Saturday - October 01, 2011

I’m Melting, Melting, Meeeelting

Old ice is much better than new ice apparently, so when a bit of the old goes away it becomes news. We see this story, or one very much like it, every fall, because that’s when the summer melt in the Arctic is at it’s greatest. In another 5 or 6 weeks things will freeze solid once again.

Canadian Arctic nearly loses entire ice shelf

Two ice shelves that existed before Canada was settled by Europeans diminished significantly this summer, one nearly disappearing altogether, Canadian scientists say in new research.
...
Luke Copland is an associate professor in the geography department at the University of Ottawa who co-authored the research. He said the Serson Ice Shelf shrank from 79.15 square miles (205 square kilometers) to two remnant sections three years ago, and was further diminished this past summer.

Copland said the shelf went from a 16-square-mile (42-square-kilometer) floating glacier tongue to 9.65 square miles (25 square kilometers), and the second section from 13.51 square miles (35 square kilometers) to 2 square miles (7 square kilometers), off Ellesmere Island’s northern coastline.

This past summer, Ward Hunt Ice Shelf’s central area disintegrated into drifting ice masses, leaving two separate ice shelves measuring 87.65 and 28.75 square miles (227 and 74 square kilometers) respectively, reduced from 131.7 square miles (340 square kilometers) the previous year.

“It has dramatically broken apart in two separate areas and there’s nothing in between now but water,” said Copland.
...
Ice shelves, which began forming at least 4,500 years ago, are much thicker than sea ice, which is typically less than a few feet (meters) thick and survives up to several years.

Canada has the most extensive ice shelves in the Arctic along the northern coast of Ellesmere Island. These floating ice masses are typically 131 feet (40 meters) thick (equivalent to a 10-story building), but can be as much as 328 feet (100 meters) thick. They thickened over time via snow and sea ice accumulation, along with glacier inflow in certain places.

The northern coast of Ellesmere Island contains the last remaining ice shelves in Canada, with an estimated area of 217 square miles (563 square kilometers), Mueller said.

Between 1906 and 1982, there has been a 90 percent reduction in the areal extent of ice shelves along the entire coastline, according to data published by W.F. Vincent at Quebec’s Laval University. The former extensive “Ellesmere Island Ice Sheet” was reduced to six smaller, separate ice shelves: Serson, Petersen, Milne, Ayles, Ward Hunt and Markham. In 2005, the Ayles Ice Shelf whittled almost completely away, as did the Markham Ice Shelf in 2008 and the Serson this year.

In 2008 satellites saw that the Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route were open simultaneously for the first time since satellite measurements began in the 1970s – and now it has happened again. 

While the Northern Sea Route above Russia (also known as the Northeast Passage) has been open to shipping traffic since mid-August, recent satellite data show that the most direct course in the Northwest Passage now appears to be navigable as well.
...
Weather patterns have been different this year, but the early opening of the passages indicates that we could be about to hit a new record low in ice cover.

“The minimum ice extent is still three to four weeks away, and a lot depends on the weather conditions over the Arctic during those weeks,” says Leif Toudal Pedersen, a senior scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute.
...
During the last 30 years, satellites observing the Arctic have witnessed reductions in the minimum ice extent at the end of summer from around 8 million sq km in the early 1980s to the historic minimum of less than 4.24 million sq km in 2007.

Before the advent of satellites, obtaining measurements of sea ice was difficult: the Arctic is both inaccessible and prone to long periods of bad weather and extended darkness.

I’d say it’s time to start working this annual opening into our plans, and maybe hurry up and lay some trenched seabed oil pipelines from Alaska across to the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Meanwhile, the whales are stealing a march on the humans, and happily swimming across the top of the world looking for new flavors of tasty krill and some hot whale nookie action.

For the first time, scientists have documented bowhead whales traveling from opposite sides of the Canadian High Arctic and mingling in the Northwest Passage, a usually ice-clogged route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

There have been other hints that geographically separate populations of these air-breathing mammals traversed the Arctic when the ice cover shrinks, including signs of genetic mixing between populations and 19th-century reports of harpoon heads of Atlantic origin showing up in whales on the western side of the Arctic.
...
“Given recent rates of sea ice loss, climate change may eliminate geographical divisions between stocks of bowhead whales and open new areas that have not been inhabited by bowhead whales for millennia,”

Right, because that thing with the harpoons - a mere 160 years ago - hasn’t happened for millennia - thousands of years. See the above quote about life before satellites: we really have no frickin’ idea how often and how fully these passages have opened up in the past.

Posted by Drew458     on 10/01/2011 at 10:28 AM   
Filed Under: • Climate-Weather •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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