Melt ponds cause the Artic sea ice to melt more rapidly

Alfred Wegener Institute: The Arctic sea ice has not only declined over the past decade but has also become distinctly thinner and younger. Researchers are now observing mainly thin, first-year ice floes which are extensively covered with melt ponds in the summer months where once metre-thick, multi-year ice used to float. Sea ice physicists at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), have now measured the light transmission through the Arctic sea ice for the first time on a large scale, enabling them to quantify consequences of this change. They come to the conclusion that in places where melt water collects on the ice, far more sunlight and therefore energy is able to penetrate the ice than is the case for white ice without ponds. The consequence is that the ice is absorbing more solar heat, is melting faster, and more light is available for the ecosystems in and below the ice. The researchers have now published these new findings in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Melt ponds count among the favourite motifs for ice and landscape photographers in the Arctic. They are captured glistening in a seductive Caribbean sea blue or dark as a stormy sea on the ice floe. “Their colour depends entirely on how thick the remaining ice below the melt pond is and the extent to which the dark ocean beneath can be seen through this ice. Melt ponds on thicker ice tend to be turquoise and those on thin ice dark blue to black”, explains Dr. Marcel Nicolaus, sea ice physicist and melt pond expert at the Alfred Wegener Institute.

In recent years he and his team have observed a strikingly large number of melt ponds during summer expeditions to the central Arctic. Virtually half of the one-year ice was covered with melt ponds. Scientists attribute this observation to climate change. “The ice cover of the Arctic Ocean has been undergoing fundamental change for some years. Thick, multi-year ice is virtually nowhere to be found any more. Instead, more than 50 per cent of the ice cover now consists of thin one-year ice on which the melt water is particularly widespread. The decisive aspect here is the smoother surface of this young ice, permitting the melt water to spread over large areas and form a network of many individual melt ponds”, explains Marcel Nicolaus. By contrast, the older ice has a rougher surface which has been formed over the years by the constant motion of the floe and innumerable collisions. Far fewer and smaller ponds formed on this uneven surface which were, however, considerably deeper than the flat ponds on the younger ice.

...To find out the extent to which Arctic sea ice permits the penetration of the sun’s rays and how large the influence of the melt ponds is on this permeability, the AWI sea ice physicists equipped a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV “Alfred”) with radiation sensors and cameras. In the summer of 2011 during an Arctic expedition of the research ice breaker POLARSTERN, they sent this robot to several stations directly under the ice. During its underwater deployments, the device recorded how much solar energy penetrated the ice at a total of 6000 individual points all with different ice properties!...

Melt pond on Arctic sea ice, Photo: Stefan Hendricks, Alfred Wegener Institute

Global warming opening up Russia's Arctic

Space Daily via UPI: Russian state-owned energy firms are preparing to move into the country's offshore polar regions. On Jan. 15 Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich's told journalists that the state-controlled Rosneft and Gazprom energy companies are to receive licenses to develop the 12 and 17 arctic continental shelf sectors. The decision is raising concerns among the country's private energy companies that they will be locked out of developing the country's potentially vast arctic hydrocarbon reserves.

Russia's natural resources ministry proposed on Jan. 15 that offshore oil and gas fields on the country's Arctic shelf that isn't wanted by state-controlled firms should be explored and developed by non-state companies.

Private companies have so far failed to break the monopoly of Gazprom and Rosneft on hydrocarbons exploration on Russia's offshore continental maritime shelf, as currently only Russian state-controlled companies, including Rosneft and Gazprom, are allowed to hold offshore licenses in Russian territorial waters, Russkoe Informatsionnoe Agenstvo news agency reported on Tuesday.

Currently energy companies that want to acquire licenses to work on the Russian continental offshore shelf have to have a minimum of 50 percent state ownership and foreign and Russian private companies have to sign contracts with either Gazprom or Rosneft.

In further bad news for Russian private energy firms, Gazprom is not interested in relinquishing to state control the licenses for those offshore fields it is not interested in, according to Gazprom CEO Aleksei Miller, speaking to reporters in Novy Urengoi, above the Arctic Circle....

Three icebreakers, some of them Russian, shot by US Department of "Homeland Security," public domain

Global warming opening up Russia's Arctic

Space Daily via UPI: Russian state-owned energy firms are preparing to move into the country's offshore polar regions. On Jan. 15 Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich's told journalists that the state-controlled Rosneft and Gazprom energy companies are to receive licenses to develop the 12 and 17 arctic continental shelf sectors. The decision is raising concerns among the country's private energy companies that they will be locked out of developing the country's potentially vast arctic hydrocarbon reserves.

Russia's natural resources ministry proposed on Jan. 15 that offshore oil and gas fields on the country's Arctic shelf that isn't wanted by state-controlled firms should be explored and developed by non-state companies.

Private companies have so far failed to break the monopoly of Gazprom and Rosneft on hydrocarbons exploration on Russia's offshore continental maritime shelf, as currently only Russian state-controlled companies, including Rosneft and Gazprom, are allowed to hold offshore licenses in Russian territorial waters, Russkoe Informatsionnoe Agenstvo news agency reported on Tuesday.

Currently energy companies that want to acquire licenses to work on the Russian continental offshore shelf have to have a minimum of 50 percent state ownership and foreign and Russian private companies have to sign contracts with either Gazprom or Rosneft.

In further bad news for Russian private energy firms, Gazprom is not interested in relinquishing to state control the licenses for those offshore fields it is not interested in, according to Gazprom CEO Aleksei Miller, speaking to reporters in Novy Urengoi, above the Arctic Circle....

Shell Arctic rig runs aground off Alaska

Tom Fowler in the Wall Street Journal:  Royal Dutch Shell PLC suffered another potential setback in its attempt to drill for oil in U.S. Arctic waters when an offshore rig ran aground after breaking free from tow ships in high seas.

The Kulluk, a drilling rig owned by Shell and operated by Noble Corp., NE +2.58% struck Sitkalidak Island, an uninhabited area about 300 miles southwest of Anchorage late Monday, according to a joint statement by Shell, Switzerland-based Noble and the U.S. Coast Guard, which were coordinating their response to the accident.

A Coast Guard helicopter on Saturday lifts crew members from Shell's Kulluk drilling unit. The rig later broke free from tow ships and ran aground. The rig has about 139,000 gallons of diesel on board, along with about 12,000 gallons of combined lubrication oil and hydraulic fluid. Coast Guard aircraft that flew over the rig Tuesday didn't spot any signs of leaking fuel. Plans were under way to get salvage crews to the rig.

Shell used the Kulluk and another rig to drill exploratory wells in the Arctic Ocean off Alaska's northern coast last year, the first such operations in U.S. Arctic waters in more than two decades.

But the ambitious drilling venture—monitored by rival companies, the U.S. government and environmental groups—has encountered problems from the outset. The drilling season started later than planned because of lingering sea ice. The other drilling rig, the Noble Discoverer, almost ran aground when its anchor slipped in Dutch Harbor, Alaska.

Also, an important piece of spill-response equipment was damaged during testing, leading Shell to scale back plans to drill six wells to just two wells. A Coast Guard inspection of the Noble Discoverer, conducted after the drilling season, discovered problems with the ship's propulsion and safety systems....

The Arctic Challenger with the newly redesigned and repaired Containment Dome move away from the Port of Bellingham, WA where it had been moored since returning in September 2012 after a catastrophic failure of the first iteration of their containment process. This is not the vessel mentioned in the story, apparently. Shot by TJ Guiton, Wikimedia Commons, nder the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

NASA's Operation IceBridge data brings new twist to sea ice forecasting

NASA: Shrinking Arctic sea ice grabbed the world's attention again earlier this year with a new record low minimum. Growing economic activity in the Arctic, such as fishing, mineral exploration and shipping, is emphasizing the need for accurate predictions of how much of the Arctic will be covered by sea ice. Every June, an international research group known as the Study of Environmental Arctic Change (SEARCH) publishes a summary of the expected September Arctic sea ice minimum known as the Sea Ice Outlook. The initial reports and monthly updates aim to give the scientific community and public the best available information on sea ice.

Researchers rely on models that use estimated ice thickness data and simulated atmospheric conditions to forecast how sea ice will change during the summer. For the first time, near real-time ice thickness data obtained by NASA's Operation IceBridge has been used to correct a forecast model's initial measurements, which could lead to improved seasonal predictions.

In a paper published last month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Ron Lindsay, IceBridge science team member and Arctic climatologist with the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington in Seattle, outlined efforts to use IceBridge data to improve the accuracy of seasonal sea ice forecasts. Lindsay and colleagues used a new quick look sea ice data product that IceBridge scientists released before the end of the Arctic campaign earlier this year. The quick look data, intended for use in time-sensitive applications like seasonal forecasts, supplements the final sea ice data product typically released roughly six months after the campaign. By using new data processing techniques, IceBridge scientists were able to publish the quick look measurements in a matter of weeks. "The idea was to make the data available for anyone to use for the Sea Ice Outlook," said sea ice scientist Nathan Kurtz of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The work outlined in Lindsay's paper marks the first use of IceBridge quick look data in an ensemble sea ice forecast (computer) model. "An ensemble forecast is where you run a single forecast model many different times," said Lindsay. In this case, they ran the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) model seven times using conditions from previous summers. PIOMAS uses sea ice extent, the area of sea containing sea ice, and atmospheric data to simulate ice and ocean conditions....

A Digital Mapping System (DMS) mosaic of Arctic sea ice. The dark areas are leads, or open areas of water. Identifying leads is one of the necessary steps in preparing IceBridge’s quick look sea ice thickness data product. Credit: NASA / DMS team

Climate model is first to study climate effects of Arctic hurricanes

EurekAlert: Though it seems like an oxymoron, Arctic hurricanes happen, complete with a central "eye," extreme low barometric pressure and towering 30-foot waves that can sink small ships and coat metal platforms with thick ice, threatening oil and gas exploration. Now climate scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and in England report the first conclusive evidence that Arctic hurricanes, also known as polar lows, play a significant role in driving ocean water circulation and climate.

Results point to potentially cooler conditions in Europe and North America in the 21st century than other models predict.

Geoscientist Alan Condron at UMass Amherst and Ian Renfrew at the University of East Anglia, U.K., write in the current issue of Nature Geoscience that every year thousands of these strong cyclones or polar lows occur over Arctic regions in the North Atlantic, but none are simulated by the latest climate prediction models, which makes it difficult to reliably forecast climate change in Europe and North America over the next couple of decades.

"Before polar lows were first seen by satellites, sailors frequently returned from the Arctic seas with stories of encounters with fierce storms that seemed to appear out of nowhere," says Condron, a physical oceanographer. "Because of their small size, these storms were often missing from their weather charts, but they are still capable of producing hurricane-force winds and waves over 11 meters high (36 feet)."

He and Renfrew say that despite the fact that literally thousands of polar lows occur over the Arctic region of the North Atlantic ocean every year, none are simulated by even the most sophisticated climate models. To understand the importance of these storms on climate, Condron and Renfrew therefore turned to a new, state-of-the-art climate model to simulate the high wind speeds associated with these "missing" storms.

"By using higher resolution modeling we can more accurately simulate the high wind speeds and influence of polar lows on the ocean," Condron says. "The lower-resolution models currently used to make climate predictions very much miss the level of detail required to accurately simulate these storms."....

This photo-like image of a subtropical storm was acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Terra satellite on November 1, 2006. Located 900 miles off the coast of Oregon in the northwestern Pacific, this storm system looks like a hurricane, but it is located far from any of the typical hurricane formation areas. The storm originally formed from a cold-cored extratropical storm, but after sending two days over anomalously warm water, it developed a warm center and the hurricane characteristics of a cloud-free eye and an eyewall of thunderstorms circling the eye. Though the storm was strong enough to be named had it formed in one of the hurricane sectors, it is outside the regions which hurricane monitoring organizations administer, so the authority to give it a full name is not well defined. As of November 2, 2006, the Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu had not issued any information on the storm nor even applied it with a name. It was known merely as Storm 91C by the U.S. Navy.

US military ponders Arctic changes

David Smalley at the US Office of Naval Research: The Navy’s chief of naval research, Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, met this week with leaders from U.S. and Canadian government agencies to address research efforts in the Arctic, in response to dramatic and accelerating changes in summer sea ice coverage.

“Our Sailors and Marines need to have a full understanding of the dynamic Arctic environment, which will be critical to protecting and maintaining our national, economic and security interests,” said Klunder. “Our research will allow us to know what’s happening, to predict what is likely to come for the region, and give leadership the information it needs to formulate the best policies and plans for future Arctic operations.”

The Arctic Summit, held Dec. 11 at the Office of Naval Research (ONR) headquarters in Arlington, enabled senior leaders from ONR, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Defense Research and Development Canada, the Departments of Energy and Interior, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Science Foundation, the Navy Task Force Climate Change and more to share important scientific ideas on the region. One of the goals of the summit was to assess the different Arctic research efforts—and potentially form new research partnerships.

“Vital and varied Arctic research is taking place across a number of agencies,” Klunder said. “We are identifying areas of common scientific interest—and ideally come up with a comprehensive mutual understanding of everyone’s current and planned efforts.”

In the wake of last week’s widely reported release of NOAA’s Arctic Report Card—co-edited by ONR program officer and Arctic science expert Dr. Martin Jeffries—new concerns have arisen over record-low levels of sea ice and snow in the Arctic.

“We are surely on the verge of seeing a new Arctic,” said Jeffries. “And, since the Arctic is not isolated from the global environmental system—indeed it is an integral and vital part of that system—we can expect to see Arctic change have global environmental and socio-economic consequences.”....

NOAA took this photo of late summer ice in the Arctic Ocean

Wildfires darkening Greenland snowpack, increasing melting

Ohio State University: Satellite observations have revealed the first direct evidence of smoke from Arctic wildfires drifting over the Greenland ice sheet, tarnishing the ice with soot and making it more likely to melt under the sun.

At the American Geophysical Union meeting this week, an Ohio State University researcher presented images from NASA’s Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) satellite, which captured smoke from Arctic fires billowing out over Greenland during the summer of 2012.

Jason Box, associate professor of geography at Ohio State, said that researchers have long been concerned with how the Greenland landscape is losing its sparkly reflective quality as temperatures rise. The surface is darkening as ice melts away, and, since dark surfaces are less reflective than light ones, the surface captures more heat, which leads to stronger and more prolonged melting.

Researchers previously recorded a 6 percent drop in reflectivity in Greenland over the last decade, which Box calculates will cause enough warming to bring the entire surface of the ice sheet to melting each summer, as it did in 2012. But along with the melting, researchers believe that there is a second environmental effect that is darkening polar ice: soot from wildfires, which may be becoming more common in the Arctic.

“Soot is an extremely powerful light absorber,” Box said. “It settles over the ice and captures the sun’s heat. That’s why increasing tundra wildfires have the potential to accelerate the melting in Greenland.”

... in the Arctic, rising temperatures may be causing tundra wildfires to become more common. To find evidence of soot deposition from these fires, Box and his team first used thermal images from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to identify large fires in the region. Then they used computer models to project possible smoke particle trajectories, which suggested that the smoke from various fires could indeed reach Greenland....

Glaciers and icebergs at Cape York, Greenland, shot by Brocken Inaglory, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Arctic continues to break records in 2012: Becoming warmer, greener region with record losses of summer sea ice and late spring snow

NOAA: The Arctic region continued to break records in 2012—among them the loss of summer sea ice, spring snow cover, and melting of the Greenland ice sheet. This was true even though air temperatures in the Arctic were unremarkable relative to the last decade, according to a new report released today.

“The Arctic is changing in both predictable and unpredictable ways, so we must expect surprises,” said Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D., under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator, during a press briefing at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco, Calif. “The Arctic is an extremely sensitive part of the world and with the warming scientists have observed, we see the results with less snow and sea ice, greater ice sheet melt and changing vegetation.”

Lubchenco participated in a panel discussion that presented the annual update of the Arctic Report Card, which has, since 2006, summarized the quickly changing conditions in the Arctic. A record-breaking 141 authors from 15 countries contributed to the peer-reviewed report. Major findings of this year’s report include:

• Snow cover: A new record low snow extent for the Northern Hemisphere was set in June 2012, and a new record low was reached in May over Eurasia.
• Sea ice: Minimum Arctic sea ice extent in September 2012 set a new all-time record low, as measured by satellite since 1979.
• Greenland ice sheet: There was a rare, nearly ice sheet-wide melt event on the Greenland ice sheet in July, covering about 97 percent of the ice sheet on a single day....

Difference from average temperature in the Arctic from 2001-2011 compared to the long-term average (1971-2000). From NOAA

Thawing of permafrost expected to cause significant additional global warming, not yet accounted for in climate predictions

UN Environment Programme News Centre:  Permafrost covering almost a quarter of the northern hemisphere contains 1,700 gigatonnes of carbon, twice that currently in the atmosphere, and could significantly amplify global warming should thawing accelerate as expected, according to a new report released today by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). Warming permafrost can also radically change ecosystems and cause costly infrastructural damage due to increasingly unstable ground, the report says.

"Policy Implications of Warming Permafrost" seeks to highlight the potential hazards of carbon dioxide and methane emissions from warming permafrost, which have not thus far been included in climate-prediction modelling. The science on the potential impacts of warming permafrost has only begun to enter the mainstream in the last few years, and as a truly "emerging issue" could not have been included in climate change modelling to date. The report recommends a special IPCC assessment on permafrost and the creation of national monitoring networks and adaptation plans as key steps to deal with potential impacts of this significant source of emissions, which may become a major factor in global warming.

"Permafrost is one of the keys to the planet's future because it contains large stores of frozen organic matter that, if thawed and released into the atmosphere, would amplify current global warming and propel us to a warmer world," said UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner.

"Its potential impact on the climate, ecosystems and infrastructure has been neglected for too long," he added. "This report seeks to communicate to climate-treaty negotiators, policy makers and the general public the implications of continuing to ignore the challenges of warming permafrost."

...Should the active layer increase in thickness due to warming, huge quantities of organic matter stored in the frozen soil would begin to thaw and decay, releasing large amounts of CO₂  and methane into the atmosphere....

A scientist standing in front of an ice-rich permafrost exposure on the coast of Herschel Island, Yukon Territory (photo: Michael Fritz, from the UNEP website).