Historical Documents Reveal Arctic Sea Ice Is Disappearing At Record Speed

The Guardian - Dana Nuccitelli

Summer Arctic sea ice is at its lowest since records began over 125 years ago

The 2015 Arctic sea ice summertime minimum (699,000 square miles below the 1981-2010 average) is seen in a NASA visual representation of satellite data. Photograph: NASA/REUTERS

Scientists have pieced together historical records to reconstruct Arctic sea ice extent over the past 125 years. The results are shown in the figure below. The red line, showing the extent at the end of the summer melt season, is the most critical:

Time series of Arctic sea ice extent, 1850-2013, for March (blue line) and September (red line). Illustration: Walsh et al. (2016)

Arctic sea ice extent in recent years is by far the lowest it’s been, with about half of the historical coverage gone, and the decline the fastest it’s been in recorded history. Florence Fetterer, principal investigator at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, described the data reconstruction process in a guest post at Carbon Brief:

Prof John Walsh, now at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and Dr Mick Kelly, from the University of East Anglia (now retired), were pioneers at retrieving data. They hand-digitised information from sources, such as aerial surveys, from the US Navy and UK Meteorological Office, and from the Danish Meteorological Institute’s yearbook maps (see examples from 1978 and 1979 – both pdfs).
Walsh, along with Prof William Chapman from University of Illinois, used these various sources to make monthly grids in Arctic and Southern Ocean sea ice concentrations, covering the period 1901-95.

However, as Fetterer explains, gaps remained in their records, which have now been filled into the NSIDC dataset using a variety of sources:

• The sea ice edge positions in the North Atlantic, between 1850 and 1978, derived from various sources, including newspapers, ship observations, aircraft observations, diaries and more. 
• Sea ice concentration data from regular aerial surveys of ice in the eastern Arctic by the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia, beginning in 1933. 
• Sea ice edge positions for Newfoundland and the Canadian Maritime Region from observations, for 1870 to 1962. 
• Detailed charts of ice in the waters around Alaska for 1954 to 1978, originally the property of a consulting firm (the Dehn collection). 
• Arctic-wide maps of ice cover from the Danish Meteorological Institute from 1901 to 1956. 
• Whaling ship logbook entries that noted ship position along with an indication of whether the ship was in the presence of ice.

A Danish Meteorological Institute ice chart for August, 1926. The red symbols mark the location of observations recorded in ship logbooks. Illustration: Walsh et al. (2016).

It’s not just the area of ice-covered ocean that’s shrunk; in fact, the volume of Arctic sea ice has declined even faster. As illustrated in this video created by Andy Lee Robinson, about two-thirds of the summer sea ice has disappeared in just 36 years as the warming oceans have thinned the ice.

Annual minimum Arctic sea ice volume 1979–2015, created by Andy Lee Robinson. 

Previous research has also shown that Arctic sea ice is at its lowest level in at least 1,450 years, and the recent decline is mostly due to human-caused global warming.
This dramatic change may be causing ripple effects throughout the Earth’s climate system. For example, some research has suggested a possible connection between the Arctic sea ice decline and the intensity of California’s recent record drought (although the connection is not definitive). Those record drought conditions in turn contributed to the intense wildfires currently raging across California. Other research has suggested possible connections between disappearing Arctic sea ice and extreme weather events, but again, these connections aren’t yet definitive.
The loss of ice causes what scientists call a feedback effect. Ice is highly reflective, while the ocean beneath is dark. When the ice on the ocean surface melts, the Arctic becomes less reflective and absorbs more sunlight, causing it to warm faster, melting more ice, causing more warming, and so on. This feedback is one of the main reasons why the Arctic is Earth’s fastest-warming region, with temperatures rising about twice as fast as in lower latitudes.
Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius predicted this Arctic amplification effect in 1896. As a result, the Arctic is effectively the ‘canary in the coal mine’ of the Earth’s climate, showing us the dramatic effects human-caused global warming can have on the climate system. The signal is clear, but the question remains whether we’ll take action, or stay in the coal mine.

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