Earth’s Poles Are Melting

Credit: NASA/Kate Ramsayer

Like ice cream left out in the summer sun, our Arctic and Antartic regions are slowly melting.

The 2016 Arctic Report Card, just published by NOAA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, presents a dim future. It reveals a complex of multiple interrelated issues putting enormous stress on the Arctic.

Rising air and sea temperatures, loss and thinning of sea ice, ocean acidification and melting permafrost lead the list of diseases afflicting the Arctic. If the Arctic were a patient, doctors would give it little hope.

In typical sciencey understatement, the report begins by stating that a “persistent warming trend and loss of sea ice are triggering extensive Arctic changes.” Indeed.

Want the bad news? Ok, here it is:

• 2016 is likely to be the warmest year on record.
• The spring snow cover in the North American Arctic was the lowest since satellite records began in 1967.
• In 37 years of monitoring the spring melt in Greenland, only one year started earlier than this year.
• The Arctic sea ice in November was the lowest on record.
• Sea surface temperatures in the Barents and Chukchi Seas were 5 degrees Celsius warmer than normal in July and August.
• Melting permafrost in the Arctic is releasing carbon that has been trapped in frozen soil for hundreds of thousands of years.
• Species are moving northward, while those that can’t get any further north—polar bears—could see a population decline of 30 percent in the coming decades.

“We are witnessing changes in the Arctic that will impact generations to come,” said Margaret Williams, managing director for U.S. Arctic programs for WWF. “Warmer temperatures and dwindling sea ice not only threaten the future of Arctic wildlife, but also its local cultures and communities. These changes are impacting our entire planet, causing weather patterns to shift and sea levels to rise.”

Norwegian research vessel RV Lance deliberately trapped in Arctic ice during a 2015 expedition. Source: Monica Votvik/Norwegian Polar Institute.

New information published this week in Nature comes from a 2015 voyage by the Norwegian Polar Institute that deliberately froze its research vessel, RV Lance, into the ice pack north of Svalbard.

“We saw a new Arctic where the ice is much thinner, only 3 to 4 feet thick,” said Mats Granskog at the Norwegian Polar Institute. “And this ice functions very differently than it did 10 years ago.”

Younger, thinner sea ice freezes later and melts sooner. Strong winds can move large areas of thin ice, as it did in Hudson Bay in May of 2015. High winds from the northwest pushed the winter ice east, creating open water. Polar bears were forced off the ice a month sooner than normal.

At the other end of the world, things aren’t looking much better.

• A 70-mile crack in the Larsen C ice shelf is set to calve off an iceberg the size of Delaware.
• A separate rift in the ice of West Antarctica is forcing the British to relocate their Halley VI Research Station 14 miles east to avoid being stranded at sea.
• The sea ice around Antarctica in November was 699,000 square miles short of normal.
• Melting Antarctic ice sheets are reducing the salinity of the Southern Ocean.
• Researchers from NASA and the University of California, Irvine (UCI) have detected the fastest rates of glacial retreat ever observed in West Antarctica.

The British Antartic Survey’s Halley VI Research Station must be moved 14 miles across the ice to avoid being stranded. Source: British Antarctic Survey.

With dangerous implications for the planet, what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic.

“The Arctic is an integral part of the larger Earth system where multiple interactions unite its natural and human components,” wrote researchers C.J. Vörösmarty and L.D. Hinzman in the 2016 Arctic Report Card.

One of those interactions concerns people living in coastal communities.

One-quarter of the world’s population lives in coastal areas that will become uninhabitable by 2100. That’s the message of a special edition of Earth’s Future, a journal published by the American Geophysical Union earlier this week.

More than 130 cities with populations over one million are at risk. In the U.S. alone, along the Gulf coasts of Florida, Mississippi and Alabama, storm surges will wash away barrier islands and flood coastal cities. Flooding in agricultural areas will increase 189 percent along the Gulf coast.

“Rising sea level represents a significant threat to coastal communities and ecosystems, including altered habitats and increased vulnerability to coastal storms and recurrent inundation,” the journal states.

As our ice cream melts, its effects are going to drip all over the world.