Sea Ice Thickness

What this makes clear is that the decline in ice thickness has been ongoing since 1980. Prior work gave us only two points of reference between 1959 and 2000. This is a more detailed study from 1959 on and assures us that the ice loss has been ongoing after 1980 which represented a peak. This is a surprise.

This means that I can ignore the pre 1980 data and focus on the decline since.

The measured thickness has declined by 53% which easily explains the sharp drop in areal extent also. It has all happened in twenty five or so years and is accelerating because the heat been absorbed has progressively less ice to work with. Also the process has not ended yet. Today’s ice I believe is the thinnest yet.

The real point that must be made is that this process has not ended or reversed.

This continues to be the one tangible bit of evidence that is indisputable about so called global warming. It also suggests that we could be on the verge of quite warm Arctic summers. Real vegetation in the Arctic?

This also allows us to fine tune our calculations and we find that multiyear ice will likely be gone in about a decade at most. We are now in the visible melt out phase of this Arctic clearing event. A good wind system like 2007 will also accelerate it just as a strong cooling event will reverse the process.

Which means that the open seas will take a bit longer but not much longer and expect another surprise in the decline of areal extent.

Satellites And Submarines Give The Skinny On Sea Ice Thickness

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Satellites_And_Submarines_Give_The_Skinny_On_Sea_Ice_Thickness_999.html

http://www.terradaily.com/images/change-sea-ice-thickness-1988-2008-bg.jpg

Patterns of average winter ice thickness from February to March show thicker ice in 1988 (left), compared to thinner ice averaged from 2003-2008 (right). Thickness information in Antarctica is limited to an irregular polygon shape that outlines the area where declassified submarine data are available. Credit: Ronald Kwok/NASA

by Kathryn Hansen

Pasadena CA (SPX) Sep 10, 2009

This summer, a group of scientists and students - as well as a Canadian senator, a writer, and a filmmaker - set out from Resolute Bay, Canada, on the icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent. They were headed through the Northwest Passage, but instead of opening shipping lanes in the ice, they had gathered to open up new lines of thinking on Arctic science.

Among the participants in the shipboard workshop (hosted by Fisheries and Oceans Canada) was Ron Kwok of NASA's Jet propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Kwok has long provided checkups on the health of Arctic sea ice - the frozen sea water floating within the Arctic Ocean basin. He also knows that some important clues about ice changes can't be seen from a ship.

Extending the Record

While satellites provide accurate and expansive coverage of ice in the Arctic Ocean, the records are relatively new. Satellites have only monitored sea ice extent since 1973. NASA's Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) has been on the task since 2003, allowing researchers to estimate ice thickness as well.

To extend the record, Kwok and Drew Rothrock of the University of Washington, Seattle, recently combined the high spatial coverage from satellites with a longer record from Cold War submarines to piece together a history of ice thickness that spans close to 50 years.

Analysis of the new record shows that since a peak in 1980, sea ice thickness has declined 53 percent. "It's an astonishing number," Kwok said. The study, published online August 6 in Geophysical Research Letters, shows that the current thinning of Arctic sea ice has actually been going on for quite some time.

"A fantastic change is happening on Earth - it's truly one of the biggest changes in environmental conditions on Earth since the end of the ice age," said Tom Wagner, cryosphere program manager at NASA Headquarters. "It's not an easy thing to observe, let alone predict, what might happen next."

Sea ice influences the Arctic's local weather, climate, and ecosystems. It also affects global climate. As sea ice melts, there is less white surface area to reflect sunlight into space. Sunlight is instead absorbed by the ocean and land, raising the overall temperature and fueling further melting. Ice loss puts a damper on the Arctic air conditioner, disrupting global atmospheric and ocean circulation.

To better identify what these changes mean for the future, scientists need a long-term look at past ice behavior. Each year, Arctic ice undergoes changes brought about by the seasons, melting in the summer warmth and refreezing in the cold, dark winter.

A single extreme melt or freeze season may be the result of any number of seasonal factors, from storminess to the Arctic Oscillation (variations in atmospheric circulation over the polar regions that occur on time scales from weeks to decades).

But climate is not the same as weather. Climate fluctuates subtly over decades and centuries, while weather changes from day to day and by greater extremes.

"We need to understand the long-term trends, rather than the short-term trends that could be easily biased by short-term changes," Kwok said. "Long-term trends are more reliable indicators of how sea ice is changing with the global and regional climate."

That's why a long-term series of data was necessary. "Even decadal changes can be cyclical, but this decline for more than three decades does not appear to be cyclical," Rothrock said.

All the Ice Counts

Arctic sea ice records have become increasingly comprehensive since the latter half of the 20th century, with records of sea ice anomalies viewed from satellites, ships, and ice charts collected by various countries. Most of that record, kept in the United States by the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, describes the areal extent of sea ice.

But a complete picture of sea ice requires an additional, vertical measurement: thickness. Melting affects more than just ice area; it can also impact ice above and below the waterline. By combining thickness and extent measurements, scientists can better understand how the Arctic ice cover is changing.

Kwok and other researchers used ICESat's Geoscience Laser Altimeter System to estimate the height of sea ice above the ocean surface. Knowing the height, scientists can estimate how much ice is below the surface.

Buoyancy causes a fraction (about 10 percent) of sea ice to stick out above the sea surface. By knowing the density of the ice and applying "Archimedes' Principle" - an object immersed in a fluid is buoyed by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object - and accounting for the accumulation of snowfall, the total thickness of the ice can be calculated.

In 2008, Kwok and colleagues used ICESat to produce an ice thickness map over the entire Arctic basin. Then in July 2009, Kwok and colleagues reported that multiyear 'permanent' ice in the Arctic Ocean has thinned by more than 40 percent since 2004. For the first time, thin seasonal ice has overtaken thick older ice as the dominant type.

Submarines and Satellites

To put the recent decline in context, Kwok and Rothrock examined the recent five-year record from ICESat in the context of the longer history of ice thickness observed by U.S. Navy submarines.

During the Cold War, the submarines collected upward-looking sonar profiles, for navigation and defense, and converted the information into an estimate of ice thickness. Scientists also gathered profiles during a five-year collaboration between the Navy and academic researchers called the Scientific Ice Expeditions, or "SCICEX," of which Rothrock was a participant. In total, declassified submarine data span nearly five decades-from 1958 to 2000-and cover a study area of more than 1 million square miles, or close to 40 percent of the Arctic Ocean.

Kwok and Rothrock compared the submarine data with the newer ICESat data from the same study area and spanning 2003 to 2007. The combined record shows that ice thickness in winter of 1980 averaged 3.64 meters. By the end of 2007, the average was 1.89 meters.

"The dramatic decrease in multiyear ice coverage is quite remarkable and explains to a large degree the decrease in total ice area and volume," Kwok said.

Rothrock, who has worked extensively with the submarine data, agrees. "This paper shows one of the most compelling signals of global warming with one of the greatest and fastest regional environmental impacts."

Ice Through Human Eyes

While it is critical to keep monitoring the Arctic with satellites and aircraft, Kwok believes there is also a benefit in physically standing in a place and seeing the changes through human eyes-particularly for non-scientists, who do not keep a close watch on sea ice.

The August 2009 workshop in the Northwest Passage brought together an eclectic group of politicians, artists, and scientists to see the ice firsthand. The challenge was to see the problem of a changing Arctic environment from a variety of scientific, political, cultural and human perspectives and to discuss the future of collaborative study in the Arctic. The science of sea ice has implications for people's livelihoods, for long-established ecosystems, and for opening a new part of the world to exploration and exploitation.
The workshop participants now take their experiences and observations back to warmer climates, where there is sometimes less urgency about ice retreat.

"Sea ice is about more than just hard science; it's a geopolitical and human issue," Kwok noted. "There is a big personal impact when you get away from your desk and see it in person."

Arctic Sea Ice Collapse Beginning

For some reason this is my week for sea ice. This report is additional confirmation of the present rapidity of the ice loss. They still talk of averages which misleads. Understanding that the ice reduction is best modeled on the basis of a constant size withdrawal, you get an accelerating effect that is now beginning to be very noticeable.

Simple calculation led me to project clear summer seas as early as 2012 back in 2007. NASA woke up and followed suit a few months later. We were all ignored since the press is never going to understand a non linear behavior.

Any way if the average loss has been seven inches a year over the past four years, then the present decline rate is likely around nine inches for this year. Figure ten or so next year and a foot thereafter and we are ice free in 2012. We simply do not have enough multi year ice left to make an iota of difference.

After all the ice has been cleared, we will see a new regime in which winter ice will go through a spring breakup and a swift removal that could be complete as early as mid July. This would provide a comfortable two month sailing season over the top.

Present indications suggest that we are in fact on our way to possibly losing all our multi year sea ice within the next five years. This report and others tell us we can not waffle anymore. In fact this report waffles by not pointing out that this loss is huge by any comparison.

Satellite survey reveals dramatic Arctic sea-ice thinning

http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/yournews/39779

Scientists have evaluated for the first time how much the thickness and volume of Arctic sea ice, not just the ice's surface area, have shrunk since 2004 across the Arctic Ocean basin. Even where the sea ice cover persists despite climate change in the region, a vast portion of the remaining ice layer has become thinner than it used to be, the new study finds.

"Even in years when the overall extent of sea ice remains stable or grows slightly, the thickness and volume of the ice cover is continuing to decline, making the ice more vulnerable to continued shrinkage," says Ron Kwok, senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and leader of the study.

Kwok and colleagues at NASA and the University of Washington, in Seattle, report that Arctic sea ice thinned dramatically between the winters of 2004 and 2008, with thin seasonal ice replacing thick, older ice as the dominant type for the first time on record.

Using ICESat measurements, scientists found that overall Arctic sea ice thinned about 17.8 centimeters (7 inches) a year, for a total of 67 cm (2.2 feet) over four winters. The total area covered by the thicker, older, multi-year ice that survives one or more summers shrank by more than 40 percent.

The team's findings were published today, Tuesday 7 July, in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans, a publication of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). The researchers used measurements from NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) to generate the first basin-wide estimate of the thickness and volume of the Arctic Ocean's ice cover. The data covers the period from the fall of 2003 through the winter of 2008.

Kwok says the results offer a better understanding of the regional distribution of thick and thin ice in the Arctic, presenting a much more telling picture of what's going on in the Arctic than measurements of how much of the Arctic Ocean is covered in ice alone can.

"Ice volume allows us to calculate annual ice production and gives us an inventory of the freshwater and total ice mass stored in Arctic sea ice," he notes. "Our data will help scientists better understand how fast the volume of Arctic ice is decreasing and how soon we might see a nearly ice-free Arctic in the summer."
The Arctic ice cap grows each winter as the sun sets for several months and intense cold sets in. In the summer, driven by wind and ocean currents, some of that ice naturally flows out of the Arctic, while much of it melts in place. But not all of the Arctic ice thaws each summer: the thicker, older ice is more likely to survive. Seasonal sea ice usually reaches about 1.83 meters (6 feet) in thickness, while multi-year ice averages 2.74 m (9 ft).

In recent years, however, the amount of ice replaced in the winter has not been sufficient to replace summer ice losses. This leads to more open water in summer, which then absorbs more heat, warming the ocean and further melting the ice. Between 2004 and 2008, multi-year ice cover shrank 42 percent, or 1.54 million square kilometers (595,000 square miles) – nearly the size of Alaska's land area.

During the study period, the relative contributions of the two ice types to the total volume of the Arctic's ice cover did a complete flip-flop. In 2003, 62 percent of the Arctic's total ice volume was stored in multi-year ice, with 38 percent stored in first-year seasonal ice. By 2008, 68 percent of the total ice volume was first-year ice, with 32 percent multi-year.

Study co-author and ICESat Project Scientist Jay Zwally of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., says ICESat makes it possible to monitor ice thickness and volume changes over the entire Arctic Ocean for the first time.

"One of the main things that has been missing from information about what is happening with sea ice is comprehensive data about ice thickness," says Zwally. "U.S. Navy submarines provide a long-term, high-resolution record of ice thickness over only parts of the Arctic. The submarine data agree with the ICESat measurements, giving us great confidence in satellites as a way of monitoring thickness across the whole Arctic Basin."

The authors attribute the changes in the overall thickness and volume of Arctic Ocean sea ice to the recent warming and anomalies in patterns of sea ice circulation. "The near-zero replenishment of the multi-year ice cover, combined with unusual exports of ice out of the Arctic after the summers of 2005 and 2007, have both played significant roles in the loss of Arctic sea ice volume over the ICESat record," says Kwok.