Arctic Summer

The condition of the Arctic sea ice is exciting lots of comment this year. All this is in sharp contrast to last year. Recent headlines are taking note that the sea ice surrounding the pole itself is one year ice and the related patch is huge. Of course this is an artifact of the winds. If the winds fail to change the configuration, it is safe to say that the pole will be ice free this August for a couple hundred miles in all direction.

More importantly, for the past several weeks, the areal extent of the ice has mirrored last years chart. We can in fact expect a reduction over last year once we hit the end of season. The winds are also clearly able to move material around much more freely than in past years as is reasonable. This means that the long term ice is breaking up and is free to intermingle better with the younger ice leading to a mechanical acceleration of the ice loss.

I have made the observation that last years melt indicated a complete annual clearing of the Arctic as early as 2012. To my surprise, last years winter has not changed this prognosis one bit. This is holding true despite the fact that this year’s growing season is around two weeks late. The raspberries have just started to ripen in Vancouver when we should have been picking for two weeks. By the way, we need to be nervous about the fall grain harvest. We should be fine, but an early frost combined with a two week late ripening of the grain is quite possible.

An open question is whether or not we have a new climate regime or not of warm arctic summers followed by chilly northern winters. It is way too soon to really know what the reconstructed northern climate will look like now that the sea ice is well on the way to be reconfigured.

And that is what really needs to be recognized. Possibly for the first time since the medieval optimum, the long term arctic sea ice is disappearing. There will be a winter sea ice regime that will be likely fully removed every summer. Last year, strong westerly winds cleared the western arctic. This year we seem to be getting it from the eastern arctic or something like that. It is clearly very different.

So here we are, having passed through a very overdue cold winter, finding no effect on the ongoing sea ice removal in the arctic. I would speculate that breakup conditions have been reached and that it would now require a powerful northern climate reversal to even stop this process.

From now on, the only remaining variable will be the frequency of warm northern winters which can then accelerate the summer ice removal. This year, I see no reason to expect much real change over last year, but had conditions mirrored the past year we would have seen another sharp ice removal phase. Even without that, the annual surplus heat in the northern hemisphere which has been impacting the arctic for at least thirty years will continue to do its work.

In the meantime, the summer cruise ships heading for the pole could well have a real treat this summer. An open sea at the poles is just too good to miss. And I imagine that the press will be there in force.

Andrew Freedman and Sea Ice

Those tracking this summer’s sea ice melt can see that it is the retreat on the eastern edge is well ahead of past seasons, while the western edge is showing little change as yet. This is hardly surprising considering the massive retreat of last year.

This past winter created a thicker than expected first year ice, but the melting taking place appears to also have been faster this April. In short, I see nothing stopping the removal of most of last years sea ice this summer. Then if the winds rise, we will catch another sharp reduction in the remaining sea ice this August. The scientists are quite right to quote short odds on this event.

I observe also that there will be a number of cruise ships standing by to run the Northwest Passage. That will still need a cooperative wind at the best, but we certainly could have done it last year. I wonder if there will be any brave merchant ships making the attempt? I suspect it will not be permitted yet.

We continue to get froth over the polar bears, primarily driven by the need of environmentalists for a salable cause. The bears can essentially hibernate a full five months as they must do in southern Hudson’s Bay. At this moment, even that is still covered with ice, although I am pretty sure it is pretty rotten now. Anywhere further north they are still feeding and will be largely retreating to land now as the ice continues to fail. Their hibernation period is more like three months. Also the observation that the bears are getting slightly smaller is a strong indicator of overpopulation problems, since the population has sharply expanded over the past forty years.

We need to actually declare the Blue fin Tuna as endangered since it is in decline thanks to aggressive over fishing. Oh well!

Andrew Freedman: Arctic Sea Ice May Set Record Low

The Interior Department's decision last week to list the polar bear as a "threatened" species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) may soon be seen as either a prescient move, or possibly even as too little too late, if scientists' ominous predictions for this summer's Arctic sea ice melt and for future seasons prove correct. A number of predictions have been issued in the past several months, all indicating that 2008 has at least a decent chance of beating out 2007 for the title of the greatest summer sea ice loss on record.

In fact, some experts have concluded that the North Pole itself may be covered by water, rather than ice, during the peak of the annual melt season at the end of the summer, and that the Northwest Passage could be ice-free for a time as well.

The recent predictions offer an unsettling picture of the astonishing rate of environmental changes that have been taking place in the far north. Sea ice loss also puts the pace of climate change policymaking into perspective, since there is a stark disparity between the rapidly melting Arctic and the slow pace of Washington policymakers.

An examination of new information about Arctic sea ice dynamics illustrates this point. According to recent analyses of Arctic sea ice, the ice that is entering the 2008 summer melt season is thinner and younger than the ice that melted like butter on a frying pan last summer. With sea ice, the opposite of the Hollywood ideal of young and thin is desirable, since new and thin ice melts more rapidly than thicker, older ice.

Late last month, University of Colorado at Boulder researchers found that only two percent of Arctic sea ice was older than normal (defined in that study as the period between 1982 to 2007), while 63 percent was younger than average. Consistent with this assessment, National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) researchers reported in April that first-year ice covered a whopping 72 percent of the Arctic Basin, including the area around the North Pole. The NSIDC noted that Arctic sea ice had recovered in terms of geographic extent from last summer's record melt, but that last summer's decline was so large that there was precious little older ice left over to build up during the winter.

Recent atmospheric conditions have also contributed to the Arctic sea ice's young and thin problem, including a positive phase of the Arctic Oscillation in which pressure patterns steer storms farther north, bringing stronger surface westerly winds in the North Atlantic and warmer and wetter than normal conditions to the Arctic and northern Europe. Such winds helped to flush older ice out of the region this winter, leaving a large expanse of younger and thinner ice to enter the 2008 melt season. Last summer, unusually sunny weather during portions of the summer season contributed to the record melt.

Although it remains to be seen whether atmospheric and ocean conditions will combine to create another record sea ice melt this year, most predictions indicate that there is a high likelihood that this year's melt season will at least result in well below average Arctic sea ice extent (average here refers to the 1979-2000 period).

"Even if more first-year ice survives than normal, the September minimum extent this year will likely be extremely low," the NSIDC stated on April 7.

The University of Colorado's sea ice forecast indicated that there is a three-in-five chance that the 2007 record low for Arctic sea ice extent will be exceeded this year due to the combination of warming temperatures and the preponderance of younger, thinner ice. And the NSIDC has declared that it is "quite possible" that the North Pole will be ice free during this melt season.

According to a study published in February in Geophysical Research Letters, computer model predictions show a 50 percent chance that the Northern Sea Route and the Northwest Passage will be "nearly ice free" in September of 2008. The study indicated that sea ice loss this year is likely to progress more slowly than last year, and reach a low but not necessarily record-breaking minimum.

The NSIDC's May 5 sea ice news and analysis stated that only 30 percent of first-year ice typically survives the summer melt season, compared to a 75 percent survival rate for older ice. NSIDC scientists compared survival rates from past years with the 2008 April sea ice coverage and determined that in order to avoid breaking last year's record, more than 50 percent of this year's first-year ice would need to make it through the melt season. To put this into further perspective, only 13 percent of first-year ice survived last year's record melt.

Last year, sea ice melted to a record low that far exceeded 2005's record melt. In September of 2007 (September marks the end of the summer melt season), the sea ice cover was 23 percent below the 2005 level and 39 percent below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000.

The melt was so rapid last year that, according to Sheldon Drobot of the University of Colorado, during a two-week period the area of sea ice lost was equivalent to losing the area of Kansas every day.
Scientists blame human emissions of greenhouse gases for much of the Arctic sea ice decline, but natural factors are also at work in the region, such as variations in ocean currents and atmospheric cycles including the Arctic Oscillation. The interactions between natural cycles and human influences is a key research area during the current International Polar Year.

Whether or not sea ice cover hits a new record low this year, however, it's likely that the overall decline in sea ice will have negative repercussions on polar bears and other ice-dependent species. This is, of course, the reason for the Interior Department's begrudging polar bear listing last week. The Interior Department's press release stated as much when it said, "loss of sea ice threatens and will likely continue to threaten polar bear habitat. This loss of habitat puts polar bears at risk of becoming endangered in the foreseeable future, the standard established by the ESA for designating a threatened species."

However, assuming a strong relationship exists between sea ice loss and species decline, after looking at the latest predictions and the recent Arctic sea ice data, I wonder how soon it will be before polar bears are pushed into the endangered category. Hopefully policymakers will catch up to the scientists, who are themselves struggling to stay abreast of the rapidly changing environment. According to NSIDC, one sea ice expert, Ron Lindsay of the University of Washington, has cautioned that "sea ice conditions are now changing so rapidly that predictions based on relationships developed from the past 50 years of data may no longer apply." In other words, we're now in uncharted territory.