Dr. Susan Crockford
Not even three weeks after the yearly minimum of sea ice extent was reached this year, new shorefast ice is already forming off the coast of Siberia, which is critical fall hunting habitat for polar bears.
So, not only was this year’s sea ice extent for September at the very lowest extreme of predicted levels for late summer, given ever-increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, new ice seems to be forming earlier in the fall as well, which bodes well for winter ice formation. It’s looking to me like the decade-long increasing trend of September ice extent since 2012 (see below) may indicate a change more biologically relevant to ice-dependent Arctic animals than the zero trend since 2007.
Shorefast ice across the Arctic
Virtually everywhere in the peripheral seas of the Arctic Ocean (Barents, Kara, Laptev, Chukchi, Beaufort, as well as Baffin Bay and Davis Strait, shorefast ice thick enough to support a polar bear forms before the mobile ice pack in the central Arctic expands to the shores of the peripheral seas (below). The Laptev Sea is often the first to experience this new shorefast ice formation because of the bitterly cold winds that blow north from Siberia.
As I’ve explained in detail previously, this new ice formation creates nutrient-rich upwelling, which attracts fish to feed on the planktonic organisms that proliferate at the surface; like clock-work, seals arrive to feed on these fish and those seals provide a predictable food source for polar bears that have spent the summer fasting onshore.
Sea ice along Laptev Sea coast
New sea ice formation at 5 October, select years since 2006 (below), courtesy NISDC MASIE, shows new ice forming in 2022, 2021, and 2017 but not in previous years (only a few shown for brevity):
I’m happy for the polar bears having some new hunting opportunities, and thanks to Dr. Susan for reporting it. I see another hunting opportunity, that EM-Bird is a helicopter with people inside: Spam in a Can. Don’t go there.
A climate miracle!
Russia has performed nada towards the many Western Civilization
Anthropogenic Global Warming,Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming,Climate Weirding,Climate Disruption,Climate Amplification, climate change alleged goals to prevent, whatever…Could it be that the obsessively melodramatic CO₂ activists have lied to the world?
That’s a definite YES!
Thank you Dr. Crockford!
Great news, well for those obsessive melodramatic activist lunatics who claim the world needs colder weather or it will cascade disasters from imagined nebulous climate tipping points.
Me? I’d like some of that alleged warmer weather, later frosts, earlier end of frosts; unlike this year!
I’ve been carrying plants from the outside into the house to protect them from a possible early frost. It came all too soon this year.
My plants are moving tonight – two weeks before the “normal” first frost date. I’ll cover the other ones. I am getting too old for this global warming.
Satellite records of sea ice extent suffer from the relatively short observation period.
Climate Etc.:
‘Arctic sea ice extents have shown a lot of variability over the last 10,000 years (at least), so we shouldn’t be too surprised that the extents have substantially changed since the start of the satellite records in 1978. Despite the widespread belief that the current Arctic sea ice coverage is “unusually low” (based on a combination of the 1978-present satellite records and computer model results), it seems that the coverage was actually a lot lower 6,000-8,000 years ago’.
The current Arctic sea ice extent is well within naturally occurring Holocene climate variations and Polar Bears have done alright during greater climate fluctuations of the past 150,000 years at least.
It’s the thought that humans may have contributed to the post-1979 trend that upsets alarmists.
dive masters in Cabo San Lucas already seeing whales. several weeks earlier than usual.
Its probably the ice advances and retreats in the current period between ice ages that led to the evolution of polar bears from the other large brown bears in the last 350,000 to 475,000 years
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/polar-bears-diverged-from-brown-bears-fairly-recently/
Interesting was the ability to take on such a high fat diet, which would normally shorten your life which in humans is known as bad cholesterol
Forced to adapt by climate change 100 of thousands of years ago ? yes, its what drives a lot of evolution including our own species
So if the long decline in sea ice was attributable to Crises Anthro Global Warming because of a 30% increase in CO2, is the 10yr recovery of sea ice since 2012 and the 8 years of cooling attributable to 10% more added CO2? Yeah, they explained that global warming also causes global cooling. This definitely isn’t rocket science, it’s something more complicated.
It shows CO2 to be fairly irrelevant to the cyclical natural patterns.
Tonight the frost will reach Illinois and Indiana.
Very soon the Hudson Bay will begin to freeze over.
and parts of Kentucky
It’s winter all over Siberia. Due to the pattern of the polar vortex, air will soon begin to flow into Canada directly from Siberia.
If the ice is forming earlier then the hunting season for the Polar Bears may well go on longer; more well-fed bears means larger sustained populations, what a huge success story.
Sorry, but winter in North America starts earlier.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2022/10/08/2200Z/wind/isobaric/70hPa/orthographic=-79.31,66.34,446