Mark Serreze, University of Colorado Boulder
With the setting of the sun and the onset of polar darkness, the Arctic Ocean would normally be crusted with sea ice along the Siberian coast by now. But this year, the water is still open.
I’ve watched the region’s transformations since the 1980s as an Arctic climate scientist and, since 2008, as director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center. I can tell you, this is not normal. There’s so much more heat in the ocean now than there used to be that the pattern of autumn ice growth has been completely disrupted.
To understand what’s happening to the sea ice this year and why it’s a problem, let’s look back at the summer and into the Arctic Ocean itself.
Siberia’s 100-degree summer
The summer melt season in the Arctic started early. A Siberian heat wave in June pushed air temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit at Verkhoyansk, Russia, for the first time on record, and unusual heat extended over much of the Arctic for weeks.
The Arctic as a whole this past summer was at its warmest since at least 1979, when satellite measurements started providing data allowing for full coverage of the Arctic.
With that heat, large areas of sea ice melted out early, and that melting launched a feedback process: The loss of reflective sea ice exposed dark open ocean, which readily absorbs the sun’s heat, promoting even more ice melt.
The Northern Sea Route, along the Russian coast, was essentially free of ice by the middle of July. That may be a dream for shipping interests, but it’s bad news for the rest of the planet.
Warmth sneaks in underwater
The warm summer is only part of the explanation for this year’s unusual sea ice levels.
Streams of warmer water from the Atlantic Ocean flow into the Arctic at the Barents Sea. This warmer, saltier Atlantic water is usually fairly deep under the more buoyant Arctic water at the surface. Lately, however, the Atlantic water has been creeping up. That heat in the Atlantic water is helping to keep ice from forming and melting existing sea ice from below.
It’s a process called “Atlantification”. The ice is now getting hit both from the top by a warming atmosphere and at the bottom by a warming ocean. It’s a real double whammy.
While we’re still trying to catch up with all of the processes leading to Atlantification, it’s here and it’s likely to get stronger. https://www.youtube.com/embed/C17-Z_sl5cI?wmode=transparent&start=0
Climate change’s assault on sea ice
In the background of all of this is global climate change.
The Arctic sea ice extent and thickness have been dropping for decades as global temperatures rise. This year, when the ice reached its minimum extent in September, it was the second lowest on record, just behind that of 2012.
As the Arctic loses ice and the ocean absorbs more solar radiation, global warming is amplified. That can affect ocean circulation, weather patterns and Arctic ecosystems spanning the food chain, from phytoplankton all the way to top predators.
On the Atlantic side of the Arctic, open water this year extended to within 5 degrees of the North Pole. The new Russian Icebreaker Arktika, on its maiden voyage, found easy sailing all the way to the North Pole. A goal of its voyage was to test how the nuclear-powered ship handled thick ice, but instead of the hoped-for 3-meter-thick ice, most of the ice was in a loose pack. It was little more than 1 meter thick, offering little resistance.
For sea ice to build up again this year, the upper layer of the Arctic Ocean needs to lose the excess heat it picked up during summer.
The pattern of regional anomalies in ice extent is different each year, reflecting influences like regional patterns of temperature and winds. But today, it’s superimposed on the overall thinning of the ice as global temperatures rise. Had the same atmospheric patterns driving this year’s big ice loss off Siberia happened 30 years ago, the impact would have been much less, as the ice was more resilient then and could have taken a punch. Now it can’t.
Is sea ice headed for a tipping point?
The decay of the Arctic sea ice cover shows no sign of stopping. There probably won’t be a clear tipping point for the sea ice, though.
Research so far suggests we’ll stay on the current path, with the amount of ice declining and weather systems more easily disrupting the ice because it’s thinner and weaker than it used to be. https://www.youtube.com/embed/vtM9KTVGFVw?wmode=transparent&start=0
The bigger picture
This year’s events in the Arctic are just part of the climate change story of 2020.
Global average temperatures have been at or near record highs since January. The West has been both hot and dry – the perfect recipe for massive wildfires – and warm water in the Gulf of Mexico has helped fuel more tropical storms in the Atlantic than there are letters in the alphabet. If you’ve been ignoring climate change and hoping that it will just go away, now would be an appropriate time to pay attention.
Mark Serreze, Research Professor of Geography and Director, National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado Boulder
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Lots of snow in northern Russia at least, northern hemisphere snow cover is above normal.
https://globalcryospherewatch.org/state_of_cryo/snow/
While the southern hemisphere snow is on the low side, the sea ice is on the high side.
And the trend is…..
Regards, MagneO
Earlier today I was reading yhis
3 More New Studies Show Modern Arctic Sea Ice Extent Is Greater Than Nearly Any Time In The Last 10,000 Years
https://notrickszone.com/2020/10/29/3-more-new-studies-show-modern-arctic-sea-ice-extent-is-greater-than-nearly-any-time-in-the-last-10000-years/
Read this one from 1922. It´s happened before!
changing-artic_monthly_wx_review.png
So, how many times in the last 10,000 to 15,000 years has ice along the Siberian Coast not been there or greatly reduced in extent compared to any time in the last 100 years??
What if anything is unique about today’s climate that has not occurred numerous times in the past?
Maybe if it gets warm enough we can once again have Vikings settle Greenland as they did about 1000 years ago.
As incredible as it seems, we are deep into a group think, Orwellian-Lysenkian world in which political ideology predominates and real science is used as a hammer to coerce the imposition of a leftist political agenda.
His chart goes back to 1979; as if the last 40 years or so is representative of what??? Oh, that’s right, of the last 40 years.
What total bullshit.
I’ll bet there was less ice cover before the last glaciation….
Why all the emphasis on the extreme minimum which is super sensitive to the variable weather showing huge swings. The ice extent on or about July 21 has been essentially identical for the past 10 years. Isn’t that a better metric? I.ve made this comment before, come on someone help me out.
“I.ve made this comment before, come on someone help me out.”
I’m probably not the someone you’re looking for….
The ice comes back every year 14-16 million square kilometers (about 5.4-6.2 million square miles), 2020 max’d out with 15 million, same as in 2009.
According to NSIDC, the average maximum extent for 1979-2000 was 15.46 million square kilometers (5.96 million square miles).
Not much of a change there so let’s make reduction in “multi year ice” a problem, or not.
“In August, 1922, the Norwegian Department of Commerce sent an expedition to Spitsbergen and Bear Island under Dr. Adolf Hoel, lecturer on geology at the University of Christiania. The oceanographic observations (reported that) Ice conditions were exceptional. In fact, so little ice has never before been noted. The expedition all but established a record, sailing as far north as 81o29′ in ice-free water. This is the farthest north ever reached with modern oceanographic apparatus…..”
https://judithcurry.com/2013/04/10/historic-variations-in-arctic-sea-ice-part-ii-1920-1950/
In other news on planet fireball, the Antarctic sea ice extent is greater than in 1980, 13.2 vs 12.5 million Km². Wrap up if you’re thinking of going out, it’s -50°c today.
Thanks Climate Believer, that helps. More proof that the more things change the more they stay the same.
It will come as a considerable shock to Serreze that he’s the one who’s been ignoring climate change. He seems to think the climate is static? Does he think Dr. Mann’s fraudulent, as admitted by himself, hockey stick is an accurate reflection of reality? Does he deny the MWP and LIA? Does he deny that the climate is still recovering from the Little Ice Age?
Serreze is just doing what most climate scientists do, fear mongering to protect their funding. The timing, of his propaganda sheet, shortly before the election is teling.
This is not normal? Only in the time we have been observing accurarely, 50-60 years.
Bad news for the rest of the planet? Only if you believe that a somewhat warmer world is bad news.
The ocean contains much more heat than before? I though Keith was still looking for it.
And that feedback on open water. That must work everywhere near the edge of ice fields, just like it always did.
Sereeze says “I’ve watched the region’s transformations since the 1980s ….I can tell you, this is not normal.”
No , the late 1970s was certainly NOT NORMAL.
It was an extreme outliar, up there with the extents of the Little Ice Age
You would think someone in his position would actually know this.
But apparently he is as ignorant as griff. !
This is the same problem Dr. Ian Stirling has with polar bears. You study something, you know more and more about less and less until, finally, you know everything about nothing. I used to joke that Ian knew every polar bear on a first name basis. Even so, he’s obviously wrong about polar bear survival in a seasonally ice free arctic. As far as I can tell, the arctic has been seasonally ice free for most of the Holocene.
Similarly, what Serrez says about how the arctic loses ice rings true. The same as with Stirling, his alarmism is ill informed because the arctic appears to have been seasonally ice free for most of the Holocene. example
Exceptional! can be considered great!! Positive! Beneficial! This pseudo-science activist is lamenting the melting of poor, sad, hapless ICE! Frozen water! Dead frozen water! So sad. This guy has been drinking too many Icees and his brain is frozen.
Is this right – that barely half the sea level rise is from anthropogenic causes?
It is from the IPCC report:
https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chapter/chapter-4-sea-level-rise-and-implications-for-low-lying-islands-coasts-and-communities/
4.2.2.5.2
Attribution of global mean sea level change to anthropogenic forcing
By estimating a probabilistic upper range of long-term persistent natural sea level variability, Dangendorf et al. (2015) detected a fraction of observed sea level change that is unexplained by natural variability and concluded by inference that it is virtually certain that at least 45% of the observed increase in GMSL since 1900 is attributable to anthropogenic forcing. Similarly, Becker et al. (2014) provided statistical evidence that the observed sea level trend, both in the global mean and at selected tide gauge locations, is not consistent with unforced, internal variability. They inferred that more than half of the observed GMSL trend during the 20th century is attributable to anthropogenic forcing.
Slangen et al. (2016) reconstructed GMSL from 1900 to 2005 based on CMIP5 model simulations separating individual components of radiative climate forcing and combining the contributions of thermosteric sea level change with glacier and ice sheet mass loss. They found that the naturally caused sea level change, including the long-term adjustment of sea level to climate change preceding 1900, caused 67 ± 23% of observed change from 1900 to 1950, but only 9 ± 18% between 1970 and 2005. Anthropogenic forcing was found to have caused 15 ± 55% of observed sea level change during 1900–1950, but 69 ± 31% during 1970–2005. The sum of all contributions explains only 74 ± 22% of observed GMSL change during the period 1900–2005 considering the mean of the reconstructions of Church and White (2011), Ray and Douglas (2011), Jevrejeva et al. (2014b) and Hay et al. (2015). However, the budget could be closed taking into contribution of glaciers that are missing from the global glacier inventory or have already melted (Parkes and Marzeion, 2018) which were not considered in Slangen et al. (2016).
Based on these multiple lines of evidence, there is high confidence that anthropogenic forcing very likely is the dominant cause of observed GMSL rise since 1970.
———
So they added a bit to get the 45% to over 50% and can say that anthropocentric is the dominant cause?
PS It was page 343 of my hard copy, but seems a bit different online.
So Russia has wasted perfectly good money in building Arktika, the latest nuclear powered monster ice-breaker ?
Can you envision that they will commission such a vessel just for fun leisure cruises ?
Oh, for crying out loud. The sea ice will form like it always does. Ice is an insulator; no ice means the arctic water will lose heat. Then freeze like normal. Geez, does everything always have to be dialed up to 11.
Oh, for crying out loud. The sea ice will form like it always does. Ice is an insulator; no ice means the arctic water will lose heat. Then freeze like normal. Geez, does everything always have to be dialed up to 11.
P.S. This article was written by someone in Boulder–need I say more.
Concerning Griff, et al,
I feel he does have a value to us.
(Apart from entertainment, that is.)
He’s not much of a “devil’s advocate”, but he gives it a good try, considering what little he has to work with.
“Troll”is not the right word. That’s unfair.
Can I suggest that he continues to get his ass kicked, but with good humour?
I think I’d miss him. Is it just me? 🙂
(I don’t often comment, but I read regularly.)
Griff’s more of a Devil’s Avocado if you ask me
“Devil’s Avocado” is very funny
Hellstinki, who’s your ghostwriter?
I suspect that the avocado nut is bigger than griff’s brain, though.
The rest is just green mushy pulp.
Questions for Dr. Serezze: Do you expect any part of climate to be forever static? Would rapidly advancing ice sheets be better or worse for life on Earth?
Just more fear mongering from a profess.
Isn’t this just a long form version of the “Arctic is screaming”?
Serreze is utterly dependent on assumption (This has not happened before, not normal) without any real evidence for that claim, a claim that also willfully ignores the immense uncertainty in modeling (so much so that NOAA can get a following season’s forecast 100% wrong
You literally have to believe the pages and mann hockeystick shenanigans to assume change is happening at a rate that is not normal and that this didn’t happen before (the latter claim has even less evidence, almost none)
Given the sea ice levels of the last 10,000 years, I’d say Serreze is like Holthaus, fighting some personal demon and using the climate battle as a proxy (The Thunberg family also do this, the father admitted as much to BBC, and like the others, cash in financially or in career)
If anti-griff was here, he would point out that on November 12, the sun will not rise again in Arctic Bay Canada until Feb……it will truly be a Cold Dark Winter there. Anti-griff would note that the recent snow and cold front that hit Canada and parts of the USA set some record cold temps and the amount of snow cover plus the latitude meant that it reflected more solar radiation than the arctic is absorbing. Anti-griff is also fond of pointing out that even though 2012 was a low ice year in the arctic, 2013 produced a remarkable rebound.
Mark Serreze “In the background of all of this is global climate change.“.
No it’s not.
Mark doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and no one else knows any better.
As Antarctic sea ice has been perfectly stable over the last 4 decades at least this is not GLOBAL climate change. Sea ice is a perfect thermometer.
The fact that Antarctic sea ice is perfectly stable is proof that CO2 is not affecting GLOBAL climate. CO2 should also have melted Antarctic sea ice since there is about as much CO2 over the southern hemisphere as over the northern hemisphere…..
How’s Antarctica doing? ….. Mark, griff, anyone ??
Antarctica is basically the same as it has been for the last century – near record ice cover….Anti-griff told me this information.
What can’t antlantification do ??
atlantification even
Too early to be thinking of reindeers phil
philincalifornia
” How’s Antarctica doing? ”
So it does:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CPSG0C_h9i1HjDTrF2Vmj84A6t2p3t9O/view
But the sum of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extent might surprise you a bit:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YiaEnD5ywRCU4nY9x-OZh1ThLNaC2VNe/view
J.-P. D.
The ideal temperature of the planet for life is at least 2 deg. C warmer than this and CO2 levels double the current levels.
We are supposed to believe, absurdly that the ideal temperature of the planet was exactly when humans started burning fossil fuels and this also just happened to be when CO2 levels were perfect and Arctic sea ice was also where it always needs to stay.
What if humans would have advanced a couple hundred years faster?
I guess that perfect temperature would have been defined as colder(during the Little Ice Age).
Although advancement, world crop production and other related items probably would not have happened then because it was too COLD for life!
It’s a climate optimum for life on this greening planet by all authentic scientific standards.
Just so happens that the ideal temperature is higher and humans developed along coastlines falsely assuming the the climate would never warm up and are bent out of shape worrying over sea level rise.
Arctic sea ice was LOWER than this during the Holocene climate OPTIMUM, 9,000 to 5,000 years ago.
Sea ice is already floating in the water and does not contribute to sea levels.
Antarctic ice and Greenland ice melting does.
Fake news.
I’m not kidding. You look at the calculated sea-ice extents and there is less natural variation before 1980 than the uncertainty of modern measurements using satellites. Somehow, this imperceptible change scared prominent scientist 70-80 years ago into seeing a drastic reduction in sea ice that would lead an ice free arctic by the 70s!
We’re they tripping?
Perhaps the ‘scientists’ could learn from The Bard from 400 years ago:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
– Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio
your philosophy ] i.e., philosophy (or learning) in general.
The emphasis here should be on “dreamt of”, as Hamlet is pointing out how little even the most educated people can explain.
It will be interesting to see how the warm water progresses further eastward. Warm North Atlantic water has flown into the Arctic ocean in the nineties and 2000’s starting near Svalbard. Where it melts Arctic ice more water vapor fills the air that is causing more low pressure areas that suck in warm moist air from the south. High atmospheric turbulence (storms) mixes cold fresh upper water with deeper warmer water, bringing upward the deeper heat. When the warmer water will further shift eastwards at some point weather patterns over Svalbard and Nova Zembla will change back to a colder mode. It will be interesting to see when the growth of ice over the Barents Sea will restart. Last year already showed more sea ice north of Svalbard. The Polarstern frozen in the north could not be reached well by ice breakers.
When actual wind patterns will shift from the North Atlantic further to the East a big change can be expected. Unless once more warm water will flow from the North Atlantic into the Arctic. My guess: a change in weather pattern over the North Atlantic/Svalbard will induce cooling, preventing further warm inflows. The next phase of a cycle. Living in the Netherlands I already observed the last years more northeast and northern winds.
While the Earth is bouncing back from the Little Ice Age a general warming pattern is normal. That warming comes to expression in the North. The South Pole has a nearly independent stable high pressure area over the ice cap. While warm air flows upward over the Arctic cold stratospheric air is continuing to flow down over the Antarctic.
Oceans are already cooling for six thousand years. The reason is simple. Obliquity changes, less Sun over high northern latitudes causes cooling at that latitudes without (!) resulting in a warming over the tropics. While the tropics get more solar all ‘extra heat’ is convected away from the surface and lost for the higher latitudes. Tropical oceans are constrained to a maximum temperature of 30 degrees Celsius. Whatever the influx of energy.
But a cooling Earth shows a higher variability than a continuous warm Earth shows. Extreme warming events are to expect when the Earth is cooling followed by more extreme cooling events. The problem is the time scale: those ‘big cycles’ can only be seen over a time span of centuries. The Little Ice Age was a big cooling event, right now we are in a big warming event. What’s next, are we already at the top of the warming period? Or not yet? Interesting years to come.