One of the advantages of being part of a research institute are the fascinating conversations that happen over lunch between colleagues working in different areas. Today was a classic with conversation ranging from the stratospheric effects of the Hunga-Tonga eruption to the different types of snow crystals that form in snow packs and their impacts on sea ice. However, the conversation started with a request to me for some rules of thumb on sea level rise, so here they are:
The Greenland ice sheet loses on average around 250 to 280 Gigatonnes of ice each year – that’s from all processes including melt and surface runoff, iceberg calving, basal melting and submarine melting.
The small glaciers and ice caps around the world contribute a bit more to sea level rise in total each year than each of the big ice sheets currently, but they will be quickly exhausted. As there are thousands of small glaciers, most of which are not well monitored, we have to estimate how these are changing using models. It appears that on avergae they add around 0.7 to 1 mm of global sea level rise each year.
The thermal expansion of the oceans is still the largest part of currently observed sea level rise but on an annual basis, the cryosphere now often contributes more.
Since the early 1990s sea level rises about 3mm every year, but over the last 5 years it has been closer to 4.5mm per year. The curve over the last 2 decades has followed a quadratic shape rather than a linear shape – put simply, this means sea level is accelerating. The sea rose 10mm from January 2020 to August 2021.
An El Nino, which some are warning could occur this year, may cause a temporary pause or at least slow down in sea level rise, even as global air temperatures increase, mostly due to the large amounts of rain that are associated with it, but this will only be temporary.
While the rate (3-4 mm per year) doesn’t sound like very much, every mm counts, increasing the risk of coastal flooding and storm surges affecting coastal communities.
Finally, global sea level rise is not distributed evenly, broadly speaking, the further away from an ice mass you are, the more likely it is to affect your local sea level, so Greenland matters less than Antarctica in Northern Europe.
NOAA’s visualisation of observed sea level rise from satellites in the background and at tide gauge locations (the round dots) since 1993, note the uneven pattern which reflects processes like ocean currents, atmospheric circulation and winds, local relative land movements and gravitational changes due to changing ice masses.
I hope these little rules of thumb help. Feel free to add more (or disagree) in the comments..
We will head to the field in Qaanaaq in late March with various instruments.
Update: It’s official now, I have booked my tickets, we have new instruments to deploy and a colleague and I are working on developing a new programme that we can hopefully also fit in alongside the currently planned programme. More on this at some point no doubt. The countdown has begun and I am getting into that fieldwork frame of mind.
I came across this blog post from old friend and former colleague, Karen Darke, who I’m now more or less out of touch with, unfortunately.
She is just back from her incredible Pole of Possibility expedition in Antarctica and she wrote this which I think perfectly summed up that expedition frame of mind..
It’s a really great blog post and well worth a read of the whole thing.
There are people and places I look forward to again but my soul is already grieving for expedition life, for the dualities that it brings: complexity and simplicity, space and confinement, alone-ness and together-ness, vulnerability and strength, connection and disconnection. I miss waking up huddled closely with my tent-mates and the time skiing silently in big open white-scape. I miss the detailed organisation of kit and systems and the contrasting uncertainty of every hour of every day. I miss feeling small and vulnerable as well as strong and capable. I miss the clear, invented purpose of every day.
Karen Darke, Pole of Possibility
One of those moments on a fieldwork expedition when everyone is busy, drilling holes in the ice to send down a CTD, drilling a sea ice core to measure salinity, digging snow pits, deploying instruments. My DMI colleagues Steffen Olsen and Andrea Gierisch are the ocean and sea ice scientists driving this work in close collaboration with our Greenlandis friends, you can read more about their work here: ..
Our fieldwork expeditions are maybe a bit more frenetic than the pole of possibility has been (in some ways, probably not others). We are always racing against the clock and the weather to get as much work done as possible. We probably cover less distance and there is perhaps less physical stress as the dogs do the hard work of pulling, rather than skiing with human muscles. Nonetheless, there is a constant low-level thrum of thinking, planning, checking. Even if there are also often whole hours, where not much other than travel happens and that are extremely valuable thinking time. (And how often do we get that in the modern world?)
Unlike the Antarctic, working with local people in Greenland means that we also see the landscape as a working place, not just a white desert far away and as Karen writes, how true this is:
It is harder than we anticipated to leave, but Antarctica has been a reminder that we are adaptable, resilient, purpose-seeking, capable humans. No matter how harsh our environment may be, we seem to find ways to connect, collaborate and create ways to not only survive, but to thrive.
On a slightly different note, I had momentarily similar thoughts to Karen on the problem of despoiling the landscape with toilet visits the first time I visited Qaanaaq, before realising that when travelling with 30 dogs (as the local people have always done), the problem is rather moot. But as I have written before, it’s easy to fall into the trap of pristinism in the Arctic. Our work on the Arctic environment is a reminder that it really isn’t. Even in Antarctica, environmental pollutants from lead to microplastics have been found, while the curse of overfishing is almost as visible in the Southern Ocean as in the northerly just as climate change is also taking a toll.
But finally, I also find myself fully agreeing with the last part, because although fieldwork is often cold, uncomfortable, difficult, exhausting, boring and tiresome, it’s also often fascinating, rewarding and exciting. And the experience can change us.
Just as a photograph can’t always capture the profundity of a place or a moment, it is sometimes difficult to find words that describe how something has sculpted us. An experience can impact us so deeply that we don’t immediately know how to translate it for others. And may never
I am immensely privileged to be able to do fieldwork in Greenland and I am extermely grateful for the opportunity to do so.
I was recently asked to comment on this interesting new paper by David Rounce and co-authors for AP by Seth Borenstein called “Global glacier change in the 21st century: Every increase in temperature matters”. You can read his resulting summary here . I’m posting here the slightly expanded and lightly edited response I sent to Seth in response to his (very good) questions.
The authors only look at the small glaciers and ice caps in this study, not the big polar ice sheets, though they do also cover small peripheral glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica that are not part of the main ice sheets. Of course, this means that sea level rise from all the other important processes like thermal expansion and ice sheet met also have to be taken into account on top of the numbers given here.
Their main findings were that at 1.5 °C above preindustrial, we can expect total glacial mass loss between 2015 and 2100 would be 26% with 90 mm of sea level rise and 49% of the small glaciers and ice caps lost globally. The paper only deals with these small glaciers and does not count the big ice sheets!
At 4°C, we’re looking at 41% mass loss with ~154 mm of sea level rise and 83% of glaciers lost. At 2.7 °C, where the world is now heading, 32% mass loss, 115 mm of sea level rise and 68% of glaciers lost.
I’m sad to say that the results aren’t exactly a surprise – the community has known for some time that the loss of glaciers is basically linear with temperature, so the title of the paper is really spot on, every tenth of a degree really does matter. This earlier paper by my Horizon 2020 PROTECT project collaborator Ben Marzeion shows something very similar But it’s a nice new result with the latest generation of glacier model and updated with the latest CMIP (IPCC) scenarios and they included some new processes that weren’t very well accounted for in previous work.
My first thought was that these latest estimates were actually a little lower than I expected, but the baseline in the paper is 2015 – we should remember that many of these glaciers have already lost quite a lot of ice (see my two photos of Nigårdsbreen in Norway, taken only 13 years apart) – so the new estimates are basically in line with what I would have expected given earlier work. I’d also expect that they will continue to lose ice beyond 2100 so it’s definitely not an end state that they are giving here. As they state in the article there will be widespread deglaciation of some pretty iconic parts of the world, even under the present planned emissions reductions..
In many ways part of the problem has been the previous studies have not always accounted for all the processes: frontal ablation (melt and calving of vertical ice cliffs, mostly in contact with water), the effect of debris cover and so forth (the latter will likely reduce the rate of loss, the former probably increases it). Given what we know about these processes and how to represent them in models, I still consider this work to be a more realistic estimate. Then we also need to account for the climate models and the scenarios used to force them – there are some important differences between CMIP5 and CMIP6 which might also account for some of this shift. We have actually seen something somewhat similar for the projected changes in the big ice sheets.
It’s probably important to remember though that this study still needs to make simplifications, especially when looking at so many glaciers in so many different regions, so there will always be new updates to come with improved computing power and computational techniques and better representation of processes. Having said that, I do not think the picture will substantially change in future, though I can always be proved wrong, and the glaciers community are now at the stage of refining estimates for rates of mass loss.
Globally the loss of glaciers means sea level rise. Regionally and locally the biggest consequences will be for for water resources and we’re likely to see a local increase in natural hazards like outburst floods and avalanches that will need to be carefully managed. There have been a couple of instances already in the last year or two that probably demonstrate this well (e.g. the Marmolada glacier in Italy last year).
Sea level budget divided into components, from Legeais et al. 2018 ESSD The steric component is the expansion of sea water as it warms.
I include myself in the group who has to get used to the cultural shift. I have worked on glaciers in the Alps and Norway which are really rapidly disappearing. It’s kind of devastating to see, but it’s not actually surprising. We have known it was coming and in many cases (including the authors of this paper), measured the massive losses (last year, 2022 was a disaster for the Alps and both Fabien Maussion and Matthias Huss who are co-authors on the paper are running very comprehensive programmes that show in real time how much of a disaster) and predicted it with some accuracy. But we’re now at the point where it’s really undeniable that these glaciers are going fast.
#Glacier ice melt in 2022 was impressive! See the incredible speed of ice loss at the snout of Rhonegletscher (@VAW_glaciology time lapse by A. Cremona)…
The Rhonegletscher in the timelapse above is a really iconic glacier in the Alps, I have my own favourites, mostly places I’ve worked, like Norway, Iceland and Greenland, which are all to a greater or lesser extent retreating fast now. The glaciers that people consider iconic or at least well-known tend to be accessible and depend very much where you are and they will be the glaciers we mourn over in the next decades. In the French Alps, it’s probably the Mer de Glace, in Switzerland perhaps Rhone glacier or Plaine Morte (both have monitoring programmes), in Canada perhaps the Malaspina or Athabasca glaciers. There are still (just) glaciers on Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya, the Ruwenzoris are basically gone, as are the Papuan glaciers.
Though they show in the study that ice loss is basically linear with temperature, at some point the glaciers become so small that the remianing melt is highly non-linear. And these won’t grow back under any sensible “overshoot” scenario (never mind that we don’t really have technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere at scale). Once they’re gone, they’re basically gone forever on human timescales Finally, I’d like to add a bit of anlaysis by Ben Marzeion and co-authors , it’s possible to basically put a number on the amount of melted glacier ice each kg of CO₂ leads to.
We find that under present-day climate conditions, every emitted kg of CO2 will eventually be responsible for a glacier mass loss of 15.8 (5.9–20.5) kg. Again, since the global glacier mass is decreasing with increasing temperatures, this number is greater for lower temperatures and smaller for higher temperatures.
I have been meaning to write about my return to field science (after 10 years mostly working on climate models) for the last 2 years, but prompted by this beautifully written piece in the Danish Newspaper information, I decided Christmas Day was the day (it for sure beats the washing up)…
“For at forstå, hvad der er ved at ske ved kloden, rejste vi mod isens ende” “To understand what is happening to the earth, we travelled to the end of the ice”
Martin Bahn og Anders Rye Skjoldjensen (foto) in Information 23rd December 2022
To make one thing very clear straight away, and as the newspaper article also makes very clear, my colleague Steffen Malskær Olsen has established and maintained a very long-running programme of observations in the fjord near Qaanaaq. This town in northern Greenland on the edge of a large fjord, and close to the North Water polynya has a uniquely interesting location to study and understand Arctic processes. The DMI facility there is long established and part of the INTERACT network of Arctic field stations. The 15-year record collected by Steffen is more or less unbroken and uniquely valuable. None of the science I’m planning to do or to work on would be possible without his dedication, hard work, insight and bridge building within the community in Qaanaaq. He and my other DMI colleagues involved in this programme are brilliant scientists and great field companions and I feel privileged to be able to work with them in this incredible place.
In the field: Steffen and team retrieving an oceanographic mooring with instruments on it after a winter out in the fjord in 2021.
Secondly, as the article also makes clear, scientists are not individualistic heroes who beat the odds, it’s a team sport. And it’s especially true in Greenland where the true heroes of this story are probably not scientists but the local hunters and fishers who guide and transport us and whose knowledge and experience is unmatched. I include also on this category our DMI colleague Aksel Ascanius who lives and works in Qaanaaq has been an essential part of the programme since the earliest days, as well as keeping other long-term observations in the network running in this part of the world.
Collaboration with the people who live in the Arctic has been essential for success in Arctic science since since the days of Franklin and Rae (for British readers) or Suersaq, aka Hans Hendrik, (after whom Hans Island is named) for Danes..
Anyway, back to the science of the present-day. DMI has progressively added more and more elements to the field laboratory in Qaanaaq in addition to the longer running observations. A non-exhaustive list would include an infrasound monitoring station that is part of the CTBTO, weather observations (of course), surface emissivity measurements by drone, fjord salinity, temperature and photosynthetically available radiation measurements plus snow and sea ice measurements as well as work with satellites and biology. One glaring omission, up to this year at least, was the glaciology of the region. How does the ice sheet affect the regional climate, how does the ocean affect the glaciers that calve into the fjord? Can we learn about some important but poorly understood processes like calving and melange dynamics using this area as a test bed? What about surface mass budget and snowfall and snow melt?
A lead in the sea ice – these fractures in the ice have sea water (the black) welling up between two thick plates of sea ice. The conditions were perfect for frost flowers to grow on the surface. Sea ice turns out to be a lot more interesting – and complex- than I’d ever imagined…
Now, as a glaciologist, I’ve mostly worked with the interface between atmosphere and ice sheet (at least the last 14 years or so, but I am also still (after my PhD topic on ice fracture and crevasses) interested in calving glaciers and the processes that control how fast icebergs form. And the fjord, Inglefield Bredning has *a lot* of calving glaciers in it. It is a natural laboratory for glaciology and for developing numerical models. Calving is actually a surprisingly difficult thing to model with computer models of glaciers.
Or perhaps it’s not that surprising?
Observations are difficult to get (to put it mildly). There are a number of (possibly wild) theories of “calving laws” that remain poorly constrained by observations as a result. Common parameterizations of ice flow makes it hard to deal with fast flowing glaciers where calving is common. Dealing with grounding lines, where glaciers meet the sea and start to come close to flotation can give notorious numerical errors and retreat requires the remaking of ocean grids in fully coupled climate models.
Satellite image from ESA’s Sentinel-2 satellite showing glaciers calving icebergs into the head of the Ingle field Bredning fjord. The black is open water, icebergs show up as blueish dots, the land is carpeted in snow. Low winter sun (in late September 2022) casts deep shadows.
These are not easy or computationally cheap problems to solve. And where there are at least thousands (maybe even tens of thousands?) of scientists working on atmospheric weather and climate modelling, the community working on ice sheet dynamic models is probably only in the low hundreds.
And of course, we really lack long time series of measurements – essential in a system that changes only s l o w l y, but likely irreversibly and which we are, only now as the system is changing rapidly, starting to understand.
This of course is why the fjord observation record of Steffen is so valuable – these are reliable, repeated measurements of ocean properties that are known to affect the outlet glaciers that meet them. It is indeed a natural laboratory.
What we are now also working on is a field lab to study these calving processes in-situ. I have already found the return to the field scientifically valuable. There is really no replacement for going to observe the earth system you want to understand. (My PhD supervisor used to call it “nurturing your inner glacier”). Observations taken in spring/summer 2022 have already changed how I think about some processes and hopefully the follow-up we have planned in 2023 will confirm our new theoretical framework.
Heading home from the deployment of instruments out near calving glaciers at the head of the fjord.
I am fortunate indeed in that at the same research department, we also have colleagues collecting and analyzing satellite data and developing the numerical models we want to use to understand how ice sheets fit into the earth system. All three of these elements – field, satellite and numerical model- are essential.
In this project we are using the satellite observations to extend the time series of field data and we can use both sets of observations together to develop and test a numerical model of this fjord and the glaciers that calve into it. The numerical model we can then extend to other glaciers in Greenland. Hopefully, we can also use this work to understand how Antarctic glaciers might also respond to a warming ocean. Ultimately, the aim of all this work is to understand the contribution of these glaciers to sea level rise both now and in the future.
This is not a frivolous question. In fact, if large (more than a couple of metres).of sea level rise is expected, it is a question that is basically existential for Denmark.
I will add more on the specifics and science in coming months, this is already long enough. However, I’d like to mention a couple of other points:
Firstly, DMI is by no means alone operating up here. Many of the key articles, particularly on glaciology in this region, have been written by the Japanese group at Hokkaido University and their collaborators at the Meteorological Research Institute, the national institute for polar research and others. We at DMI are also working directly with the Greenland institute of natural resources, Asiaq, GEUS, KU, DTU, AU, SDU, ESA, Eumetsat and many others in this research programme.
Finally, this work is currently being carried out under the auspices of the Danish National Centre for Climate Research (NCKF), funded by the Danish Government though with contributions also from other research projects mostly funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe frameworks as well as ESA’s climate change initiative for the Greenland ice sheet.
In a sense this isn’t that “new” – we’ve known about higher sea levels during the last interglacial for ages and that the global mean temperature was roughly 2C above the pre-industrial global mean. This is in fact one of the reasons for the Paris target (though some scientists speculate that it’s also pretty much already out of reach).
However, the sea surface temperature stuff makes it extra interesting as the ocean is a pretty big source of uncertainty in global climate models and mot models do not manage to reproduce modern day ocean temperatures all that well.
It should also be said that the last interglacial is only a good analogue for 2C world up to a point – it was warm because of enhanced solar input, not because of greenhouse gases as this plot from an Antarctic ice core, edited by the awesome Bethan Davies at the Antarctic Glaciers blog shows:
Carbon dioxide (CO2), Methane (CH4) with reconstructed temperature from the Vostok Ice Core, taken in Eastern Antarctica. Enhanced with modern methane, CO2 and temperature measurements by Bethan Davies. Note that the “modern” value of CO2 here is from 2004. In 2017 it is currently measuring 403 ppm.
It’s also interesting to speculate where the water came from – the Greenland ice sheet was much smaller than today but it was still there and now “only” contains 7m of sea level rise today. So the complete disappearance of Greenland cannot explain the rise in global sea level. The small glaciers and ice caps of the world can’t contribute more than half a metre or so either. Therefore it has to be Antarctica contributing the most – East or West is the question and it really is a very very longstanding question.
The progress in the international polar year (IPY) in mapping the bedrock of Antarctic in the BEDMAP2 brought quite a few surprises, including the discovery of several very deep marine basins in the East that could potentially contribute a lot of water to sea level.
More recently, channels under the floating ice shelves of west Antartica, along with various modelling studies have proposed that the west could be much more unstable than thought. Actually this has been a very very longstanding problem in Antarctic science since at least the late 1970s when John Mercer first proposed the marine ice sheet instability hypothesis.
The silent storm surge – coastal flooding in Copenhagen on the 5th January – the water in the harbour is not normally this high! Source: Brian Dehli, shared by DR
The “silent storm surge” in January 2017 around the coast of Denmark was a hundred year event in many places, but as Aslak Grinsted points out, sea level rise makes a hundred year event a 20 year event with only a small rise.
Sea level will not rise equally everywhere, the fingerprint of Greenland ice sheet loss is felt largely in the Pacific, Antarctic ice melt will be felt in Europe. It matters where the water comes from. A point not generally appreciated.
So this new paper is also important, but it only underlines that we need to be able to make much much better estimates of how fast and how far the ice sheets will retreat, which is the justification for much of my own scientific research.
Finally, I think it’s probably necessary to point out that sea level is already rising. This was asked by a listener to Inside science, one of my favourite BBC radio 4 programmes/podcasts. I was a little surprised that an apparently scientifically literate and interested member of the public was not aware that we can measure sea level rise pretty well – in fact to an extent, the global warming signal is more easily detected in the ocean than in the global temperature record. This is because the ocean expands as it warms and there is ocean pretty much everywhere, whereas temperature observations are patchy and mostly on land. Clearly, scientists like myself are *still* not doing a very good job of communicating our science more widely. So here is the global mean sea level record to date, it’s updated pretty regularly here and on average, sea level is rising at about 3mm per year or 3cm per decade.
Sea level variation measured by satellite since 1993 from NASA
When we look at tidal gauges,sea level rose about 20cm in the 2oth century
Sea level rise in the 20th century measured by tide gauges, plot by NASA, data from CSIRO
The big uncertainties we have on whether or not this will accelerate in years to come is largely down to missing processes in ice sheet models that we don’t yet understand or model well – mostly calving by glaciers and ice shelves. I promised Steve Bloom a blog post on that at some point – I have a paper to finish and new simulations to run, but hopefully I’ll get round to that next.
UPDATE: I was made aware this morning of a new report from the European Environment Agency about climate change impacts and adaptation in Europe. In the report they state (correctly) that while the IPCC 5th Assessment Report suggested that in the 21st century the likely sea level rise will be on the order of half a metre, some national and expert assessments (I took part in a couple of these) had suggested an upper bound of 1.5 – 2m this century, for high emissions scenarios.
This is a big difference and would be pretty challenging to adapt to in low-lying countries like the Netherlands and Denmark, not to mention big coastal cities like London or Hamburg. It’s laso important to emphasise that it doesn’t jsut stop at the end of the century, in fact our simulations of the retreat of Greenland ice sheet suggest it’s only just getting going at the end of this century and the next century the rate of ice loss will really start to accelerate.
All of which is to say, there’s really a very good reason to act now to reduce our emissions. The EEA has also produced this very nice map of observed sea level rise in Europe over the last two decades based on Copernicus environmental data.
With the prospect of American federal funding for environmental observations being reduced or strongly constrained in the future, it’s really important we start to identify and support the European datasets which are the only other sources of environmental monitoring out there right now.
On the 16th may 1619 two ships, the Unicorn and the Lamprey, set sail from Copenhagen searching for the fabled North West Passage. On board there were 65 men, led by their captain, the Danish explorer Jens Munk. A year and a half later, the Lamprey limped back into Bergen (Norway) with just 3 men, including Munk, on board.
Almost all of the other crew members had died of scurvy in Hudson Bay .
The story of this terrible voyage, their sailing round Iceland, Greenland, Baffin Bay and into Hudson Bay is outlined in this wonderful atmospheric podcast from DR.
A Map, hand-drawn by Jens Munk in 1624 of the area between Cape Farewell and Hudson Bay, seen from the north; (Source: Tromsø University library)
The UK has similarly many tales of Arctic and Antarctic suffering, listening to the podcast I was put in mind of Coleridge’s famous “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, but we rarely hear of the similar stories from other nations, a clear benefit of learning other languages is being able to access these archives and stories*.
The podcast contains a wonderful description by a Greenland pilot of the sea ice and how tricky navigating it can be along with interviews and inputs from many others. If you are at all familiar with Danish – I really recommend the series.
However, the description by a nutritionist of the terrible effects of scurvy had me wondering. I learn (via Dutch family and confirmed by the OED) that the name of the disease, caused of course by a lack of vitamin C in the diet, is probably from the Dutch Scheurbuik – rip belly – an eloquent description of one of the notable later stages of the disease.
Rip here is less a description of enhanced musculature and much more a description of what it feels like when your internal organs start to bleed and your muscles and bones are weak from lack of nutrition.
Photo of chest cage with pectus excavatum and scorbutic rosaries – from this paper
Upon looking it up (Thankyou Wikipedia), I learn that the causes of scurvy had been repeatedly identified, forgotten and mistaken since at least the middle Ages. There is an estimate that around 2 million sailors died as a result of scurvy between 1500 and 1800.
2 Million almost entirely preventable deaths and 2 million men who died in appalling agony.
And this happened in spite of what appears to be the first recorded medical trial by James Lind in the 1750s, it still took the Royal Navy 40 years to start giving out fresh citrus fruits as a standard on their ships. Vitamin C itself was only finally recognised and extracted in 1932.
This story is an outrage in many ways, but a clear example also of how science and medicine, properly conducted, can help to improve and save lives. It is also a clear warning to conduct thoughtful experiments with care and to listen to those warnings when they have been issued.
It might also be a recommendation that learning foreign languages is not only fun and useful but can be it’s own reward.
*I should also mention here that the rather awesome Danish Arctic Institute are currently producing a very well written series on Danish exploration in the Arctic in English, based on their own very comprehensive podcast series. These are published online in the Arctic Journal. Both the series of historical accounts and the newspaper in general are absolute top recommends for those interested in the subject of the Arctic environmentally , socially and politically.
The lure of the poles (Svalbard in Spring, the coldest time of year)
Extract from “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
UPDATE: The Arctic Sea ice Outlook I mention in the post below has just been published for 2016. We will follow this up in September when the final results will be known, but here are the 30 entries using a rage of different techniques including sophisticated computer models, statistical estimates and what is kindly called “Heuristics” but which may be characterised as an educated guess by people who have been studying this field for a while…
Professor Wadhams has not contributed an estimate this year but it can easily be seen that none of the estimates reach as low as the putative 1 million square kilometres. Nonetheless the view of 27 expert climate scientists put forward by Kay, Bailey and Holland (pdf), not to mention the very sophisticated RASM model (one of the most sophisticated in this area, run by the US Naval Postgraduate school), put the September extent at a very low 3-4 million km2, in the same range as the record low of 2012.
It will be interesting to see how low it does go. The latest results from the polar portal show that Arctic sea ice is currently still on the record low 2012 line but a careful look shows also that the 2012 and 2013 curves diverge around mid to late June. The year 2013 is pretty representative of a “new normal” over the last 4 years or so, it is therefore difficult to tell based on simply extrapolating along the curves which path 2016 is likely to follow.
The area covered by at least 15% sea ice in the Arctic from 1981 to present, the black and red curve shows the year 2016 and is updated daily on the Polar Portal
The Polar Portal has become part of our daily life at DMI where I work in the last few years, it combines detailed observations and models from the Greenland ice sheet, the Arctic sea ice and, soon hopefully, permafrost. I am particularly involved in the Greenland pages where we daily calculate the amount of snowfall and snow melt which gives us a surface mass budget and which we sum up over the year to work out what it means for the health of the Greenland ice sheet. This year has been especially interesting with an extraordinarily early start to melting driven by warm Arctic temperatures. Many records in Greenland have been broken in April, May and June. Spectacularly, last week Nuuk set a new temperature record for June that managed to last only 24 hours, before it was broken again.
Crossing the sea ice in front of Paulabreen, a surge type glacier with a calving front in Svalbard
I trained as a glaciologist originally, but even then I came across sea ice and was first of all unnerved by it, crossing on scooters to visit glaciers in Svalbard, and then fascinated by it. Recently I have been working pretty closely with my colleagues in DMI who are sea ice scientists and I have learnt quite a lot. We even published a paper together in the journal Polarforschung earlier this year. Not only that, I am now part of a big ERC Synergy project known as ice2ice with scientists at four institutions in Bergen and Copenhagen working on the complex connections between sea ice, ocean, atmosphere and ice sheet in the Arctic. More on that another time, but suffice to say it’s fascinating work and I know a hell of a lot more about sea ice than I did even three years ago.
So when this news story crossed my email this evening courtesy a BBC researcher and journalist I knew pretty well straight away what it was about. Basically the scientist Professor Peter Wadhams had made some statements about the extent of Arctic sea ice which might be considered somewhat eyecatching.
Professor Wadhams is a well-known scientist who did some incredibly valuable and indeed ground-breaking early work on sea ice. More recently he has also done some very valuable work reconstructing thickness based on submarine observations during the Cold War (see below on why this is important). I well remember seeing him talk about this as a young graduate student, he is an excellent speaker and gave a very interesting and compelling talk. In the last few years he has made several statements that have been widely reported and perhaps misinterpreted, with regard to the future fortunes of the Arctic sea ice.
Now, I need and want to be clear about this. Most of the global climate models we use are not very good at reproducing the observed historical sea ice extent. They have improved significantly in the last few years but still struggle to reproduce the actual observed decline in sea ice area from satellites. And there are actually very good reasons why this should be. There are some very good stand alone sea ice models which have done a very good job and the key difference between these models is our clue. Sea ice models are generally partly forced with actual observations, or climate reanalyses which assimilate observations, so the atmosphere and the ocean are close to reality. Basically sea ice responds to weather, and if you have a more accurate weather driving your sea ice model you will get a better fit to the observations.
So, is Professor Wadhams correct? Will the sea ice “disappear” this year.
Well, it is pretty clear that given the changes we have already observed in the Arctic, as well as what we know about Arctic amplification and the general direction that anthropogenic emissions are heading in, that unless something changes pretty soon, we will likely see an end to a significant cover of sea ice in the Arctic at some point in the next few decades. But was does that actually mean?
Reading his actual comments in the article he appears to define 1 million km2 as “no sea ice” and that partly reflects how we define sea ice extent. Since most of the data sets use a cut-off figure (typically 15%) to define when a grid square or pixel is or is not a sea ice point. This is known as sea ice concentration and is really something of a hangover from the days when sea ice was observed from ships and an attempt was made to estimate how much sea ice in the area was around the vessel.
There are however lots of things that can affect sea ice extent, including winds and currents and melt ponds. The latter also affects how different algorithms assess the area that is or is not covered by sea ice. As there are a number of different sensors in use and a number of different algorithms processing that data, it is not entirely surprising that there actually a number of different estimates (I will use OSISAF) for how much of the Arctic is covered in sea ice. And this number will vary in years with more winds for example, or stronger ocean currents, sea ice will disperse faster. It is quite likely that much of the variability in sea ice area in recent years is at least partly attributable to different winds, as well as, for example in 2012, big storms that have arrived at just the right moment (or wrong one depending on how you look at it), to break up the sea ice into smaller, more easily transportable pieces.
As an aside, a better measure for how much Arctic sea ice there is actually present is sea ice volume. Unfortunately this is very difficult to measure, especially outside the winter freeze up season, though a research group at the UCL, centre for Polar Observation and Monitoring have developed a way to do so. Here for example is the most recent plot, which as you can see has not been updated since May 2016 due to the presence of melt ponds on the surface of the sea ice which the Cryosat radar cannot penetrate.
So 1 million km2 is probably a reasonable cut off for assuming an “ice-free” Arctic in the sense that it indicates that there will still be some sea ice drifting around (it always forms surprisingly quickly when the winter begins) in summer, even if it is dispersed.
Over the last 40 or so years (we have good observations going back to 1979, it gets patchy after that), in September, when the area covered by sea ice is at it’s lowest, that extent has been between about 7 and 9 million km2, more recently that has dropped and 2012, the lowest on record had an extent of about 4 million km2, which you can see on the latest polarportal sea ice chart below.
I well remember 2012, we had a large melt event over Greenland that year also, but it was still quite a long way from the 1 million km2 quoted by Professor Wadhams. Again, let me be clear, we are pretty sure that at some point on a time scale of a few years to a few decades, the Arctic will become “ice-free” in the summer time. We can predict this, even if we don’t know exactly when, since, as I hope is clear now, sea ice conditions are very dependent on the weather. The weather this year so far, at least this Spring has been very warm and congenial to sea ice melt. The big dive shown on the graph above is no mystery when considering some of the temperature anomalies in the Arctic, as shown also on the Polar Portal.
Nevertheless, the recent plots seem to show that the 2 metre air temperature in the Arctic is returning to close to normal and there is little reason to suppose that will change significantly anytime soon.
Having said that, weather forecasting has improved massively in the last few decades, a true quiet revolution, but we still do not know how the weather will pan out over the whole of this melt season. I am sure that at some point Professor Wadhams will be proved correct, but we do not know when and it is even possible or rather likely that we will have a few years where we switch back and forth between ice free and not ice free conditions. So, the answer to the question I pose above is probably no. But don’t bet on it remaining so for too long.
UPDATE: I recalled this morning on my way in to work that I had somehow failed to mention the Sea Ice Prediction network. This group of people under the auspices of ARCUS, gather predictions on y´the end-of-season sea ice extent ever year. The call for predictions for the 2016 season is now open. Many different research groups as well as one or two enthusiastic amateurs will post their predictions over the next few weeks. It is an interesting exercise, as you can see based on last year’s report (see also figure below), it is not the first time that Profgessor Wadhams has predicted a 1 million km2 extent in September, and his is the lowest (and least accurate) in the rankings.
Endnote: There has been quite an absence of posts from this blog recently. I have been too busy with work, family, travel and more recently the EU Referendum (for which I have been threatening a post for quite some time and may yet get around to before polling day). However, a question about Arctic sea ice has been flickering on the edges of my consciousness for a while now so this was a quick (EDIT: not so quick!) blogpost to try and address it when I should actually be writing something else…
“The Arctic is one of the last great pristine ecosystems, a safe haven for endangered species and home to Indigenous Peoples whose lifestyle has survived in harmony with nature for thousands of years.”
This quote in the wake of COP21, extracted from a celebrity I’ve never heard of (sorry, I’m just not that interested in actors) raised my hackles as it repeated yet again the idea that the Arctic is “pristine”.
Even without contemplating climate change, it is most certainly not, as the polar portal season report I was vaguely involved in compiling this year made clear.
The “pristine” wilderness of Von Postbreen, Svalbard
There is a whole literature in the humanities on Orientalism and “othering”, about how we define other people and places partly to define what we are not. I’m not sure if there is a term for this narrative of a “pristine wilderness”, let us call it “pristinism ” for want of a better term. But before I list the ways in which the Arctic is not pristine, let me make very clear, I am well aware I also suffer from pristinism, to some extent. What my boss teasingly refers to as “the white disease”, the fascination with snow and ice that makes me want to leave the comforts of house and home and go and live somewhere deeply uncomfortable, and indeed dangerous in order to plumb the mysteries. I have been visiting the Arctic for well over 12 years now, though as most of my work is on computer, I don’t get the option so often anymore. Maybe that’s a good thing, perhaps the last thing the Arctic needs is more people flying to it.
The ecosystem has been significantly degraded by the loss (hopefully now in reverse) of most of the large cetacean species by commercial whalers. Similarly, walrus and polar bears in Svalbard were almost rendered extinct before hunting was banned. It also appears there were walrus in Iceland when the vikings arrived that, like any polar bear at the present day arriving on Icelandic shores, were quickly dispatched. The Greenland vikings were certainly rich from walrus ivory as their main source of income. Not content with exterminating the walrus the early settlers sent their sheep out and very successfully deforested the 25-40% of Iceland that had been forested, leading to dust storms, soil erosion and the unfortunate inability to build boats to get anywhere else very far away. Deforestation has only recently begun to be reversed. In much the same way Musk Oxen were virtually eliminated from Eastern Greenland by hunting, but then rather too successfully introduced to the west where there has been a population explosion.
Fish stocks have at least been largely preserved in Iceland (sensible given how important fishing is to the economy), but there have been several notorious crashes in different fish species in the North Atlantic and around Greenland. Although, to be fair these latter seem to be at least partly caused by changing ocean temperatures rather than purely overfishing. Then there are the invasive species, largely limited so far to the (admittedly delicious) King crab , an omnivore that will eat everything in it’s path much to the fear of some local ecologists around the Arctic coast of Norway.
And then there are the birds. Different bird species face declining populations due both to loss of habitat outside the Arctic as well as hunting in the Arctic region. I was somewhat surprised, though in retrospect I should not have been, at the very few bird numbers that I saw while on a kayaking trip within an easy boat ride of Nuuk.
I would have seen many more in the Scottish islands, but if a subsistence species is within easy reach of a large town (which in themselves would have been impossible prior to colonisation), it is an inevitable tragedy of the commons waiting to happen. Similarly, seals are incredibly wary and remain as far from people as possible in Greenland, a big contrast to the rather trusting and curious creatures I have been able to paddle very close to around the British Isles. And Heaven help any polar bear that strays too close to any Greenlandic settlements, legal protection or not…
Part of the problem are the difficulties birds have in reproducing. This is at least partly down to the toxic mix of chemicals stored in their fat, which comes out in a rush when these animals and birds have to live on their body fat supplies – as they do each summer when incubating eggs. These eggs also appear to contain high levels of mercury, cadmium, PCBs, organochlorines, dieldrin to mention just a few, with an effect on the developing bird embryos inside and of course anything that eats either bird or eggs.
And this of course is because that “pristine” Arctic has an extremely high concentration of industrial chemicals, heavy metals and other by-products of our manufacturing society. Albeit a long way from most sources of production. I was once fascinated to discover that all sorts of historic events such as the Greek and Roman production of silver (and it’s leaden by-product) could be identified in the Greenland ice cores, as could the introduction of leaded petrol and it’s later phasing out. The atmosphere acts as a kind of distillation column, concentrating these poisons at the top (and bottom) of the world, not to mention the local sources. There are coal mines in Svalbard, aluminium smelters in Iceland and Greenland, the oil + gas fields of Alaska, Newfoundland, Norway and Russia. Not to mention god only knows what hazardous (radioactive?) waste is leaching away from forgotten islands in the Russian sector of the Arctic.
Three polar bears take over an abandoned dog shed for a sleep in the shade, Svea coal mine, Svalbard
In the food chain, the little animals get eaten by the bigger ones, which get eaten by the bigger ones, concentrating and accumulating toxic chemicals all the way to the top of the food chain.
To us.
Because humans are, in the Arctic at least, the top predator.
Yet at the same time we in the crowded, populated mid-latitudes project our fantasies of a pristine fairy-tale at the top of the world.
Sorry.
The Arctic is very very far from pristine, and if what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic, the reverse is also true, the Arctic is part of this world for good or ill. There is however, no doubt that it exerts a powerful pull on our imaginations.
There is a reason poor old Ursus maritimus has become the poster children of climate change. Perhaps it’s all the bright white snow and ice, even if the Arctic Report card shows us the browning of the Arctic as snow lies for ever shorter periods at the same time as sea ice cover at the end of summer is similarly declining…
From the Arctic report card 2015: “Northern Hemisphere (NH) June snow cover extent and September Arctic sea ice extent. Sea ice extent data for 1979-2014 are derived from the NASA Team algorithm (Cavalieri et al., 1996); ice extent estimates for 2015 are produced from real time data (Maslanik and Stroeve 1999). Bold red and blue lines are 5-year running means of the original snow and sea ice extent records, respectively.”
I am optimistic but cautious about the Paris agreement at COP21. I hope it will come in time to preserve some remnant of the Arctic wilderness, but even if it does we still have some big challenges to face. Sweeping these under the carpet for the sake of a convenient narrative about a pristine wilderness is not helpful. I have a great affection for the Arctic, the people and the wildlife that lives there. I started this post originally some time ago but failed to finish it as it made me rather depressed to think about, but then I was put in mind of this poem from Seamus Heaney and decided it was worth finishing after all with this piece.
Clearly, the myth of “The North” and “the Arctic” has been with us for some time, but surely we owe it to the Arctic and the peoples who live there to try and see through the “pristinism” and start to fix some of these challenges?
As an impressionable seven year old I learnt what a crevasse was; namely a large split in a glacier of great hazard to glacier travellers. This knowledge was imparted by a venture scout in my parents group who, on a climbing trip to the Alps, managed to end up in one, breaking several bones in the process. Years later this did not discourage me from my own forays into alpine mountaineering, so it was probably inevitable that I would have my own brush with mortality in a crevasse while researching them as part of my PhD work (see photo).
Some injuries, 3 days after falling into a crevasse (thankfully to be rescued by quick-thinking field assistants). Not a recommended “experience”.
The research was interesting and made more so by being carried out in such a spectacular environment. Breiðamerkurjökull is a southern outlet glacier of the Vatnajökull ice cap in Iceland. It’s actually one of the more popular tourist destinations in Iceland thanks to the boats that run on the lagoon in front of the glacier, getting people up close and personal with icebergs. The icebergs are one of the reasons we chose to work there, as the rationale of my Phd project was can a crevasse depth relation be used as a parameterisation for calving in ice sheet models?
Crevasses on Breidamerkurjokull, note figure for scale
Crevasses are extremely beautiful features to observe and they are interesting scientifically since they indicate all sorts of information about what is going on in a glacier. As they are aligned more or less with the principal stresses in a particular location we can see where a glacier is accelerating or decelerating, that is stretching or compressing respectively, based on the shape and alignment. They can also be used as a feature to track glacier velocity between two successive images taken from aircraft or satellites. Crevasses are also significant in other ways, since they are a plane of weakness that can be exploited by meltwater, channelling it away from the surface of the glacier to the bed changing the velocity of the glacier. And as proved in the case of my Phd work, when they extend deep enough in the right place, they cause large chunks of ice, namely icebergs, to fall off the front of glaciers.
Given all these interesting habits it is probably surprising to learn that the large computer models of ice sheets and glaciers don’t usually include crevasses in them, though there are some more recent honourable exceptions, mostly working with single outlets or small glaciers such as Sue Cook’s work with the Elmer model. This is because an individual crevasse is not only too small for the resolution of a model, it’s also a discontinuity, and the approximations of the physics of ice sheets do not easily allow discontinuities. To put it another way, when we model glaciers we usually assume they are really large and thick fluid bodies, and as everyone knows, fluids don’t crack. This is just another bizarre property of water, and if I get chance I’ll discuss that again in further detail in another entry. But back to crevasses.
Now I mostly work with a climate model, HIRHAM5, using it to calculate surface mass balance, that is accumulation of snow and the melt and run-off from the surface of glaciers and ice sheet. However, I am finally (loosely) involved in a project that sets out to finish in some way the work I started as a young PhD student.
At DMI we run the PISM ice sheet model, fully coupled with a global climate model EC-Earth as I wrote about in this post. We will also soon be running HIRHAM5 coupled to PISM in order to study feedbacks between ice sheet dynamics and surface climate forcing (mainly in terms of how topography and elevation of the ice sheet affects the surface mass balance). We also intend to participate in the ISMIP6 model comparison project which will compare the results of several different global climate models that also include ice sheets in a realistic fashion.
One of the key challenges in getting these running is how to deal with the ocean interface with the ice sheet, both in terms of submarine melt of outlet glaciers (likely a far more important process than earlier recognised) and in terms of calving icebergs. One of our main (and in my opinion most interesting) projects right now, ice2ice has allowed us to employ a PhD student to work on this specific issue. She will be using a similar idea to Faezeh Nick’s model of outlet glacier calving, which in turn was based on a long ago work (pdf) I was part of as a lowly PhD student.
By comparing the measured crevasse depths with numerical models I was able to show that simple models can be used as approximations of crevasse depth. That study is still one of the very very few where actual empirical measurements of crevasse depth, strain rate, spacing and other variables were made and compared with model output.
In my current incarnation as modeller I will be keeping very carefully away from all sharp fractures in the ice and concentrating instead on the model part. Expect updates here…
The climate of Greenland has been changing over the last 20 or so years, especially in the south. In this paper we showed that the amount of melt and liquid water run off from the ice sheet in the south west has increased at the same time as the equilibrium line (roughly analogous to the snow line at the end of summer on the ice sheet) has started to move up the ice sheet. Unlike previous periods when we infer the same thing happened this can be attributed to warmer summers rather than drier winters.
The area we focus on in this study is in SW Greenland close to Nuuk, the capital. White shows glaciers, blue is sea, brown is land not covered by ice.
We focused on the area close to Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, as we had access to a rather useful but unusual (in Greenland) dataset gathered by Asiaq the Greenland survey. They have been measuring the run off from a lake near the margin of the ice sheet for some years and made this available to us in order to test the model predictions. This kind of measurement is particularly useful as it integrates melt and run-off from a wider area than the usual point measurements. As our model is run at 5.5 km resolution, one grid cell has to approximate all the properties of a 5.5 km grid cell. Imagine your house and how much land varies in type, shape and use in a 5.5 km square centred on your house and you begin to appreciate the problems of using a single point observation to assess what is essentially an area simulation! This is even more difficult in mountainous areas close to the sea, like the fjords of Norway or err, around south west Greenland (see below).
The beautiful fjords near Nuuk. Represent this in a 5.5km grid cell…
The HIRHAM5 model is one of very few regional climate models that are run at sufficiently high resolution to start to clearly see the climate influences of mountains, fjords etc in Greenland, which meant we didn’t need to do additional statistical downscaling to see results that matched quite closely the measured discharge from the lake.
Graph comparing modelled versus measured discharge as a daily mean from Lake Tasersuaq near Nuuk, Greenland. The model output was summed over the Tasersuaq drainage basin and smoothed by averaging over the previous 7 days. This is because the model does not have a meltwater routing scheme so we estimated how long it takes for melt and run-off from the ice sheet to reach this point.
We were pretty happy to see that HIRHAM5 manages to reproduce this record well. There’s tons of other interesting stuff in the paper including a nice comparison of the first decade of the simulation with the last decade of the simulation, showing that the two look quite different with much more melt, and a lower surface mass balance (the amount of snowfall minus the amount of melt and run – off) per year in recent years.
Red shows where more snow and ice melts than falls and blue shows where more snow falls than is melted on average each year.
Now, as we work at DMI, we have access to lots of climate records for Greenland. (Actually everyone does, the data is open access and can be downloaded). This means we can compare the measurements in the nearest location, Nuuk, for a bit more than a century. Statistically we can see the last few years have been particularly warm, maybe even warmer than the well known warm spell in the 1920s – 1940s in Greenland.
Graphs comparing and extending the model simulation back in time with Nuuk observations
There is lots more to be said about this paper, we confirm for example the role of increasing incoming solar radiation (largely a consequence of large scale atmospheric flow leading to clearer skies) and we show some nice results which show how the model is able to reproduce observations at the surface, so I urge you to read it (pdf here) but hopefully this summary has given a decent overview of our model simulations and what we can use them for.
Sterna Paradisaea 
