EcoAlert: Dramatic Arctic Sea-Ice Melt over a Two-Week Period

 

          

 

These images, captured two weeks apart by NASA's Terra satellite on 17 July (below) and 3 August (above), show a stark melting of sea ice in the Arctic's North-West Passage. The region's ice cover is now significantly lower than expected, says the Canadian Ice Service, with coverage on July 30th estimated at 33 per cent, compared to the 1981-2010 median of 79 per cent. The ice retreat will continue through September, when annual ice cover is at its lowest.

These images, acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite, show significant changes over two weeks. The top image shows Parry Channel on July 17, 2012, when ice filled the channel. The bottom image shows the same region on August 3, when some ice was still clinging to the shores of Victoria and Melville Islands but open water otherwise dominated the region.

The Canadian Ice Service reported that ice cover in Parry Channel began to fall below the 1981–2010 median after July 16, 2012, and the loss accelerated over the following two weeks. On July 23, the percentage of ice cover in the channel was roughly 67 percent, compared to the median of 80 percent. On July 30, ice cover was roughly 33 percent, compared a median of 79 percent.

These photo-like images show widespread open water in early August, though patches of ice linger south of Melville Island. Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center cautioned, however, that while the Parry Channel appeared almost entirely free of ice, it was not necessarily open for navigational purposes. Sea ice can be thin enough to avoid detection by satellite sensors such as MODIS yet still thick enough to impede ships.

Recent studies have suggested that certain organisms have begun to take advantage of the open water. The Northwest Passage opened in 2007, a year when there was record-low sea ice in the Arctic. A 2007 study on Neodenticula seminae—a type of plankton historically found in the Pacific Ocean—concluded that the species had turned up in the North Atlantic. The research suggested that the plankton’s route included the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. A 2012 study on bowhead whales, which tracked individuals with satellite transmitters, indicated that Pacific and Atlantic populations had begun to overlap in the Northwest Passage in August 2010.

The increasing temperatures and diminishing sea ice have been linked to changes in the behavior of salmon and bears. Extreme Arctic melts can leave shorelines vulnerable to erosion, and may even be responsible for the colder winters experienced in Northern Europe and North America of late.

Attempts to identify a shortcut between Europe and Asia across the Arctic date back to the late fifteenth century, just several years after Columbus journeyed to the Americas. For centuries, attempts to find the route were stymied by unfamiliar geography and unforgiving ice. The Northwest Passage was first successfully navigated by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen between 1903 and 1906. He used the southern route through the Northwest Passage; Parry Channel is part of the northern or “preferred” route.

 

          

 

The Daily Galaxy via http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov

Comments

[Christian Rioux]

More useless scare tactics

[DwarfGalaxy]

Temperatures will be too hot for us, soon.

[Beverly]

This has everything to do with natural processes like summer season and wha the sun is doing, since the Arctic is the first part of Earth hit by solar anything. The ice is enlarging at the antarctic. The climate has warmed up for millennia already -- the glaciers have receded back into Alaska and upper Canada from where they were 10,000 years ago(NY, NJ and south of Long Island).

Such hubris and ignorance that human activity could carry heavier influence on the Earth than the Sun, cosmic rays, cosmological laws, or the jet stream.

[His Devine Shadow]

"hubris and ignorance" is exactly what your comments bring to mind. The hubris to think you know more than most educated scientists. The ignorance to think you know how everythign works because you can imagine it.

[Lee]

Enough already with the global warming BS. If it is true the planet is getting warmer then lets embrace and enjoy it because the alternative is a planet covered with ice sheets that will inevitably come again and again.

[Mephisto]

I'm with His Devine Shadow on this one... 10,000 years? Well, this is all happening within a century or two! And it's speeding up as the decades go by... The evidence is just too obvious, it's almost getting to the point where it's nearly as impossible to debunk like the theory of evolution.

The Sun, which is studied extensively by NASA, with it's 11-year outburst cycles... is ultimately unrelated to the ever increasing exponential growth of sea levels, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, atmospheric methane levels, atmospheric chlorofluorocarbon levels, average global temperatures, and the average number of freak tropical storms per year in the last century... But yet "mysteriously", they all somehow correlate with each other.

As for cosmic rays... Don't you think the amount of research satellites on space weather NASA has in orbit would have picked up anomalies in the amount of cosmic rays being blasted into Earth? If so, it would also correlate with the above paragraph, but it simply doesn't.

The Jet Stream... Wait, is that even a serious culprit of yours? Or was that thrown in there to make your list seem more extensive and thus foolishly more credible? (but in reality you would have little to no idea what you're really talking about)... It is INCREDIBLY well researched by aeronautical engineers and meteorologists, and not once has it ever been put into our faces as a probable cause for the folly going on! The jet stream acts quickly (like a storm), it can not affect the planet for a century on such a scale, the jet stream is a final result for something much more grandeur, not the other way around... Might as well throw in Earthquakes as the cause for global warming (but then, that will just make you an "Earthquake Weather" loon)

Cosmological Laws... Fine, you have some very slight significant point with this one... There are many unexplored mysteries of the universe as a whole (dark matter, dark energy, the higgs boson, the graviton, the big bang, our ultimate destiny, the nature of our neighboring universes, the reason for our existence, why we find ourselves in this particular reality, and the ever puzzling mystery of life and death)... It could be possible that some mysterious as-of-yet understood force is at work here... But, as but forth in Ockham's Razor: When selecting from among competing hypotheses, one should select the solution which makes the fewest assumptions. So, what seems more likely? That some ridiculous outlandish force that we have absolutely no idea about (beyond whatever we allow our imaginations to drift off into) is somehow the cause of global warming… or, that we humans have disrupted the balance of nature by overpopulating the planet to seven billion souls and having everyone's waste products in this consumption industrialized world wreak havoc on a very thin and vulnerable layer of the Earth?

If you should choose the former, then might as well denounce Science as blasphemous and claim the Bible is a literal history of the planet and that God is punishing us with this global warming for our sins.

[Payner]

Good breakdown Mephisto, so you were around 10,000 years ago and provide proof it is happening way quicker this time... lol

we are a virus, that will consume this planet, until this planet chews us up and spits us out, just like the dinosaurs!!! ha ha

[ur maa]

The idea that 'just because it's been well researched and 97% of scientists are sure it's AGW' is a non-argument - most people, after all, believe - through either inability to understand the data/facts or just pure psychological ignorance - that e.g. the tin towers collapsed due to structural failure, or pearl harbour was a surprise attack, or that the assad regime is a tryranny, or there were WMDs in Iraq, or, or. just because something is repeated ad nauseam doesn't mean it's true.

and actually, the solar cycle has far more influence than is given credit. just look at the medieval warming period, or the maundy minimum. current solar cycles 24 and 25 are due to be as low in activity as the maundy minimum - thus we can expect a cooling period soon. and there is a 40 year predictability about solar cycles, so scientists should have known this 40 years ago. So the real question is a psychological one - are they deliberately lying, or are they just stupid and bad scientists?

i wonder how the masses will react in 10-15 years when the temperature drops and they realise they have been lied to all this time...

[Relentless]

Idk, watching all those documentaries of temperatures steadily increasing over the last 100 years makes me not believe in any 11 or 40 year solar cycle for that matter having any affect on global warming. The temperature will not go down, the solar cycles have little to do with this, all the solar cycles do is mess up communications and give us cool auroras in polar regions.

[Payner]

Relentless, its all about the sun, it always will be, the sun is the only god we should all believe in, with out there wouldn't be any life... Next there going to say, Mar's didn't survive, because of global warming lol

Everyone wants to talk about it, and do absolutely nothing...
"Poor earth, hmm, i'm gonna buy a Large SUV!" Trucking idiots :)

[Barry]

You would think that doing any research on the climate, icecaps and weather patterns was bad thing.
Remember these were the same guys just a few years ago saying there was no global warming. Now they’re saying it’s a sun or planetary cycle.
Next they will be saying that heating up the planet is for mankind.
Meanwhile big oil is carving up the arctic cause billions in profit just isn’t enough.

[Ruth Mc]

@Payner: "Mar's"???