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The fossil fuel-driven climate crisis is causing Arctic sea ice to disappear more rapidly than expected, according to new research.
The Arctic could be almost completely without sea ice during the summer within the next decade, according to a new study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.
The study states that rising temperatures from the human-caused climate crisis are leading to increasing reductions in sea ice during the summer.
"These reductions are projected to continue with ongoing warming, ultimately leading to an ice-free Arctic," the study says. "In the September monthly mean, the earliest ice-free conditions (the first single occurrence of an ice-free Arctic) could occur in 2020–2030s under all emission trajectories and are likely to occur by 2050."
Well, I certainly wouldn't bet against this.
In fact, given the pace of change, I would be surprised if it didn't happen.https://t.co/7DPdhMi2ti
— Bill McGuire (@ProfBillMcGuire) March 5, 2024
An Arctic that is nearly completely without sea ice for the summer months would be an environment that is quite different—and dangerous—for indigenous animals like polar bears and seals. Though the Arctic is expected to become ice-free eventually, the study states that when this will occur will depend on how quickly humans stop burning fossil fuels.
“This would transform the Arctic into a completely different environment, from a white summer Arctic to a blue Arctic. So even if ice-free conditions are unavoidable, we still need to keep our emissions as low as possible to avoid prolonged ice-free conditions," Alexandra Jahn, an associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and a lead author of the research, told The Guardian.
Jahn said that if humans are able to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the future, the sea ice would eventually return. Many scientists are studying different ways to accomplish carbon removal—an approach that many climate advocates have criticized as a false solution—but experts say reducing greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible is the main priority.
A study from last year found that ice-free summers in the Arctic had become an "unavoidable" future due to climate change. Ice is also disappearing in Antarctica, which is warming more quickly than scientists had anticipated.
We’ve just come through the warmest December and January ever measured globally, and February seems certain to follow.
I don’t write that often about developments in the actual climate in these pages—it’s uniformly depressing, and it is the part we can do the least about. None of us has the power to change how much heat a molecule of carbon dioxide traps, nor can we alter how the jet stream reacts to changes in polar temperatures. All we can do is determine how much carbon dioxide and methane there is up there in the air—and so that’s what I concentrate on.
And yet the changes underway on our planet are now so extreme, and so remarkable, that sometimes we do need to stand back and simply gaze in awe and sadness. At my latitude (43.97 degrees north, or very nearly halfway between the North Pole and the equator) the changes in winter may be the most dramatic signs yet. And the most dramatic in my heart for sure, because winter is the time I love the most.
We are bleeding away the chill that is one of the hallmarks of our planet.
This year in North America has been about as close as we’ve ever come to a year without a winter—the geological obverse of 1816, the year when an Indonesian volcano put so much sulfur into the air that there was no real northern hemisphere summer. We’re the volcano now, and the gases we produce increase the temperature: it was 70°F in Chicago Tuesday, in February—which was also the day that the Windy City decided to join other American cities in suing the fossil fuel industry for damages. But that was just one of a hundred heat records broken in the course of the day, from Milwaukee to Dallas (94°F). But it wasn’t a single day of heat—it’s been an almost unrelentingly warm winter, with by far the lowest snow coverage for this time of year ever recorded (13.8% of the lower 48 as of Monday, compared with an average of more than 40%) and with the Great Lakes essentially free of ice.
We can surmise that this year’s puny winter has something to do with the strong El Niño in the Pacific, but of course the far deeper problem is the ongoing warming of the Earth—we’ve just come through the warmest December and January ever measured globally, and February seems certain to follow. There simply is a smaller supply of cold air in the Arctic than ever before. As The Washington Post put it on Tuesday:
The amount of cold air above the Northern Hemisphere this winter is near a record low, an unambiguous signal of the planet’s warming climate, according to a new analysis of 76 years of temperature data from about a mile above the ground.
The depleted cold-air supply means blasts of Arctic air generally lack the vigor of the past, while incursions of unusually mild weather—such as the one swelling over the central United States now—can be more frequent and intense.
The cold-air supply in the Northern Hemisphere is being evaluated using temperature data from about 5,000 feet high in the atmosphere. For about a decade, Jonathan Martin, a professor of meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, has analyzed the size of the cold pool at this level—or the area of the hemisphere covered by temperatures at or below 23°F (minus-5 Celsius).
We are bleeding away the chill that is one of the hallmarks of our planet.
That comes with serious pragmatic consequences. In the high Arctic, previously unheard-of thunderstorms are melting ice faster than ever. As Ed Struzik reported last week from Greenland, “surface crevassing, which allows water to enter into the interior of the icecap, is accelerating, thanks to rapid melting. And slush avalanches, which mobilize large volumes of water-saturated snow, are becoming common: In 2016, a rain-on-snow event triggered 800 slush avalanches in West Greenland.”
Further south, those record winter temperatures let forests and grasslands dry out fast. That’s why Canada’s boreal forest burned at a record rate last summer, and it’s why huge blazes are driving Texans for cover today—the Smokehouse Creek fire in the Panhandle, which only started Monday, is already the largest blaze in the state’s history; it forced the evacuation of the country’s biggest plant for disassembling nuclear weapons.
The higher latitudes need the annual rest that winter provides. It’s how these places—and the creatures in them—evolved. In Maine, which has the largest moose herd in the lower 48, 90% of calves died last winter because they were sucked dry by ticks that can now last all winter long. Biologists find moose with 90,000 ticks; they rub their hair off trying to shed the pests. “Ghost moose” is what they call these hairless beasts. You can’t have the Earth that we’ve known without some cold at the north and south; it’s functionally required, a part of the Pleistocene.
It’s not functionally required that we be able to glide across the surface of the Earth—but losing that is a deeply human cost, at least for some of us. Winter is the most whimsical season by far: Nature releases friction for a time, and all of a sudden you can skim across the ground. I was in Minneapolis two weeks ago for the Nordic skiing world cup race—the first held in the U.S. in a quarter century—and two days beforehand the first substantial snowfall of the Minnesota winter rescued the proceedings, letting 20,000 people come out for a stinging cold day to watch the fittest athletes on earth sail across the trail. This weekend I’ll be helping man the finish line here in Vermont as 700 little kids from around New England show up for the annual cross-country festival at our local ski area. Or at least I hope it will—it was pouring rain Wednesday afternoon, and the forecast for race day is 55°F.
All of which is to say that the impact of the climate crisis is psychological as well as physical. The deepest patterns of our lives—the ways our bodies understand the cycle of the seasons and the progress of time—are now slipping away. The fight to slow the warming of the planet is the fight to save billions of people and millions of species, but it’s also the fight to hold on to profound beauty and profound meaning, not to mention sheer gorgeous powdery magic.
Instead of imposing the same industrial model on the Arctic Ocean that has tragically failed the rest of the world, we need a new protective approach to this unique region, and soon.
The Arctic Ocean is one of the most extraordinary, unique, and severely threatened regions in the global biosphere. The marine ecosystem supports over 7,000 identified species, many of which are found nowhere else on Earth—polar bears, walrus, several kinds of ice seals, narwhals, beluga whales, bowhead whales, and many kinds of seabirds, fish, and invertebrates. Indigenous Peoples have survived off this rich ocean ecosystem for millennia.
However, the Arctic Ocean is now suffering effects of climate change more severely than anywhere else on Earth and is well on its way toward ecological collapse. Arctic sea ice has declined by roughly half in the past 50 years, permafrost and the Greenland ice cap are rapidly melting, ocean acidification is increasing, currents are changing, sea ice ecosystems are in catastrophic decline, and many coastal villages are moving to higher ground.
But rather than intensifying efforts to protect this struggling ocean region, governments and industry are instead rushing to exploit the increasingly ice-free Arctic Ocean for oil and gas, minerals, shipping, commercial fishing, tourism, and military interests. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the Arctic may contain 30% of the world’s undiscovered oil and 13% of gas deposits, most of it offshore. The Arctic seabed may also contain strategic minerals; some nations, particularly Russia, are expanding their military presence across the Arctic Ocean; and increasing commercial ship traffic across ice-free waters increases risks of oil spills, ship strikes on marine mammals, underwater noise, and regional air pollution.
The first step on this path is for President Joe Biden to designate by Executive Order the proposed U.S. Arctic Marine National Monument, permanently protecting all U.S. waters of the northern Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean off Alaska from oil and gas development, seabed mining, and commercial fishing.
Combined with the effects of climate change, such industrialization and militarization will further accelerate ecological and social collapse of the region. So, instead of imposing the same industrial model on the Arctic Ocean that has tragically failed the rest of the world, we need a new protective approach to this unique region, and soon.
However, the Biden administration just announced that the U.S. is now joining other Arctic nations in the Arctic offshore resource rush, claiming rights to vast extended continental shelf areas of the Arctic Ocean seabed beyond our 200-mile limit. This is a historic mistake.
Instead, the U.S. and other Arctic coastal nations—Canada, Russia, Norway, and Denmark/Greenland—should permanently and fully protect all waters of the Arctic Ocean outside their 12-mile territorial sea, and all nations should permanently and fully protect the international waters of the Central Arctic Ocean collectively in a circumpolar International Arctic Marine Sanctuary, setting aside all territorial claims, including extended continental shelf claims.
The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) allows coastal nations to claim sovereign rights to waters out to 200 miles from their shoreline as an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), as well as to claim extended continental shelf (ECS) areas of the seabed beyond their 200-mile limit if they can demonstrate that these extraterritorial seabed areas are geological extensions of the shelf within their EEZ. Other Arctic coastal nations, as parties to UNCLOS, have made such extended shelf claims, some of which overlap near the North Pole. Although the U.S. is not yet a party to UNCLOS, it joined the fray this month by claiming over 380,000 square miles of seabed outside of our 200-mile EEZ, mainly in the Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea off Alaska. The extended shelf rush in the Arctic is eerily reminiscent of the 19th-century land rush in the western U.S., then said to be our “manifest destiny.”
For the Arctic Ocean today, world governments should take a time-out and refocus the approach to this extraordinary, threatened global treasure.
In 1959, nations joined together to agree to the Antarctic Treaty, permanently setting the continent aside exclusively for peaceful, scientific purposes, holding all previous territorial claims in abeyance. The Antarctic Treaty has been a truly historic success and a model of international cooperation for conservation.
To refocus our approach toward the Arctic Ocean, we proposed at the 2022 U.N. Oceans Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, that Arctic and other governments agree to establish a permanent, circumpolar International Arctic Marine Sanctuary (IAMS) for all waters and seabed outside of the 12-mile territorial sea of Arctic coastal nations. This would include international waters of the Central Arctic Ocean surrounding the North Pole, as well as productive waters across most of the Arctic continental shelf within coastal EEZs.
The proposed Arctic Marine Sanctuary should be co-managed with Indigenous communities along the Arctic coast and should permanently preserve the Arctic Ocean for peaceful, scientific purposes, prohibiting all oil and gas development, mineral development, commercial fishing, and military activities. The sanctuary should also enact more stringent safety rules for Arctic shipping and tourism, expand scientific research, and protect subsistence uses by coastal peoples. Such comprehensive protection will give the Arctic Ocean ecosystem and coastal peoples the best chance possible to survive the devastating effects of climate change over the remainder of this century.
Of course, under Vladimir Putin, Russia is unlikely to agree to such a multilateral conservation treaty at present. But Russia will not always be led by such an imperial, authoritarian regime and is expected to someday rejoin the international community and hopefully endorse the global effort to protect the Arctic Ocean.
The first step on this path is for President Joe Biden to designate by Executive Order the proposed U.S. Arctic Marine National Monument, permanently protecting all U.S. waters of the northern Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean off Alaska from oil and gas development, seabed mining, and commercial fishing. In so doing, Biden will insulate this unique marine system from threats in future federal administrations, and he will lead the way for other Arctic nations to join together to establish the proposed circumpolar International Arctic Marine Sanctuary. Despite Biden’s commitment to protect 30% of America’s oceans, he has yet to permanently protect (e.g. as marine monument or marine sanctuary) any of Alaska’s vast, spectacular, and threatened offshore ecosystems. It is time he did so.
Society has a historic choice to make with the imperiled Arctic Ocean. Should we continue our industrial expansion into one of the last wild areas of the world, further degrading the environment? Or should we choose to protect and sustain this magnificent place? How we answer this question will tell us a lot about ourselves and our future.
In 2024, let’s hope that Arctic nations and the global community will finally join together to permanently protect this spectacular and threatened ocean region for all time.