"Death Spiral" Warned as Arctic Becomes an Island for the First Time in Human History

For the first time in human history, it has become possible to circumnavigate the Arctic ice cap.

New satellite images show that both the Northwest and Northeast passages are now ice free. Professor Mark Serreze, a sea ice specialist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said the images suggested the Arctic may have entered a "death spiral" caused by global warming.

The passages are open. It's an historic event. We are going to see this more and more as the years go by.

It's news that the UK press is carrying. Here's the story in the Independent; and here's the one in the Telegraph.

But here's the one in the Houston Chronicle: it doesn't mention the historic development, only that "climatologists were eager to see whether the record low of about 1.6 million square miles" of summer ice melt in the Arctic would be duplicated again this summer.

The vanishing ice is considered one of the smoking guns indicating that global warming caused by industrial emissions of carbon dioxide is proceeding at a faster pace than predicted by a United Nations commission. While its projections would have the Arctic free of summer ice by 2030, scientists are now predicting that could happen within four or five years.

In recent weeks nine polar bears were spotted by a federal aerial survey in Alaska's Chukchi Sea swimming far from land in the open ocean. Although the animals are powerful swimmers, they cannot survive long periods in open water. They depend on ice floes as supportive platforms in order to hunt seals, a prime food source.

The Telegraph went much further in its reporting:

In 2005, the North-east passage opened, while the western one remained closed, and last year their positions were reversed. But the images, gathered by NASA using microwave sensors that penetrate clouds, show that the North-west passage opened last weekend and that the last blockage on the north- eastern one – a tongue of ice stretching down to Russia across Siberia's Laptev Sea – dissolved a few days later.

And here's how the Press Trust of India saw it:

Shipping companies are smiling all the way to the bank as they plan to exploit the first simultaneous opening of the routes since the beginning of the last Ice Age 125,000 years ago.According to the Beluga Group in Germany, it will send the first ship through the north-east passage, around Russia, next year, cutting 4,000 miles off the voyage from Germany to all the way to Japan.

It is something the Coast Guard is preparing for, as the AP reports:

The Coast Guard expects so much traffic that it opened two temporary stations on the nation's northernmost waters, anticipating the day when an ocean the size of the contiguous United States could be ice-free for most of the summer.

Wonder if anyone has plans to charter boats for tourists to watch the polar bears drown.

Update 9/4

from Open Water Circling North Pole? Not Quite (Dot Earth)

In an e-mail message Wednesday, Sean R. Helfrich, a scientist at the ice center, said that ponds of meltwater pooling on sea ice could fool certain satellite-borne instruments into interpreting ice as open water, “suggesting areas that have substantial ice cover as being sea-ice free.” The highlighted area is probably still impassible ice, including large amounts of thick old floes, he said. I sent the note to an array of sea-ice experts, and many, including Mark Serreze at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, concurred.

Fair enough, but it's just a matter of time.

Update 9/8 - That didn't take long

The Times ran an article yesterday with a subdued headline that confirmed that the arctic is indeed an island for the first time in history. In the story called Arctic Ice Hints at Warming, Experts Say, Andy Revkin wrote:

Leading ice specialists in Europe and the United States for the first time have agreed that a ring of navigable waters has opened all around the fringes of the cap of sea ice drifting on the warming Arctic Ocean.....

....Last month, news reports said that satellites showed navigable waters through both fabled Arctic shipping routes.

But
those satellite findings were disputed by the United States National Ice Center, run by the Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The center said the satellites monitoring the ice were fooled by broad stretches of fresh water pooling atop ice floes, which can resemble open sea lanes.

On Friday though, citing fresh images using sensors that can more carefully distinguish ice from water, the Ice Center concurred, issuing a statement concluding, “This is the first recorded occurrence of the Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route both being open at the same time.”

Today, the Times also ran editorial called Arctic in Retreat.

.....And, according to new satellite images, the eastern sea ice blocking a northeastern passage above Siberia has melted too, turning the Arctic into an island surrounded by open water for the first time ever.

• ‹ previous
• up
• next ›