New evidence suggests that the Arctic ice cap could disappear in summer within the next five years, leaving environmentalists in despair but oil men delighted.
From Timesonline
When Marika Holland announced the imminent demise of the Arctic ice cap 18 months ago, she was worried.
Her findings, based on predictions from one of the world’s most powerful super-computers, had been double-checked and peer-reviewed – but they still seemed extreme.
“We were suggesting the Arctic ice cap could disappear in a few decades,” said Holland, a senior researcher at America’s National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. “We were confident of our methods but it still felt very dramatic.”
What Holland and her colleagues from the University of Washington and McGill University in Canada had done was analyse the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the Arctic – and predict that its summertime ice cap could vanish by 2040.
The corollary was that in the longer term it could vanish in winter too. Future explorers would have to use boats rather than sleds.
The idea that the Arctic ice might shrink had been around for a long time but the suggestion that it could disappear, and so quickly, caused a storm.
Pretty soon the climate change sceptics were at work. Holland and her colleagues, they pointed out, had based their work on a computer model – and such models were hardly accurate enough to predict more than a few days of weather. How could they make predictions over decades?
Within just a few months, however, Holland’s findings were borne out even more dramatically than anyone could have expected.
Each year scientists use satellites to measure the area of the Arctic ice cap as it grows and shrinks with the seasons. In winter it normally reaches about 5.8m square miles before receding to about 2.7m square miles in summer.
Last summer, however, things suddenly changed. For day after day the sun shone, raising water temperatures by 4.3C above the average. By September the Arctic ice cap had lost an extra 1.1m square miles, equivalent to more than 12 times the area of Britain.
The melting reduced the summer ice cover to just 1.6m square miles, 43% less than in 1979 when accurate satellite observations began. It left so much open sea that the Northwest Passage, the fabled link between Asia and Europe, became navigable.
For Holland and her team the great melt prompted a great rethink. Their predictions seemed to be coming true, but far earlier than expected. Why?
Holland now wonders whether she and her colleagues had been “too conservative” in their published report.
When they looked at their models again, they found the events of 2007 had indeed been predicted. “We had said this melting process was likely to start around 2025 but the models also showed that there could be periods of very rapid ice melt much earlier,” she said. “Some even showed that the summertime ice cap could start to vanish by 2013.
“Now we are wondering if that is what is happening now. If it is, then the summertime ice cap may never recover and by 2013, or sometime soon after, it could be gone.”
If Holland is right, then the destruction of the Arctic ice cap could become the first great global warming disaster. Why is it happening so fast? And how will it affect the rest of the world?
At the heart of the melting in the Arctic is a simple piece of science. Ice is white, so most of the sunlight hitting it is reflected back into space.
When it melts, however, it leaves behind open ocean which, being darker, absorbs light and so gets warmer. This helps to melt yet more ice. It means that beyond a point, the ice cannot recover. The process keeps accelerating until there is no more ice to melt.
Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, has been watching this process for two decades, making trips under the polar ice cap in a Royal Navy submarine equipped with radar that can measure the thickness of the ice. Over that period the average thickness has fallen by 40%.
Professor Mark Serreze, from the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Centre, who works with Holland, believes that this latest thinning represents a significant change in the destruction of the ice cap. “The key new idea is that as the ice thins it reaches a point where it becomes very vulnerable. It gets so thin that it can get broken up or just melt away very easily. Once that happens it could be very hard for it ever to recover, especially if we get more hot summers. This year is going to be crucial.”
There is some faintly good news. The melting of the Arctic ice cap will not, for example, cause a rise in sea levels – because it is already floating.
In the short term there may even be some economic opportunities. Already the possibility of new shipping routes, as well as access to the wealth of oil and other mineral resources thought to lie under the seabed, has fuelled a flurry of claims and counterclaims from the nations bordering the Arctic.
Russia has been among the most active. Last August it sent a mini-submarine to the seabed to plant a national flag directly on the North Pole. Scientists from Denmark are mapping the seabed around Greenland, a Danish dependency.
Last August, Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, announced plans for an Arctic military training facility and a deep-water port in the Northwest Passage. America has sent armed coastguard cutters to patrol the waters it claims off Alaska.
All are studying the underwater geology to try to increase their claims. Under international law countries have exclusive economic rights to the sea within 200 nautical miles of their coast. If, however, they can prove that the continental shelf extends beyond that limit, the rights can stretch to 350 nautical miles.
Such an extension could be lucrative. The oil and gas fields in the Arctic ice cap are estimated by some geologists to contain very large reserves.
Others have a different dream for a warmed-up Arctic – as a new cradle of civilisation. Trausti Valsson, professor of environmental planning at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, believes that as rising temperatures make many lower latitudes uninhabitable, so the lands around the Arctic will evolve into “the new Mediterranean”, with towns and cities springing up in Arctic Canada, Alaska and Siberia.
Such a scenario may seem unlikely now but an ice-free Arctic would have many attractions – not least being the Northwest Passage itself, which would immediately cut 5,000 miles from shipping routes between Europe and Asia via the Suez canal and whose development would prompt pressure for new ports along Canada’s northern coast.
However, most climate researchers view such thinking with despair. “It is a great irony,” said Serreze, “that the melting of the ice cap could give us access to yet more fossil fuels that will accelerate climate change even further.
Read more on Timesonline
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