyo. Reporter Sam Eaton recently spent time with one of Japan’s leading seismologists, and a survivor of the last major quake to hit Tokyo, nearly 90 years ago. More >>>

A Year After Fukushima, Clean Energy Still Just a Promise in Japan

One year after the Fukushima disaster nearly all of Japan’s 54 nuclear power plants are out of service and the country is facing a major power crunch. The government has promised a major shift toward cleaner renewable energy to help fill the gap. But as Sam Eaton reports, the country’s clean energy revolution has yet to get much traction. More >>>

Japan’s Tsunami-Stricken Fishermen Chart New Course

Last year’s tsunami virtually destroyed many northern Japanese fishing communities. A year later, residents are struggling to rebuild, but as Sam Eaton reports, some are finding that the disaster has given them the opportunity to chart a new course. More >>>

A Year After the Tsunami, Slow Progress on Rebuilding in Japan

A year after a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami, coastal towns in northern Japan have barely begun to rebuild. Sam Eaton visited the ravaged area and spoke with residents trying to rebuild their communities and lives. More >>>

Fukushima’s Hot Zone Cleanup: A Journey Into Uncharted Territory

The tsunami triggered a triple meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant. Now, a year later, the effort to clean up the contaminated area around the plant has just begun. Sam visited the hot zone for a first-hand look at the massive undertaking. He says no one knows if it will ever be finished, because no one’s ever tried anything like it. More >>>

Japan Disaster: The Lasting Impact of March 11, 2011

Sam speaks with anchor Marco Werman about the impact of last year’s tsunami and nuclear meltdowns on the psyche and culture of the Japanese. More >>>

Fukushima

• Fukushima Report: Japan Dodged Major Nuclear Disaster
• Scientist Warned of Tsunami Disaster in Japan
• Japan Tries to Soothe Nuclear Worries

Blogs

• The News Behind the Non-News of Fukushima’s Multiple Meltdowns
• Radiation, Risk and the “Linear No-Threshold” Model
• Fukushima Report: Japan Dodged Major Nuclear Disaster
• Fukushima’s Collateral Damage
• Fukushima vs. Chernobyl–Comparison less useful than ever
• Fukushima likely not as bad as Chernobyl, but what does that mean?

Japan: Change in the Wake of Disaster

• The World’s Marco Werman on assignment in Japan

Last year’s tsunami virtually destroyed many northern Japanese fishing communities. A year later, residents are struggling to rebuild, but as Sam Eaton reports, some are finding that the disaster has given them the opportunity to chart a new course.

Last March 11, Hiromitsu Ito stood on a rocky hillside and watched a wave more than a hundred feet tall swallow the shore below, lift his house off its foundation, and slam it into a nearby bridge. When the massive wave pulled back out to sea, Ito says, it dragged everything with it—the house, his boat, his fishing gear, his entire aquaculture business, and pretty much everything else in the small fishing village of Ogatsu.

Hundreds here died that day. And since then even more have left for good. A year later, less than a quarter of Ogatsu’s four-thousand residents remain.

Before the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan’s northeast coast a year ago, this jagged and dramatic stretch of coastline, some 270 miles northeast of Tokyo, was one of the country’s biggest sources of shellfish and seaweed. Its long, narrow inlets provided calm waters that were perfect for aquaculture. But it was those same steep inlets that caused the tsunami to reach such incredible heights here and cause such massive damage to this coast and the region’s fishing industry. Ninety percent of it fishing boats were destroyed, and more than 300 ports were heavily damaged.

In the year since then, government recovery funds for fishermen have been slow to materialize, so those who chose to stay in these isolated villages have largely been left their own devices.

One elderly couple spends their days scavenging the rubble of the town for fishing gear that they might be able to repair and use. The woman says they’re among the fortunate because her husband saved their boat by taking it out to sea before the tsunami hit.

But it was an experience that still haunts him. The woman says her husband yells out in his sleep. He tells her he wasn’t scared, but she says she knows the truth.

A year after the disaster the couple are now able to fish a little, but with no commercial buyers, they’ve just been selling to friends.

Things don’t look much better for the others who used to make their living from the sea here. Only a handful of the people left in Ogatsu still fish, and in a recent survey more than a third of the fishermen in the region said they’re getting out of the business for good.

But for some of those who remain, the disaster has created an odd sort of opportunity—the clean slate of starting over, from scratch, and doing things differently.

Hiromitsu Ito, who watched his house get swept away, says the fishing industry here was in trouble long before the tsunami. At 50-years-old, Ito is a relative youngster—a year ago the average fisherman was more than 60-years-old, and few children were willing to take over. Meanwhile the market price for fish and aquaculture products was falling.

So for Ito, and handful of others, the recovery is less about rebuilding Ogatsu on land than about what happens at sea.

The rocky coastline here sunk more than three feet during the earthquake, leaving many docks partially submerged. But Ito’s has been repaired, and on a cold mid-winter morning I joined him out on the bay for a look at his new aquaculture operation.

There’s nothing unique about it—the boat, the salmon pens, the buoys and lines for growing seaweed, oysters, scallops and sea squirts—it’s all technology that’s been around for decades.

What is new is how Ito and his seven business partners paid for it. They formed a company together, and instead of selling their products through the local fishing cooperative at a set price, they’re selling straight to the consumer.

Ito says it’s those consumers who made it possible for him and his partners to start over. Their company adopted something similar to the community-supported agriculture model that’s become popular in the US—they’re selling memberships, and so far have raised more than $300,000, money they’ve used to buy boats, seed oysters and new equipment. In return, the 2,500 members, many from as far away as Tokyo, get a share of the harvest.

Ito says by selling these scallops and his other products directly to consumers, he and his partners will make one and a half times what they made before.

This isn’t the first time that fishermen here have attempted direct sales, but in a fishing culture that fiercely resists change and shuns any outsiders, Ito says what makes his venture different is that he brought in marketing experts from Tokyo. The company has adopted a feisty clenched fist as a logo, and it’s name—Oh Guts!—a play on the name of their village, Ogatsu, represents the group’s determination and will to do something new. The company even plans on setting up a shop in Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji Fish Market.

Ito says he and his partners have encountered a lot of resistance to their new way of doing things, especially from older fishermen who want to keep things the way they were. Out on the water, Ito cringes at a request to go talk with another group of fishermen nearby. “Those people are hard to deal with,” he says.

But even the most stubborn are being forced to innovate in the face of disaster. Members of some of the most traditional fishing communities along this coast have begun a temporary pool system, in which they share both the gear that remains and the profits they make.

Still, Ito says there’s something essential that’s missing on the boats of those who criticize his new approach: young people.

Ito’s crew these days, on the other hand, are both men in their 20’s. One is a young volunteer who quit his job in pharmaceutical sales to help out. The other is Ito’s 20-year-old nephew, Yuku Miura.

Miura says after the tsunami he quit his job as a hotel chef in Sendai, 50 miles away, in order to join his uncle back here in Ogatsu. Fishing had never appealed to him, and it’s not the money that got him excited about coming back to his hometown. What attracted him the most, he says, is the idea of making something and then interacting directly with the people who are buying and enjoying that product.

“The old system where fishermen sold to dealers and middlemen was nothing more than a machine,” Miura says.

Like most young people from this part of Japan, Miura had left for better prospects elsewhere. And like his uncle, he also lost his family home in the tsunami. But out here on the same water that took it away, Miura is surprised to find a future for himself he never would have imagined before March 11th of last year.

A bus that came to rest on this 50 foot building in Ogatsu, Ishinomaki, shows the power of the tsunami that tore through this small fishing village, destroying nearly every building and killing hundreds. Some wanted it left there as a symbol of the disaster. But the local government removed the bus on Saturday so that people wouldn’t be reminded of the fear they went through one year ago.

Anchor Marco Werman talks to reporter Sam Eaton about the cultural impact on the Japanese of last year’s tsunami and nuclear meltdowns.

Eaton has been reporting from Japan for The World on the legacy of the twin disasters a year later.

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Marco Werman: Hi, I’m Marco Werman and this is The World. A co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH Boston. In Japan today, a group of activists filed a law suite. They want to block the reopening of two nuclear power plants near the countries west coast. Nearly all of Japan’s 54 nuclear plants have been shut down for safety inspections following last year’s disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The two facilities at Fukui Prefecture reportedly were on target to be the first to be restarted, but the activists say that there are active fault lines near by and that the plants may still not be strong enough to survive an earthquake. Fear of a new nuclear incident is wide-spread in Japan. Its just one part of the lasting impact of the massive twin disasters that struck Japan last March 11. Reporter Sam Eaton has been in japan for us, looking closely at the recovery from the tsunami and Fukushima melt downs. Earlier he told me how things are looking in the disaster zone a year later.

Sam Eaton: Well Marco, in the tsunami region there has been some progress. You look around and many of the roads have been rebuilt. The rail lines are running again. The debris, all of those houses, and crushed cars, and boats has been been scraped away, but now you have these mountains of waste on the outskirts of town with nowhere to go. This is a huge problem. Japanese recycling laws actually make it so that all of that trash and waste has to be sorted and recycled. This gives you a sense of the Japanese bureaucracy many believe is hindering the pace of the recovery.

Werman: You know so much of the reporting of the last year has been on the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster and less on the disaster from the tsunami. When you’re on the ground, does that square up for you?

Eaton: Well these two disasters have very very different circumstances. On the one hand you have this huge loss of life and the destruction of the tsunami. On the other hand you have a nuclear disaster that’s yet to claim one life, but has taken an incredible psychological toll on the people that are living with the prospect of contamination for years ahead. And so I think the common thread here is the deep and lasting psychological toll that its taking on the people that are living in these regions. That fear is very palpable in these towns. I talked to an old couple living in a shelter they built on the foundation of their old home. The woman pulled me aside and she told me that every night her husband still screams in his sleep. Even though he says that he is not afraid of the tsunami anymore. And in a country where people don’t really show their emotions, they’re not known for showing their emotions in Japan. I had a group of dairy farmers I talked to for this story last Friday. They all were crying when they talked about going back to their farms for the first time and seeing the cows that had all died of starvation. And then you have the fears of radiation. Most of the affected area from the Fukushima fall out is an area about the size of New Jersey. So scientists say there is only a slightly elevated risk of cancer for most of that region. But you talk about being exposed to that over the long term and the science is a bit more uncertain. And living there, in that uncertainty has just taken a huge psychological toll on the people.

Werman: It is really hard to get a sense of where the fear really squares with the idle threat of radiation. Where you able to get a sense of that?

Eaton: Well it is confusing. And this is where I think the distrust of the government really confuses the matter even more. People don’t trust what the government is telling them. A lot of people are taking independent radiation readings and some of those are much higher than what the government is reporting. And this is, the government reports that the one’s informing the scientific findings that talk about the health risks.

Werman: So does this mean that people, especially in the north east of Japan where these disasters have struck. Are they less trusting of their government than a year ago? Was this kind of a Katrina moment?

Eaton: I think it was and I think it will be lasting. I mean, you look at these people and the aide has been slow to come. But at the same time, I think the Fukushima disaster really laid bare these cozy ties between the Tokyo government and big business. And people looking forward feel that’s going to continue with the recovery.

Werman: Sam, let’s unpack that word recovery just for a moment. When we look at the scale and scope of these events and the toll its taken on so many people, is Japan on a course to recover from these twin disasters and return to normal? Or are these events that sear themselves onto a nation’s psyche and have fundamentally changed things forever?

Eaton: You know, I think its hard to tell. One year is kind of this artificial marker in this process of recovery that’s going to continue for decades. And this really extends beyond just the tsunami and the nuclear disaster region. Culturally I mean, you really have this dissolution with the idea of nuclear power. In a nation that has no fossil fuels for its energy source I think that’s a huge thing going forward as well. People continually are talking about getting back to the basics in this country that went through this rapid industrialization. Its almost like this reality check, that these technologies really aren’t invincible anymore.

Werman: Reporter Sam Eaton, who has been reporting for The World in Japan. On the anniversary of last year’s tsunami and nuclear disaster. Sam, thanks very much indeed.

Eaton: Thanks so much Marco.

Werman: You can hear the first 2 of Sam’s reports on the recovery from the tsunami and the clean up effort around the Fukushima plan at theworld.org.

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And as Sam Eaton reports from the hot zone, no one knows if it will ever be finished, because no one’s ever tried anything like it.

It‘s the moment when the alarms on the Geiger counters all start going off at once that it sinks in. The bus I’m on is taking me inside the 12 mile ring around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that just about everyone else has been evacuated from. Up the coast, the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 destroyed entire towns and left mountains of wreckage. But here, in the fallout zone of the tsunami-caused triple nuclear meltdown, the devastation is invisible.

Outside the windows of our bus, we pass abandoned fields, and towns that used to be crowded with people but are now empty except for left-behind animals. Inside, we sit completely covered in Tyvek suits, nothing exposed.

The plume of radioactive fallout from the three crippled reactors contaminated an area the size of New Jersey. Now I’ve come to see firsthand how the cleanup is progressing in some of the most contaminated areas.

It’s still early. The first phase of the cleanup only began in January, nine months after the tsunami when the government finally declared the plant stable. But one thing is already certain—the cleanup is venturing into almost completely uncharted territory. No one has any idea whether it will succeed.

Less than a mile from the plant, government contractors at one of 19 model cleanup sites shovel dirt into thick plastic bags after tearing up the driveway to an abandoned house. Across the road, tractors scrape soil from a contaminated rice field. But the most dangerous radiation levels at this site are in a tall stand of cedars. Standing amid the trees looking at the forest and rivers beyond, you get a sense how difficult it is to clean up this kind of landscape.

Cleanup workers have no experience with radiation

And that’s the crux of the challenge. The Japanese government says it wants to make the entire fallout area safe to live in again, all 8,000 square miles of it. But no one’s ever really tried something like this before. Even the contractors hired by the government have no experience with radiation cleanup. So the contractors and scientists are using sites like this one to try to see what works and what doesn’t.

They’re digging up soil, spraying chemical fixation agents, even blasting iron shot over paved surfaces. But the results so far have been uneven at best. In this stand of cedars, for instance, workers have removed branches, leaf debris, even some of the topsoil, exposing the tree’s roots, but now they may also have to remove the trees themselves, because radiation levels are still more than 600 times the government’s ultimate goal.

Shinichi Nakayama, a nuclear engineer with the Japan Atomic Energy Agency who’s overseeing this initial phase of the cleanup, says they’re finding that forests are the most challenging areas. That’s a problem, because Nakayama says 70 percent of the contaminated land consists of forested hills and mountains. And he says he doesn’t know if it’s even possible to clean up this kind of terrain.

But “no” is not an answer local officials are willing to accept.

The regional government in Fukushima City has set a cleanup target of one millisievert of radiation exposure per year, the low end of an internationally accepted range of safety. And Katsumasa Suzuk, who heads the government’s decontamination division, says he hopes the model cleanup projects will meet that target. He says that would pave the way for the larger decontamination effort and ultimately make it safe for the 80,000 evacuees to go home.

What to do with all the waste?

But even if the effort succeeds, it raises another problem: what to do with all the waste?

For now, bags of contaminated soil are being temporarily stored in makeshift facilities like the lined pit that now occupies a former sports field at an abandoned school. Overall, the cleanup is expected to generate at least three and a half billion cubic feet of radioactive waste—enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys stadium, the world’s largest, 34 times. The government still doesn’t know where all that waste will go.

And then there’s this question: once the cleanup is finally complete, what kind of place will the evacuees be going back to?

Shinichi Nakayama, the official overseeing the initial decontamination, says there are limits to how much cleaning the natural environment can take. That’s one of the biggest dilemmas here. The more radioactive material you remove to make the area safe for humans, the more damage you’re doing to the land, creating a whole new set of environmental problems like erosion, decreased soil fertility, and potentially throwing off the entire balance of the local ecosystem.

Kiyomi Yokota says he thinks it’s an impossible undertaking. Yokota is an environmentalist from Fukushima whom I met in Koriyama City, 37 miles west of the nuclear plant.

Yokota says if all the trees are removed, the still-radioactive soils would erode into the rivers or the fields, where the farmers grow their food, recontaminating areas even after they’ve been cleaned.

Instead of trying to clean up, create a “no-go” zone?

He says instead the government should do what the Soviet Union did after the Chernobyl disaster—create a permanent “no go” zone for the most contaminated areas, and then use some of the cleanup funds to help people relocate, especially those with small children, like himself.

These days Yokota is doing independent radiation testing for a Japanese television company, and he says he’s finding hotspots in places the government has declared safe, some with readings close to what I found inside the evacuation zone.

Yokota says he no longer lets his three-year-old daughter play outside. And he’s careful about the food they eat. He’d like to leave, he says, but he doesn’t have the means.

And even if the government did help people like Yokota relocate, Japan, unlike the Soviet Union, is already a very crowded country. Today, one year after the disaster, most of the evacuees live in compact, temporary housing. And there are very few places they could go to recreate the coastal farms many of them left behind.

Even if government gives the OK to return, farmers worry about public trust

I met a group of evacuated dairy farmers at a community center in Minamisoma, just north of the evacuation zone. They showed me pictures they took the first time they were allowed to go back to their farms. Nearly every one of their cows had died. One photograph shows a thick wooden beam that’s been chewed through by a starving animal.

Unlike Kiyomi Yokota, 62 year-old Ise Hangui says he wants to return to his hometown for good. He wonders, though—even if the government declares his farm safe, will consumers ever trust his milk again?

And, he asks, why should they? He and all the other farmers I talked to say they don’t trust the government anymore either.

Shinji Watanabe, who’s 53, says he still can’t decide whether or not he’ll return to his farm, even if he’s allowed to, because he can’t get enough information from the government to know whether or not it’s safe. He says it would be one thing for him and his wife to return, since they’ve already lived much of their lives. But his dreams of working with his son, and eventually his grandchildren, are gone. And he can’t imagine growing old without them.

And that raises yet another dilemma in the legacy of Fukushima. Even if the government spends tens, even hundreds of billions of dollars cleaning up the contaminated zone, no one knows if residents like Watanabe even want to go home.

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It may seem an unlikely place to post messages of hope for the tsunami victims. After all, it is a comic book museum. But this white, dome-like structure is also an icon. Or at least it was. Today the museum sits empty on a windswept island across from what was once the vibrant center of Ishinomaki City.

More than three thousand people died a year ago in this small fishing port near Sendai. It was the highest toll of any town hit by the tsunami that slammed into this coast on March 11, 2011, following a massive magnitude 9.0 earthquake centered just off Japan’s northeastern coast. And like most communities in the area, a year later much of the land here in Ishinomaki still lies barren, but for the mountains of wreckage piled on the outskirts of town.

Masatoshi Saijo, who runs the comic museum, says people from all over Japan and all over the world have come here and written notes of encouragement on the sheets of plywood that cover the museum’s battered entrance. Most say things like, “we believe you can reopen,” or, “don’t be beaten by the disaster.” But Saijo’s favorite is the one that says “the Kamen Rider will live forever,” referring to the famed masked character the museum is devoted to.

Saijo says one year after so much of his city was destroyed, those characters, and their stories of banding together to fight evil, have taken on new meaning for the people who survived. The idea of never giving up, he says, or of helping one another—“these are the ideals the cartoon characters aspire to.”

But when it comes to rebuilding Ishinomaki City and all the other towns wrecked by the tsunami, there are no fictional saviors. Just ordinary people trying to rebuild their lives under extraordinary circumstances.

Ken Matsumoto is one such person. His metal shop in Ishinomaki City again buzzes with life. On a recent day, workers were busy grinding smooth the welds on a smokestack they’ve built for a new garbage incinerator.

All the metal shop’s employees came back after the tsunami, some even before there was electricity or food.

But there are reminders of the wall of water and mud that tore through here a year ago. Matsumoto points out the dark water line on the wall just above his head. And then he points to one of his workers.

“He lost his house and his entire family in the Tsunami,” Matsumoto says. “His wife, his kids, even his parents. But he still comes in to work every day.”

Around a quarter of Matsumoto’s 96 employees lost their homes. But he says they all came back, some even before there was electricity or food. First they fixed the machines in the shop, and then they used those machines to fix other machines so that other companies could reopen. All without any help from the government. Matsumoto, who’s 59, saw it as his responsibility to his workers, and his community.

“If people don’t have work, they’ll leave,” Matsumoto says.

But he also says getting people back to work is only one part of the recovery. The real recovery, he says, will happen when people feel they’re able to live safe and secure lives again. And he says that’s not likely to happen any time soon.

Such pessimism runs deep here.

“There’s a saying in Japan,” says Nobuyuki Takahashi, who runs a nonprofit that helps kids and until recently he managed a shelter for tsunami victims. “First you save yourself, then the people around you. And last of all will come the help from public institutions.”

For the most part, Takahashi says, the 320,000 people who lost their homes in the disaster are still waiting for that help. For instance it took the Tokyo government nearly a year to create a standalone recovery agency.

This despite constant reminders of just how vulnerable people still are. During our interview in his office, we were interrupted by a strong earthquake that lasted about 30 seconds. Takahashi says these quakes happen “every day.”

Hope, and resistance, for rebuilding as “green” communities to keep young people

There are hopes that the government’s new recovery agency will now streamline the rebuilding process, one that’s expected take at least a decade and cost more than $200 billion.

Takahashi is a proponent of rebuilding the tsunami zone as a model for dense, low carbon communities, which he believes may mean the difference in keeping the few younger residents who still remain here.

But Takahashi, who himself is 63, says his generation makes up the majority of these towns and villages. And most, he says, want to rebuild just the way it was.

“It’s extremely difficult to go down a new path,” Takahashi says. “It’s natural for people to want to return to what they had before.”

That’s not an option a hundred miles up the coast, in the rusting steel and port town, Kamaishi. Work crews are still tearing down Kamaishi’s wrecked buildings, but city planners see the cleared lots as an opportunity to tackle problems that have existed for decades.

Kanako Fujiwara, of the city’s reconstruction office, says going back to what was here before the tsunami is impossible, because Kamaishi was already dying. Japan’s rapidly aging population has hit small, isolated towns like Kamaishi the hardest. In four decades, it lost nearly two thirds of its population, mostly the younger generations.

Fujiwara says if towns like hers are to have any future at all, rebuilding differently is their only hope.

Unfurling a planning map on a table, Fujiwara points to orange shapes that represent new apartments for people who lost their homes in the disaster, and red ones that show new community housing for the elderly. Instead of rebuilding individual homes near the ocean, Kamaishi planners favor green apartment complexes carved into the town’s steep hillsides. And along the river in Kamaishi’s center, concrete embankments would be replaced by a curving earthen barrier that would help absorb a tsunami’s impact and serve as a city park.

Fujiwara says ideas like these will not only make Kamaishi safer, they’ll also a make it a place that appeals to people of all ages. She hopes they may even attract new businesses.

Spending priorities may lock in old approaches to tsunami dangers

But whether these things are actually built depends on limited recovery funds from Tokyo. And $650 million of this has already been allocated to a single massive construction project—rebuilding the city’s seawall.

When it was completed just a few years ago the old seawall along Kamaishi Bay was the largest in the world. It was supposed to bring a sense of safety to Kamaishi, but then last year’s 30-foot wave tore right through it and killed more than a thousand people.

Kamaishi resident Naoko Fukunari says instead of rebuilding the wall, the money from Tokyo should be spent on the town’s new housing plans, as well as better roads to escape on in case of another emergency.

In Kamaishi’s business district, which was mostly destroyed by the tsunami, Fukunari points out an empty concrete slab where there used to be a shop that she liked to visit. It had pretty pottery and nice fabric, she says. “But now that it’s gone, the place feels lonely and empty.”

Like many Japanese cities, Kamaishi has already been destroyed and rebuilt many times, from tsunamis, and even American bombs during World War Two. But Fukunari says it’s hard for her to remain hopeful for yet another rebirth. Instead, she says, she tries to be thankful for the basic things of life, like having food to eat and place to sleep.

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Emperor Penguins adults with chicks. (Photo: Michael Van Woert, NOAA NESDIS, ORA)

By Sam Eaton

As climate negotiators slog through the latest UN summit in South Africa with no breakthrough on greenhouse gas limits in sight, the science of climate change—especially melting ice—is racing ahead of the world’s response to the problem.

The day after this year’s UN climate summit ends this Friday, a research team is scheduled to fly into a remote corner of Antarctica for a visit to the Pine Island Glacier. It’s the biggest ice shelf in western Antarctica. And it’s moving—fast.

“This is the fastest glacier in Antarctica,” says Robert Bindschadler of NASA, the expedition’s leader. “It’s going 4,000 meters a year, which converts to just over one foot every hour. So this ice is ripping along.”

Bindschadler says the reason the ice is moving so fast is because unusually warm ocean water is seeping in miles under the glacier’s forward edge, melting it from below.

“In the case of Pine Island, we think that it’s melting at over a 100 meters per year right at the upstream end of the ice shelf. And you think the ice shelf by that amount, the glacier speeds up by many tens of a percent.”

Scientists compare what’s happening to the glacier to popping the cork on a champagne bottle. But in this case, what’s being held back is frozen water.

And it’s not just one glacier. There are signs of sudden, rapid melting across Antarctica, where all the corks on all the glaciers and ice sheets are holding back enough water to raise global sea levels more than 200 feet.

The faster that ice melts, the faster the world’s coastlines will be inundated. The problem is, no one saw this coming.

“It’s caught us all very much off guard,” says Bindschadler. “These are not the ice sheets that I was being taught when I was in graduate school. They are changing at magnitudes and at rates that were thought impossible just 15 years ago.”

That rapid melting is challenging assumptions on how much global warming will cause sea levels to rise this century.

The last major report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, in 2007, suggested a worst-case scenario of less than two feet of rise by 2100. But Virginia Burkett with the US Geological Survey, a lead author on the report, says there was a big caveat.

“The last IPCC report included sea level projections that were based primarily on thermal expansion,” of the water as it warms up, Burkett says. “And of course sea level is rising because of the combination of thermal expansion of sea water and ice sheet decline.”

The problem was that the science on ice sheet decline, or melting polar ice, just wasn’t good enough at the time, so the IPCC decided to leave it out of their final projections.

And even though the report’s fine print clearly stated that ice loss could accelerate substantially, that number of less than two feet has become a kind of default prediction for sea level rise.

Fast forward five years and scientists like Bindschadler and Burkett are now projecting a high-end scenario of about six feet of rising sea levels by the end of the century. Three times the 2007 projection.

That’s enough to make crowded coastal cities like Mumbai unlivable, and displace more than a 100 million people worldwide.
But some scientists say even a prediction of six feet may be too conservative.

Harold Wanless, chair of the Geology Department at the University of Miami, says all the projections by the IPCC and other scientific organizations are based on a gradual rise of sea level. But, Wanless says, “that’s not how it worked in the past.”

Scientists like Wanless are studying sediments from past warming periods to find clues as to how quickly sea levels changed. And what they’ve found is the stuff of Hollywood movies—rapid pulses in the 20-foot range, and on a time scale that could be not centuries, but decades.

“That’s in the line of possibility,” Wanless says.

And he warns that it’s time to start thinking about relocating things that countries don’t want to lose.

“Everything from national archives and our world seed banks, some of which are at much too low elevation. Military bases, things we wouldn’t want disrupted. And our nuclear power plants. Why are we even looking at the coast for those?”

Wanless believes the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland have already passed their tipping point for runaway melting. The only question for him is how fast it will happen.

Most climate scientists don’t go that far. They say they still don’t understand the complex dynamics of ice melt enough to predict with confidence a 20-foot rise by the end of the century. But few are ruling it out.

Penn State Climatologist and IPCC co-author Richard Alley says a good analogy of the risk is driving a car.

The best scenario, Alley says, is that there’s no traffic. On the other hand, you might get a lot of traffic, or “you might get run over by a drunk driver.”

The drunk driver represents that rapid pulse of sea level rise.

Alley says even though the chances of him being hit are slim, he still bought a car with all the added safety features, just in case.

“If society dealt with risks of climate change the way I deal with drunk drivers,” Alley says, “it’s possible that we would be trying to slow down a little bit so that we could learn more before we get hit by something.”

What’s happening instead is more like stepping on the accelerator. As climate negotiators from the US, China and nearly every other country on earth met this week to again try to find elusive common ground on emissions cuts, new reports confirmed that global emissions of the heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide reached record levels last year.

Alley says the higher we crank up the planet’s thermostat, the higher the risk becomes that we’ll get hit by something nasty.