Students on Ice Blog

From the Globe and Mail:

ALISTER DOYLE

April 28, 2009 at 8:38 AM EDT

TROMSOE, Norway — A fast melt of ice from the Andes to the Arctic should be a wake-up call for governments to work out a strong new United Nations treaty this year to fight climate change, Norway said today.

Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere, starting two-day talks of the eight Arctic nations and scientists in the northern city of Tromsoe, said ice was vanishing from land around the planet as temperatures increase, raising sea levels.

“It is a global phenomenon reflecting global warming,” he told a news conference, referring to a thaw in places such as “the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes, Kilimanjaro, Greenland, the South Pole or the North Pole.”

Mr. Stoere said he and former U.S. vice president Al Gore, also attending the Tromsoe talks, planned to set up a task force of experts to study the melt and report to a UN conference in Copenhagen in December that is due to spark a new climate pact.

Latest evidence of the melt would be a “clarion call, a real wake-up message to Copenhagen,” he said.

Many glaciers are retreating but, until now, he said the links between a thaw on mountains in the tropics and the Arctic have not been highlighted enough, he said. Vanishing ice “is not in the grey zone of probabilities, it is about to happen. It is serious, we have to deal with it.”

The UN Climate Panel projected in 2007 world sea levels would rise by between 18 and 59 centimetres this century. Some scientists have said the rate is likely to be closer to a metre.

That can impact irrigation. A melt of the Himalayas could disrupt farming for hundreds of millions of people in Asia.

The UN has projected up to a quarter of global food production could be lost by 2050 due to a combination of climate change, water scarcity, degradation and species infestation, as the world’s population is forecast to top nine billion.

“The Arctic continues to warm,” according to a report by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, grouping scientists in the region. It said several indicators since a major 2005 report “show further and extensive climate change at rates faster than previously anticipated.”

Sea ice in summer shrank to a record low in 2007.

Mr. Stoere will hold talks about melting ice today before a formal meeting of Arctic Council foreign ministers or deputies on Wednesday in the Arctic city of Tromsoe, ringed by snow-capped mountains.

The Council groups the United States, Russia, Canada, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland.

He said there were chances for co-operation in the Arctic, saying he hoped it would be “high north, low tension.”

Countries could act regionally to reduce pollution that accelerates the melt, he added. Soot from industrial pollution or from forest fires, for instance, can blacken snow and make it melt faster.

From NASA

Satellites Show Arctic Literally on Thin Ice
04.06.09

Credit: NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio

Additional imagery and background information for this story can be found here.

The latest Arctic sea ice data from NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center show that the decade-long trend of shrinking sea ice cover is continuing. New evidence from satellite observations also shows that the ice cap is thinning as well.

Arctic sea ice works like an air conditioner for the global climate system. Ice naturally cools air and water masses, plays a key role in ocean circulation, and reflects solar radiation back into space. In recent years, Arctic sea ice has been declining at a surprising rate.

Scientists who track Arctic sea ice cover from space announced today that this winter had the fifth lowest maximum ice extent on record. The six lowest maximum events since satellite monitoring began in 1979 have all occurred in the past six years (2004-2009).

Until recently, the majority of Arctic sea ice survived at least one summer and often several. But things have changed dramatically, according to a team of University of Colorado, Boulder, scientists led by Charles Fowler. Thin seasonal ice — ice that melts and re-freezes every year — makes up about 70 percent of the Arctic sea ice in wintertime, up from 40 to 50 percent in the 1980s and 1990s. Thicker ice, which survives two or more years, now comprises just 10 percent of wintertime ice cover, down from 30 to 40 percent.

According to researchers from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., the maximum sea ice extent for 2008-09, reached on Feb. 28, was 5.85 million square miles. That is 278,000 square miles less than the average extent for 1979 to 2000.

“Ice extent is an important measure of the health of the Arctic, but it only gives us a two-dimensional view of the ice cover,” said Walter Meier, research scientist at the center and the University of Colorado, Boulder. “Thickness is important, especially in the winter, because it is the best overall indicator of the health of the ice cover. As the ice cover in the Arctic grows thinner, it grows more vulnerable to melting in the summer.”

The Arctic ice cap grows each winter as the sun sets for several months and intense cold sets in. Some of that ice is naturally pushed out of the Arctic by winds, while much of it melts in place during summer. The thicker, older ice that survives one or more summers is more likely to persist through the next summer.

Sea ice thickness has been hard to measure directly, so scientists have typically used estimates of ice age to approximate its thickness. But last year a team of researchers led by Ron Kwok of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., produced the first map of sea ice thickness over the entire Arctic basin.

Using two years of data from NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), Kwok’s team estimated thickness and volume of the Arctic Ocean ice cover for 2005 and 2006. They found that the average winter volume of Arctic sea ice contained enough water to fill Lake Michigan and Lake Superior combined.

The older, thicker sea ice is declining and is being replaced with newer, thinner ice that is more vulnerable to summer melt, according to Kwok. His team found that seasonal sea ice averages about 6 feet in thickness, while ice that had lasted through more than one summer averages about 9 feet, though it can grow much thicker in some locations near the coast.

Kwok is currently working to extend the ICESat estimate further, from 2003 to 2008, to see how the recent decline in the area covered by sea ice is mirrored in changes in its volume.

“With these new data on both the area and thickness of Arctic sea ice, we will be able to better understand the sensitivity and vulnerability of the ice cover to changes in climate,” Kwok said.