Since the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., began tracking sea ice three decades ago, only in 2006 was there as little ice during a Northern Hemisphere winter – 5.65 million square miles.

That’s nearly 8 percent less than the average of 6.12 million square miles recorded from 1979 to 2000.

The expanse of polar ice reached its maximum on March 7, according to the center. The date of maximum ice in the studies has ranged from Feb. 18 to March 31. As of March 22, the ice had declined for five consecutive days, leading scientists to conclude it will only shrink further. However, scientists noted, sea ice responds rapidly to winds and temperature this time of year and could expand again.

Steven Armstrup, senior scientist for the nonprofit Polar Bears International, noted that 2010 was one of the warmest years on record and that last autumn’s ocean circulation patterns led to late and weak ice formation throughout much of the Arctic.

“This combination may (mean) early ice melt this year and large retreats of sea ice from polar basin coastlines,” Armstrup said.

Eight months ago, Armstrup retired after 30 years as project leader for Polar Bear Research at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center in Anchorage. He has conducted research on Beaufort Sea polar bears since 1980 and is a past chairman of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

“Because polar bears depend on the surface of the sea ice to catch seals, those things are not favorable for polar bear survival. So, if you are a polar bear, this could be a tough year – with increased starvation especially among the young and very old.”

But Armstrup is far less concerned with what happens in 2011 or any individual year than he is with rising average temperatures in the Arctic.

“The world will continue to warm as greenhouse gas concentrations rise,” he said. “There will continue to be fluctuations in temperatures … just as there always have been. Temperatures, however, will fluctuate over a rising baseline.”

Natural ups and downs in the Earth’s climate may mask the larger trend in any given year, he said.

“If we are lucky, we will have a series of cold years with circulation patterns that conserve sea ice. Ultimately, however, the greenhouse gases signal will clearly emerge. After that, all of the years will be bad for polar bears … and polar bears ultimately will disappear.”

Julienne Stroeve and her colleagues at the National Snow and Ice Data Center are studying the ripple effects of the shrinking of what Stroeve calls “the air conditioner of the Northern Hemisphere.” She believes the Arctic may be ice-free during the summer within three decades.

“When I first started out studying sea ice, or even just climate in general in the Arctic, I didn’t really think that we were in the midst of this global warming phenomenon yet.

“But then, these last few years when we just continued to see these record ice losses, I started to change my way of thinking and realize that we are having a huge impact on our climate and we’re actually causing the ice cover to pretty much disappear. And, yeah, it’s been alarming – because we don’t really fully understand the implications of this, and I think that’s the biggest fear, is that we really don’t know what we are doing.”

Stroeve said she’s less concerned with the extent of the ice coverage than with the thickness of the ice.

“Generally, older ice is thicker ice – and thickness is the key,” she said.

The 2009-10 winter, for instance, showed average ice coverage. “But some of it is very thin ice and it will melt very quickly when it warms up, she said.

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder said the maximum ice extent was 463,000 square miles below the 1979-2000 average, an area slightly larger than the states of California and Texas combined, a CU-Boulder release said Wednesday.

The measurements tied with those from 2006 as the lowest maximum sea ice extents measured since satellite record keeping began in 1979, they said.

Climate scientists say they believe shrinking Arctic sea ice is tied to warming temperatures in the region, caused by an increase in human-produced greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere.

Citing the downward trend of Arctic sea ice extent in the last decade, some University of Colorado scientists are predicting the Arctic Ocean may be ice free in the summers within the next several decades.

“I think one of the reasons the Arctic sea ice maximum extent is declining is that the autumn ice growth is delayed by warmer temperatures and the ice extent is not able to ‘catch up’ through the winter,” Walt Meier of CU-Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center said. “In addition, the clock runs out on the annual ice growth season as temperatures start to rise along with the sun during the spring months.”

Last week, NASA started up its Operation IceBridge, the third year that it’s sent up a specially-equipped, four turboprop aircraft to study changes in Arctic sea ice

“Each successive IceBridge campaign has broadened in scope,” said IceBridge project scientist Michael Studinger of Goddard Earth Sciences and Technology Center, in a recent NASA news release.

The instruments installed on the P-3B, which flies out of the Thule air base in northern Greenland, now include a magnetometer, gravimeter, airborne topographic mapper, and camera systems which can help judge the extent and depth of sea ice.

Arctic sea ice extent for February 2011 tied with February 2005 as the lowest ever recorded.

As part of the 10-week IceBridge program, the P-3B plans to survey Canadian ice caps, NASA says.

So far, it’s flown over Ellesmere Island to sample the thick multi-year ice north of the island and look at the thinner ice closer to the North Pole.

The P-3B will also fly over the Barnes and Devon ice caps in Nunavut’s High Arctic.

The aircraft is also slated to complete an overnight flight from Thule, to Fairbanks, Alaska, to survey sea ice thickness in across the Arctic Ocean.

It will also fly over the European Space Agency’s ground-based calibration sites for its ice satellite, CryoSat-2.

And measurements collected by the P-3B will add to those made by NASA’s Ice Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), which stopped collecting data in 2009.

Permafrost is ground that has been frozen year-round since before the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago. Back then, mastodons, woolly mammoth, sabre-toothed cats and a whole host of large mammals, including camels, wandered among the grasslands that once covered what is now the High Arctic. Following a major extinction event in the North, all of that animal and plant material became permanently frozen in the ground, storing a lot of carbon with it.

Today, the Arctic is experiencing greater warming than other regions of the planet and the permafrost is melting, releasing all that organic material from its icy tomb. Like thawing out frozen meat, the animal and plant remains rot, releasing methane, which is another greenhouse gas.

But wait – there’s more to come.

Warming in the North is also affecting another form of ice, the permanent ice pack covering the Arctic Ocean. Roughly half of the ice has already disappeared, with predictions that the Arctic water will be free of ice all the way to the North Pole during summer months sooner than the current IPCC prediction of 2050.

In other words, we are quickly changing the colour of the planet.

The top of the world is a white landscape that reflects sunlight back into space to keep us cool. When that white ice turns into dark seawater, the Arctic Ocean becomes a huge solar collector that absorbs radiation from the sun, which accelerates the warming, which speeds up the melting of permafrost and releases more methane, which traps more heat in the atmosphere, which triggers more permafrost melt … well, you get the idea.

The implications of this accelerated warming for Canada are huge. On the one side, all that open water will delight shipping companies looking for a shortcut through the Northwest Passage and those seeking oil in the North. On the other side, those building pipelines, roads or permanent structures will find the land sinking beneath them as the permafrost melts. Buildings will lean, roads will turn to muck and pipelines will bend, possibly break.

That’s not to mention the multitude of effects that warming in the North will have on animal and plant populations.

The bottom line is that our targets for lower carbon emissions from human activity will have to be even lower, because we have triggered a natural cascade of events that will feed back on itself.

Considering how much is at stake for Canada, it’s odd that our country’s efforts to curb emissions are lagging behind those in other parts of the world.

Indeed, through January, the season’s sea-ice return is closely tracking that of ice during the winter of 2006-2007, according to data the center released earlier this week. The below average return of sea ice then contributed to a record low summer-ice extent during the 2007 melt season.

Climate scientists keep close tabs on the Arctic Ocean’s ice – particularly during the sun-drenched melt season – because the ice’s ability to reflect sunlight back into space has a significant influence on climate worldwide, more so than Antarctica’s sea ice, researchers say.

Antarctica’s sea ice builds quickly during its winter months and extends over large areas of the ocean surrounding the continent, even as the Arctic Ocean’s ice retreats.

But Antarctic sea ice shrinks quickly during its melt season, covering only a tiny fraction of the area it spans during the Austral winter, when it’s dark. Arctic Ocean sea ice, by contrast, typically extends over much of the Arctic Ocean, even through the melt season, reflecting sunlight and keeping the region cooler than it otherwise would be.

In January, Arctic sea ice covered 13.6 million square miles of ocean, nearly 20,000 square miles below the previous record low in January 2006 and some 490,000 square miles below the 1979-2000 average.

The drivers for January’s record low extent, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, included a natural climate pattern known as the Arctic Oscillation, as well as residual heat from the Arctic Ocean, captured and retained during the previous melt season.

When the Arctic Oscillation is in a negative phase, wind patterns change in ways that can permit frigid Arctic air to plunge farther south than usual, accounting for below-normal winter temperatures in much of the US in January, including the South.

At the same time however, Arctic temperatures can run above normal during a negative phase. In January, much of the region experienced temperatures between 4 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, according to the NSIDC.

As February began the oscillation switched to a positive phase, which could speed ice growth for a period, according to the center.

But the prognosis for ice extent during the upcoming melt season isn’t good, according to Mark Serreze, who heads the NSIDC.

Even if the ice were to reach a winter expanse nearer normal, “a lot of that ice is thin, first-year stuff, and it’s going to tend to melt out easily” come spring, he says.

Indeed, he adds, the thickness of the ice heading into the melt season is a bigger factor than overall winter extent in determining how severe the spring melt-back is likely to be. Researchers over the past several years have documented a decline in older ice and an increase in thinner ice at the start of the melt season.

“We know right now, that we’ll be continuing that pattern” heading into the 2011 melt season, he says.

Nor is he looking for help from the Arctic Oscillation. While the strong negative this winter has kept things relatively toasty during an Arctic winter, it historically has tended to set up conditions that kept ice in the Arctic Ocean basin during the melt season. Winds also would spread the ice out, allowing more ice to grow in the wide cracks between floes.

Until last year, that is.

In a paper published Jan. 29 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a team led by Julienne Stroeve, also with the NSIDC, found that last winter’s strongly negative Arctic Oscillation had its own unusual circulation pattern, which ultimately provided no help in retaining ice during the 2010 melt season. Instead, last melt season registered the third lowest summer-ice extent on record.

“It appears we’re entering a new regime where old rules don’t apply anyone,” he says.

Since satellites began tracking Arctic sea-ice extend continuously in 1979, the maximum and minimum sea-ice extents have been steadily shrinking, when stacked against their 1979 to 2000 averages.

Researchers attribute the long-term to a self-reinforcing trend, or feedback, associated with global warming. As ice cover shrinks during the melt season, more of the ocean, darker than the ice, is exposed to absorb sunlight and retain it as heat. As fall arrives, the ocean releases the heat, slowing the return of sea ice.

Indeed, researchers are exploring the possibility that increases in ice loss could be driving the Arctic Oscillation into a negative phase more often than not. The jury is still out, Serreze says.

Survey data could improve forecasts of the region’s future, and also show how likely it is that the flow of warm water in the North Atlantic, known as the Gulf Stream, will switch off.

This would bring colder weather to the UK and other parts of western Europe.

“The Arctic is one of best barometers of climate change, where we see big changes taking place today,” said Simon Boxall from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) at the UK’s University of Southampton.

“This is not just about polar bears – it’s about our lives in the UK and in North America.”

In early March, four explorers will set off on foot from the geographic North Pole, trekking across the ice and ending up 10 weeks later in Greenland.

They will make regular stops to drill holes through the floating ice and lower a package of instruments into the water on the end of a piece of rope – instruments that measure the water’s temperature, salinity and flow.

This data will allow scientists to calculate the rate at which the water is sinking.

Salty seas

“We’re measuring the critical 200m layer of water between the ice and the deep ocean beneath,” said Dr Boxall, who conceived the project.

“The hypothesis has been that the layer stays there, trapped, acting to insulate the cold ice from the warm salty water below.

“On the other hand, the water might be taken away more quickly – and that might accelerate the rate of Arctic melting.”

Even in the era of Earth observation satellites and automonous ocean floats, the old-fashioned approach – sending people across the ice to take readings by hand – is really the only one available for this kind of work, he noted.

The findings could prove to be crucial in terms of projecting the future for Arctic sea ice.

Both the area and volume of summer sea ice are steadily shrinking; and the last four summers have seen ice extent fall to sizes that a few years ago were being projected for the latter half of this century.

If mixing in the crucial top ocean layer is happening more, that could help explain the trend and refine models, Dr Boxall said.

The project could also improve forecasts on the climate of western Europe, and much further afield.

The North Atlantic Drift (commonly called the Gulf Stream) brings warm water from the tropics into northern latitudes, where it gives up some of its heat to the air – keeping the UK and neighbouring countries warmer than their latitude alone would suggest.

In colder regions north and west of the UK, winds whip water molecules from the sea, cooling it and making it more saline.

In cold seasons, a layer of ice forms, which again adds to the water’s salinity.

The cold salty water sinks, and eventually returns southward deep in the ocean, forming part of the global thermohaline circulation (THC).

As it sinks, it draws the warm surface waters northwards.

Warmer and fresher water does not sink so readily; and this could could turn off the “ocean conveyor”, a picture painted in heightened Hollywood colour in the movie The Day After Tomorrow.

“Overall, if these changes… contribute to a lowering of the salt content of the North Atlantic, it could have a major impact on the entire planet – from significant temperature drops in Europe to intensified monsoons in Asia,” said Richard Zimmerman, a bio-optics specialist at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, US.

“It may also impact weather patterns throughout North America, including a dramatic increase in the frequency and intensity of severe storms, including hurricanes and tornadoes across the eastern US.”

Recent work at NOC suggests it would be a quick change – if it happens.

It would be likely to cool the UK’s climate, with the sort of winter seen in the last three years becoming the norm.

While the four explorers trek across the sea ice, scientists encamped on Ellef Ringnes Island off the north coast of Greenland will sample seawater and ice for coloured dissolved organic materials (CDOM), which affect the ocean’s absorption of sunlight.

“We’ll be taking ice core sections and melting them, filtering and measuring particulates and the CDOM fraction within melted ice, and measuring algae,” said Victoria Hill, also from Old Dominion University.

Results from the season’s work are expected to be ready for publication in science journals in the first half of next year.

This is the Catlin Arctic Survey’s third season, with ongoing projects focussing on ocean acidification – another consequence of having more CO2 in the atmosphere.

]]> http://arcticfocus.com/survey-to-probe-arctic-ice-melt/feed/ 0 http://arcticfocus.com/russian-move-threatens-polar-bears/ http://arcticfocus.com/russian-move-threatens-polar-bears/#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2011 18:48:47 +0000 SuperUser http://arcticfocus.com/?p=1804 MOSCOW, Feb 1 (Reuters) – Ambitious Arctic drilling plans by oil giant BP (BP.L) and Russia encroach upon key nature reserves, threatening native polar bear and whale populations, an environmental group said on Tuesday.

 The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said a deal last month allowing BP and Russian state-run major Rosneft access to untapped reserves in the Kara Sea violated the boundaries of two Russian national parks in one of the world’s last true wildernesses.

 The conservation group says the area licensed to the oil majors for exploration through to 2040 by the Russian government snips off some 45 square kilometers (17 square miles) of protected land.

 A WWF map shows the Novaya Zemlya archipelago enclosing the Kara Sea to the North and the Yamal Peninsula jutting into the sea’s southern shore could be threatened by the drilling.

 “Surely we are not so desperate for oil that we will tear down the boundaries of protected areas to get it,” Aleksey Knizhnikov of WWF-Russia said in a statement.

 “These protected areas are now in peril. The natural values they were set up to protect — pristine ecosystems, the seabirds, the polar bears, the marine mammals — are in jeopardy,” he added.

 BP said the two oil majors “believe that we can carry out this exploration programme safely and responsibly,” a spokesman for BP in Russia said by telephone.

 “Lessons learned from the Gulf of Mexico incident and spill will be carried through to this project,” he added.

 The two oil majors say the three Kara Sea blocks could contain oil reserves equal to the volumes of the UK North Sea, meaning a lucrative catch of around 60 billion barrels.

 But in the wake of BP’s catastrophic leak in the Gulf of Mexico this spring, experts warn the damage from drilling in the fragile Arctic ecosystem or oil leaks under the ice could be far worse than in warmer deepwater climates.

 The Russian Arctic park, designated by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Novaya Zemlya in 2009, is one of the most important breeding grounds for polar bears, a year-round haven for walrus and home to the rare narwhal and Greenland whale, according to the Russian ministry of natural resources.

WWF activists urged the Russian government to pause oil and gas exploration in the fragile Arctic until strict regulations and preventive measure are put in place to protect the region’s wildlife and fauna.

 “Parking oil rigs beside protected areas is definitely not going to help,” Alexander Shestakov, director of the WWF’s Global Arctic Programme, said in the statement.

 “In the light of the climate driven changes in this region, and across the Arctic, we need to be looking at ways in which we can help Arctic animals and peoples transition to a new and very different reality.”

 The Russian government, a majority shareholder in Rosneft, gets more than 50 percent of its revenues from oil and gas and Putin’s stated aim is to keep producing more than 10 billion barrels a day through 2020.

Waters of the Fram Strait, which runs between Greenland and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, have warmed about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 100 years, according to the study published in the Jan. 28 issue of the journal Science. Temperatures are about 2.5 degrees higher than during the Medieval Warm Period, a time of elevated warmth from A.D. 900 to 1300.

“Such a warming of the Arctic water in the Fram Strait is significantly different from all climate variations in the last 2,000 years,” study lead author Robert Spielhagen of the Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Literature in Mainz, Germany, said in announcing the findings.

“Cold seawater is critical for the formation of sea ice, which helps to cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back to space,” said study co-author Thomas Marchitto, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The Arctic lost sea ice larger than the state of Alaska between 1979 and 2009 and could become ice-free during the summers within the next several decades, according to UC’s National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The WMO, a United Nations agency in Geneva, reported that in 2010 global average temperature was 0.53 degrees Celsius above the running mean – largely equal to the warm weather seen in 2005 and 1998, the two other hottest years on record.

It was ‘an exceptionally warm year over much of Africa and southern and western Asia, and in Greenland and Arctic

Canada, with many parts of these regions having their hottest years on record,’ the WMO said in a statement.

Arctic sea-ice cover, which is seeing a radical decline due to warming, is considered by scientists to be a moderating force for the global climate.

However, on the flip side of warming temperatures in some regions, it was ‘abnormally cold through large parts of northern and western Europe’ and some part of the eastern United States, with winter temperatures far below average.

Monthly mean temperatures were as much as 10 degrees below average in some areas of Norway and Sweden.

Last year also saw what the WMO termed ‘a high number of extreme weather events.’ These included the summer heatwave in Russia and the devastating monsoonal floods in Pakistan. Sri Lanka, Brazil, Australia were also hit hard by floods.

]]> http://arcticfocus.com/un-2010-ties-record-for-warmest-year-arctic-ice-in-decline/feed/ 0 http://arcticfocus.com/1784/ http://arcticfocus.com/1784/#comments Sat, 15 Jan 2011 11:59:03 +0000 SuperUser http://arcticfocus.com/?p=1784

NOVO-OGARYOVO, January 15 (Itar-Tass) — BP and Rosneft will jointly develop oil and gas fields on the Russian Arctic shelf, and investments into the project will reach tens of billions of dollars, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at a meeting with the leadership of the British Petroleum company.

The resources of oil in question stand at 5 billion tonnes, and those of gas, at 10 trillion cubic meters,” said Putin. “These are serious figures that need further confirmation, but they are quite realistic and I hope that these estimated resources will become proven reserves.”

He added that “such work would require an investment of tens of billions of dollars and advanced technologies.”

Russia will create a favorable tax regimen for the BP and Rosneft in their joint development of the Russian Arctic shelf, Putin said.

“The Russian government intends to create the most favorable tax treatment for this project,” he said.

He declared that the BP and Rosneft had achieved “far-reaching agreements on joint work in offshore projects in Russia and in third countries.”

“I want to inform you that the Russian government supports this joint work,” he continued. This work can acquire a large scale and have a significant impact on the world oil and gas industry.”

Putin said that the Russian side was aware of the fact that these companies may face some risks. “In this regard, we cannot but welcome the idea of establishing a special research center for offshore issues,” he said.

Putin also congratulated Rosneft and the BP upon growth in the prices of their shares.

“BP and Rosneft have started to grow,” he said. “I wish to congratulate you.”

About the oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico last year, Putin said: “There is a good saying – wit once bought is worth twice taught.”

“Our experts have scrutinized the tragedy, we know that BP was the organizer of the project, but there were also eight sub-contractors, including major U.S. companies,” Putin said. “This indicates that together, we must carefully analyze everything that happens from the beginning regarding offshore projects,” Putin said.

Rosneft is the leader of the Russian oil industry and one of the largest public oil and gas companies worldwide. The principal activities of Rosneft are exploration and production of oil and gas, production of petroleum products and petrochemicals, and marketing of these products. The company is on the list of strategic enterprises in Russia. Its major shareholder (75.16 percent of shares) is the company Rosneftegaz, 100 percent state-owned.

Rosneft has 22.9 billion barrels of proven reserves, which is one of the best indicators among the public oil and gas companies worldwide. By its reserves of liquid hydrocarbons Rosneft is the undisputed leader. Its current proven reserves are big enough to last 26 years, and most of its fields are classified as traditional, which makes it possible to effectively increase production.

The corporation British Petroleum is one of the largest oil companies in the world. Currently it is present in more than 100 countries, and its staff numbers more than 80 thousand. It is headquartered in London.

BP owns refineries and petrochemical enterprises and a network filling stations, and it produces oil and lubricants. It owns shares in ten pipelines and five regasification terminals in the North Sea, in a pipeline in Alaska, as well as in several terminals for liquefied natural gas in the Gulf of Mexico. Currently, BP produces about 4 million barrels of oil per day, which is about 5 percent of total global daily production.

In Russia, BP is a co-owner of the oil company TNK-BP on a par with Russia’s Alfa-Access-Renova. TNK-BP, formed in 2003, is one of the leading oil companies in Russia and among the ten largest private oil companies in the world in terms of crude oil production. TNK-BP produces 60-70 million tonnes of oil annually, accounting for 23 percent of the total production of British Petroleum. “