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Arctic Ice Cover Hits Historic Low, Due to Global Warming Says Scientists
THE area covered by Arctic sea ice reached its lowest point this week since the start of satellite observations in 1972, German researchers announced.
An iceberg is seen off Ammassalik Island in Eastern Greenland. The summer ice retreat in the Arctic has reached a record low. AP Photo "On September 8, the extent of the Arctic sea ice was 4.240 million square kilometers. This is a new historic minimum," said Georg Heygster, head of the Physical Analysis of Remote Sensing Images unit at the University of Bremen's Institute of Environmental Physics.
The new mark is about half-a-per cent under his team's measurements of the previous record, which occurred on September 16, 2007, he said.
According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), the record set on that date was 4.1 million sq km. The discrepancy, Heygster explained by phone, was due to slightly different data sets and algorithms.
"But the results are internally consistent in both cases," he said.
Arctic ice cover plays a critical role in regulating Earth's climate by reflecting sunlight and keeping the polar region cool.
Retreating summer sea ice - 50 per cent smaller in area than four decades ago - is described by scientists as both a measure and a driver of global warming, with negative impacts on a local and planetary scale.
It is also further evidence of a strong human imprint on climate patterns in recent decades, the researchers said.
"The sea ice retreat can no more be explained with the natural variability from one year to the next, caused by weather influence," Heygster said in an statement released by the university.
"Climate models show, rather, that the reduction is related to the man-made global warming which, due to the albedo effect, is particularly pronounced in the Arctic."
Albedo increases when an area once covered by reflective snow or ice - which bounces 80 per cent of the Sun's radiative force back into space - is replaced by deep blue sea, which absorbs the heat instead.
Temperatures in the Arctic region have risen more than twice as fast as the global average over the last half century.
The Arctic ice cover has also become significantly thinner in recent decades, though it is not possible to measure the shrinkage in thickness as precisely as for surface area, the statement said.
Satellite tracking since 1972 shows that the extent of Arctic sea ice is dropping at about 11 per cent per decade.
NSIDC director Mark Serreze has said that summer ice cover could disappear entirely by 2030, leaving nothing but heat-trapping "blue ocean."
The NSIDC likewise monitors Arctic ice cover on a daily basis, but has not announced record-low ice cover. Data posted on its website as of Saturday only covered the period through September 6.
By last week, it said, sea ice is almost completely gone from the channels of the Northwest Passage. The southern route - also known as Amunden's Route - was also ice free, as was the Northern Sea Route along Siberia.
But even as the thaw opens shipping lanes, it disrupts the lives and livelihoods of indigenous peoples, and poses a severe threat to fauna, including polar bears, ice seals and walruses, conservation groups say.
"This stunning loss of Arctic sea ice is yet another wake-up call that climate change is here now and is having devastating effects around the world," said Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco.
The last time the Arctic was incontestably free of summertime ice was 125,000 years ago, during the height of the last major interglacial period, known as the Eemian.
Air temperatures in the Arctic were warmer than today, and sea level was also four to six meters higher because the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets had partly melted.
Global average temperatures today are close to the maximum warmth seen during the Eemian.
74 Comments so far
Show AllWe can fix the stagnant economy and boost economic growth by exploiting the petroleum and other minerals freed from the thawing polar region!
Then we can buy more ice.
Any other path forward is madness.
Nice try.
As for regulations, I advocate the implementation of the Precautionary Principle to govern the introduction of all new substances into the environment, and a mandate for industry to prove that those they have introduced are harmless. A physician like Dr Paul certainly can't argue with the need to do no harm, and that given the record of industry in causing massive harm such a requirement is warranted in order to introduce a product into the ecosystem.
We should have more effective regulation and cut ALL emissions. There is no other answer.
Although not stated exactly as above, I did espouse your sentiment further down the thread.
There's also probably a stylistic component to your perception. What may be strong language to a scientist may seem rather understated when compared with the yelling, screaming, hoopla, and sensationalism one sees today in the media Stateside.
The WAKE-UP calls came when the Larson B Ice shelf broke loose in Antarctica in 2003 and when the atmospheric Co2 level rose above 340 ppm.
Much of the financial and shipping publications were really upbeat.
"Now we will be able to ship goods through the arctic and save millions in fuel and time." This was followed by charts showing the differences in fuel costs and time in transit between using the Panama Canal and crossing over the arctic route.
Sadly, it is all bucks, BIG buck$. World ecology has nothing to do with it. The million$ or billion$ saved would never result in lower prices for goods. It would just go into the pockets of the same robbers who are destroying us and Europe for their personal profits.
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/09/07/313873/arctic-death-spiral-cont...
This, less politely put, means we're fu**ed.
But despair not completely, ye of little faith. Because this also means that a common, unifying challenge for humankind - if we'll only be so kind - has been defined: the climate-extreming we created ourselves.
The challenge includes our own influences and attitudes. That means the equations we're up against include our own minds.
We'll have to probe deeper into what interconnection means: interconnection between human activities and the environment, between humans and humans in order be well coordinated, and between our own thinking now and later.
Research into the properties of cyclic thinking must - and most likely will - gain predominance. And we'll have to gauge our progress by the results - in order to achieve a new equilibrium, in maybe a 100 year's time.
This means a new kind of alertness and honesty towards details and changes in our surroundings, individually as well as in groups, becomes demanded of us all. There'll be less place for complacency.
Expect old spiritual wisdom about the properties of mind to take a new center stage soon. The Vedic Upanishads - human-kind's first written spiritual thoughts - may become global best-sellers. - If, that is, the internet survives, and global best-sellers continue to exist...
It's still up to us, and steadily more than ever before. Reality just got a notch more intense.
"this also means that a common, unifying challenge~probe deeper into what interconnection means~alertness~Reality just got a notch more intense."
On land, beside the Arctic Ocean, lies the tundra, which is melting, being subject to the anomalously high polar heating taking place.
Methane is bubbling up from below the ice over the Arctic Ocean, and on the lakes and bogs of the tundra.
And then there is the presence of astronomical amounts of methane clathrates, now frozen and thus sequestered below the continental shelves and slopes of the Arctic.
These three ticking positive-feedback timebombs constitute a threat almost unimaginable to the third ape.
They are no less a threat for our lack of imagination.
We agonize over 9/11, wars and famines now present, and rightly so.
How will we handle what is coming?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-last-great-global-w...
Manysummits
========Hello Richsmith2:
Yes, the cited article by Lee Kump refers to the PETM, the extraordinary spike of heating known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum. I can't say enough about Lee Kump. Along with a very few others - a giant in the field of climate science. He points out in the article that the latest field evidence indicates strongly that the rate of heating now occurring due to anthropogenic global warming is an order of magnitude higher than the already unprecedented heating at the PETM, i.e., ten times higher a rate of global temperature increase.
The world was very different at the PETM, some 55 million years ago, about ten million years after the asteroid strike and the massive outpouring of lava in what is now India known as the Deccan Traps - which closed the Mesozoic - a greenhouse extinction event in combination with an asteroid strike - cause and effect still to be ironed out. (i.e., the K/T boundary)
The world was effectively ice free then, so comparisons must take this into account.
That's what our very best scientists do - take these mutifarious things into account, and give us their best estimates.
In this preposterous age of greed and cynicism, scientists of Lee Kump's or James Hansen's stature are lumped in with those who scarcely deserve the title human being, and yet comment on these events as if they had something to say that was worth listening to - snake-oil salesman at the very least.
It is this seeming inability of the masses to discriminate between the charlatan or megalomaniac and the hero that may prove our undoing.
We do know enough to mak decisions and take concerted actions, but the system of pseudo-democracies we have created, which is in fact a global plutocracy of ignorant and mentally disabled billionaires has us running straight into a wall so solid we may not survive the impact, or, if we do, it will be literally hell on Earth..
Manysummits
Only the timing is questionable. It may still take about 30 years for ocean temperatures to catch up with greenhouse gas percentages in the atmosphere. It may take centuries for Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet melting to catch up.
However, it takes no time at all for water vapor levels in the atmosphere to catch up. If you're in Pennsylvania or in Missouri, today is a good day to catch a fish with your bare hands in your kitchen. If you're in New York City, your town planners are just starting to wonder what could happen if a category 3 hurricane were to hit the city someday.
Further to previous posts:
I think it would be a large mistake, very large indeed, to view any of these events in isolation. The Arctic Sea Ice Melt in this article, the Coral Reef Calamity unfolding in another CD article, or any of the other world events taking place, too numerous to mention quickly.
What is important, vitally so, is to see these events as symptoms of a far graver crisis - a crisis which as yet has no single name other than perhaps Armageddon - entirely inadequate for a variety of reasons.
"The Age of Stupid" was one attempt at naming this crisis. There are others. I think it remains for some creative genius to name our age in such a way that it catches on with everyone, and ignites the fire in the belly which is the only rational response to approaching ecocide.
Manysummits
=====Manysummits writes: "The Age of Stupid" was one attempt at naming this crisis.
On that note: i have a friend who refers to our civilization as "Starship Dumbass."
I'll say 'goodby' to everyone now, unless I don't get a chnace later. Don't forget -- last one to leave, turn out the lights.
The difficulty is not that our species CAN'T still do a lot to mitigate and recover from this, but that they are so insane that they WON'T.
The thirty year ice free estimate is an old one, and is very likely to be beaten, as global carbon emissions are still rising. To get back before the tipping point, atmosphere green house gases need to be reduced, not merely slowed or halted. And just how is this Greenhouse gas reduction going to be possible, with carbon corrupt governments supporting even more carbon intensive extreme extraction from coal seam gas and tar sands?
Carbon dioxide trend - http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
Methane trend - http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/methane-update/
The rising methane is a worry, and may be the next consequence of the arctic melt tipping point. If Obama approves the Keystone pipeline, he can be known in the short term future as the man who pulled the final suicide lever.
And here is the graph that trends to 2015 as being the achievement of ice free summer. "The death spiral graph" .
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/09/07/313873/arctic-death-spiral-cont...
Very few dare publish this.
Excellent link to tamino's work on the methane trend. And I hope people take a look at the second graph in the arctic-death-spiral article you link, showing the exponential trend of sea ice volume pointing to zero sea ice in 2015. Four years hence.
Over land or water, what replaces ice absorbs much more heat. This is why the Arctic heats up much more quickly than the rest of the northern hemisphere. Underneath that melting ice lie stores of methane large enough to dwarf human emissions - Earth's poison pill, which some believe capable of triggering the runaway greenhouse.
We gotta ask the humans from 125,000 years ago how they coped with it and what steps they took to combat global warming.