Tag: Siberia

You ain’t seen nothing yet

arctic_AMSRE_29808.png This year’s Arctic sea ice minimum is now officially the second lowest in the record according to the National Snow & Ice Data Center in the US. On August 26, the ice extent stood at 5.26m km2, dropping below 2005’s 5.32m km2. The melt season still has several weeks left to run, and there are now suggestions that this year’s final minimum could be close to – perhaps even beat – last year’s record.

The NSIDC announcement has attracted a flurry of attention, and the media has been out trawling the usual suspects for quotes. The BBC reports:

Researchers say the Arctic is now at a climatic “tipping point”. “We could very well be in that quick slide downwards in terms of passing a tipping point,” said Mark Serreze, a senior scientist at the Colorado-based NSIDC. “It’s tipping now. We’re seeing it happen now,” he told the Associated Press news agency.

Adding to the interest, the European Space Agency released some interesting Envisat images of the state of the sea ice, and warned:

Following last summer’s record minimum ice cover in the Arctic, current observations from ESA’s Envisat satellite suggest that the extent of polar sea-ice may again shrink to a level very close to that of last year.

Meanwhile, Scientific American notes that the northwest passage is now open, and the Environment News Service does an admirable job of pulling all the info together – including recent work on possible rapid climate change around the Arctic. Earlier this month I was prepared to accept that I was going to lose my two bets on a new record minimum this year, so what’s been going on up north to change the outlook so dramatically?

Continue reading “You ain’t seen nothing yet”

I scare myself

arcticmethane.jpg More news from the Arctic. While the German research vessel Polarstern is cruising through the Northwest Passage, the Russian Yakov Smirnitsky is touring the Siberian seas measuring methane – and the news from scientists on board is not good. Igor Semiletov of the Pacific Oceanology Institute of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences told the Itar-Tass news agency (via Bernama):

“Yet another POI expedition is currently at work in the Arctic, along with ours. The expedition members are exploring the Lena River mouth, where we discovered abnormally high concentrations of methane last year. POI researchers have already carried out 47 studies and confirmed as follows: the concentration of methane in water and the atmosphere increases at a rapid pace, which is indicative of the break-up of permafrost on the shelf of Arctic seas.”

Refer to my last post on the subject and the comments here for some discussion of what that might mean. It’s not good news.

[Update 28/7: I love the internet. This morning I stumbled on a link to a Swedish team working on the Yakov Smirnitsky. Their blog is well worth a visit, if only for the amusing Google translations of the Swedish originals… Hat tip to a commenter at Eli’s warren.]

[Update 31/7: Magnus at Eli’s place links to a news item on the Swedish team’s gas measurements – Google translation here…

This year’s Swedish-Russian expedition has found three new areas in western and eastern Laptev Sea where the concentration of methane is clearly increased, both in water and in the air. In addition, the scientists could measure up significantly elevated in the vicinity of Lenaflodens outflow, which Semiletov past have made similar observations.

The news gets worse.]

Hole in the ice

BremenAMSR-E080702crop.jpg The National Snow & Ice Data Centre in the US is issuing regular (monthly, though they might have to become more frequent soon) updates on the progress of this year’s Arctic melt season. Today they released their report for June, and like their earlier reports (accessed from the drop down menu top right on the page), it includes a lot of very interesting reading. Here’s a highlight:

June sea ice extents in 2008 and 2007 are essentially identical, and near the lowest values for June ever recorded by satellite for the Arctic.

They note that the spatial pattern of melt this year is very different to last year, with much less melting in the Chuckchi Sea (top left on the pic at top – click for a bigger version), and much more to the north of Greenland and the Canadian archipelago. But the big news is that this year’s melt season started much earlier than usual. Take a look at this graphic:200807NSIDCmelt2.jpg

The blue bits show the areas that start melting latest. 2007 was close to the long term average in that respect, and the difference with this year is striking:

This year, sea ice in the Beaufort Sea began to melt on average 15 days earlier than normal, and 15 days earlier than last year. Surface melt in the Chukchi and East Siberian seas was 6 days earlier than normal, and 14 days earlier than in 2007. In the central Arctic Ocean, melt began around June 9th, which was 12 days earlier than normal and 9 days earlier than the year before.

Even the areas where the ice still looks pretty solid (north of Siberia) started melting weeks ahead of normal. The next month is going to be extremely interesting. The odds are tipping my way again…

Note: my new favourite site for monitoring the current sea ice area is the University of Bremen’s imagery. I don’t mean to be disloyal to Cryosphere Today, which remains essential, but Bremen’s images are higher resolution, and to my eye make what’s going on easier to follow. If we could just get some of CT’s features at Bremen, and vice versa… 😉

[This post updated July 4 to reflect amended NSIDC graphic and text (see comments). Doesn’t look as bad as it did – but that’s not much cause for comfort.]

Santa’s blues

Polarbear.jpg What’s a Christmas icon to do, when all the ice at the North Pole disappears in summer? This startling question is posed by the latest flush of media attention to events in the Arctic. First there was a National Geographic story on June 20th speculating that the North Pole would be ice free this summer (note: this is nothing to do with record minima, just do with ice around the pole itself). This was picked up by CNN, who went to Mark Serreze of the NSIDC in Boulder, Colorado for comment:

“We kind of have an informal betting pool going around in our center and that betting pool is ‘does the North Pole melt out this summer?’ and it may well,” said the center’s senior research scientist, Mark Serreze. It’s a 50-50 bet that the thin Arctic sea ice, which was frozen in autumn, will completely melt away at the geographic North Pole, Serreze said.

And then everything went quiet, until The Independent in Britain (referred to as The Indescribablyoverhyped on climate matters by Stoat) picked up the story and ran with it under the headline – Exclusive: no ice at the North Pole:

It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year.

They seem to be having problems with their choice of tense, and quite how they can justify the “exclusive” tag escapes me… The Drudge Report noticed, and then everyone in the world had to have a go [Telegraph, AP(*)]. Andy Revkin at DotEarth covers it well, and RealClimate chips in with its own analysis. It won’t be long before the usual denialist sites will be spluttering with indignation, despite the fact that the North Pole has a very good chance of being open ocean this summer – even if a new record minimum is not set.

None of this has any relevance to the odds of my winning my various sea-ice bets, but it does give me a chance to post a few interesting Arctic-related links from the last week… As part of its beat-up, The Independent went to Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, for his impressions on the changes in the Arctic, and the BBC’s been carrying a blog from Liz Kalaugher aboard a Canadian icebreaker that over-wintered near Banks Island. Interesting stuff – note Liz’s comments about the weather. Meanwhile, across the melting ice, the Russian defence establishment is beginning to get worried about the impact of melting permafrost.

(*) The AP story uncovers this truly remarkable and hitherto unnoticed fact: “That pushed the older thicker sea ice that had been over the North Pole south toward Greenland and eventually out of the Arctic, Serreze said. That left just a thin one-year layer of ice that previously covered part of Siberia.” So that ice has somehow left the land and started floating towards the Pole. Be afraid, be very afraid…

It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I don’t feel fine)

CTarctic110608.jpg For REM, it “starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane“, for us, it looks like diminishing Arctic sea ice is the sign. Over at Open Mind, the blogger formerly known as Tamino looks in some detail at the sea ice/rapid warming paper I linked to yesterday. His post makes for sober reading. David Lawrence and his team at NCAR and the NSIDC examined runs of the NCAR-based CCSM climate model that included episodes of rapid sea ice loss, and looked at what happened to climate of the Arctic during those periods. They found that the rate of warming increased 3.5 times faster than the average rate models project over the coming century. From the press release:

While this warming is largest over the ocean, the simulations suggest that it can penetrate as far as 900 miles inland. The simulations also indicate that the warming acceleration during such events is especially pronounced in autumn. The decade during which a rapid sea-ice loss event occurs could see autumn temperatures warm by as much as 9 degrees F (5 degrees C) along the Arctic coasts of Russia, Alaska, and Canada.

This is what it looks like in their nifty graphic:

permafrost.jpg

This is what we saw last winter.

200712-200802-pg.gif

Looks as though the process the paper describes is already under way. Canada’s a bit cooler, but then it still has some ice left at the moment…

And the end of the world? Go and re-read my recent post on methane hydrates in the shallow seas north of Siberia. Consider what Lawrence et al have to say about permafrost. Then ponder the meaning of “positive feedbacks in the carbon cycle”. What’s happening up North could make any efforts to reduce global emissions irrelevant, or at best, mean that reaching a relatively low stabilisation target (450ppm?) suddenly a lot harder. Just to make things even harder, we have 30 years of warming to go, even if we could stabilise atmospheric greenhouse gases today.

I’m going to enlarge my veggie garden, and re-examine my thoughts on resilience as a response to climate change.

[Update: Joe Romm at Climate Progress has good coverage.]

[Update 2: Nature‘s In The Field blog reports reactions to the Lawrence et al paper from aboard a ship cruising the Arctic, and in passing confirms some of my thoughts…]