(Cryosp)here today, gone tomorrow

Re-post from Open Mind; the commentary is worth scanning, also.

There’s a new kid in town, blog-wise, showing maps of Arctic sea ice concentration and thickness, called apocalypse4real (seems to be an appropriate name). It shows that all the ice thicker than 6m is gone from the Arctic (click the graph for a larger, clearer view):

Ice thicker than 6m would show in black (but there isn’t any), red is 6m thick, dark blue is open water.

Furthermore Neven’s caution that the storm in the Arctic might wreak havoc with its sea ice seems to be premonitory. Both extent (from NSIDC) and area (from Cryosphere Today) have taken a nosedive lately, setting new record lows for this date (click either graph for a larger, clearer view):

The alarming fact is that this year’s minimum sea ice extent is already the 6th-lowest on record — and there’s still about a month to go in the melt season.

Meanwhile, this year’s minimum sea ice area is already 5th-lowest on record — and there’s still about a month to go in the melt season.

At this point, I think my prediction that this year’s minimum would be close to, but wouldn’t break, the record will turn out wrong. I expect we’ll set a new record low for sea ice extent, area, and volume.

If you believe that we can do this to the earth and not have consequences, you’re a fool.

In fact there’s an interesting presentation by Rutgers Univ. researcher Jennifer Francis about possible consequences of the rapid decline in sea ice.

Meanwhile, here in the USA we’ve just had the hottest month on record and the hottest 12-month period on record. The heat and drought gripping the nation have devastated the corn crop, with fears that the shortfall will cause a crisis in food prices.

Consequences.

I can’t help but wonder how Anthony Watts and other fake skeptics will spin this. I can’t wait to see his next “Sea Ice Update.” I wonder what WUWT reader “Smokey” will have to say.

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This entry was written by jcwinnie, posted on 2012-8-11 at 7:09 pm, filed under atmosphere, climate, disasters, forecast, world and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

4 Comments

  1. jcwinnie
    Posted 2012-8-15 at 4:37 pm | Permalink

    Even as the sea ice on the Arctic Ocean looks to be headed for a possible record meltback this year, scientists reported Wednesday that the land-based ice sitting atop Greenland has already melted more than any time in the past 30 years — and that’s with another four weeks left in the melting season. The new study, based on satellite observations, expands on a report in July that showed a record 97 percent of Greenland’s icy surface had undergone at least some melting during the summer season.

    Supraglacial lake on Greenland ice.
    Credit: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

    But, that research only showed how widespread the melting was, not how long it went on in any given area — and in fact, some of that melted snow and ice almost certainly re-froze, meaning it won’t end up flowing to the ocean to raise sea level (total sea level rise is expected to reach 3 feet or more by 2100, and scientists expect Greenland to contribute a significant part of that increase).

    The new study, by contrast, looks at both the extent and the duration of melting to put together something called the “cumulative melting index,” which is a better gauge of how much water is likely to drain permanently from the frozen continent. The actual number won’t be compiled until the end of the season, since some of the meltwater will be trapped in surface lakes, sitting atop the ice, that will eventually freeze back when winter comes.

    Plenty of it, however, will drain into crevasses, and ultimately into the sea. Along the way, that drainage water can lubricate the undersides of glaciers, allowing them to flow more quickly, and dump more icebergs, into the ocean — another cause of sea level rise. “Over the past few years,” said Marco Tedesco of the City College of New York, who issued the new report, in an interview, “about half of Greenland’s contribution to sea level rise has come from meltwater, and half from ice going directly into the sea.”

    But surface melting has accelerated over the past decade, he said, for a number of reasons. The most straightforward is that air temperatures in the Arctic have been rising. Even at the highest altitudes on Greenland, where melting normally happens only for a few days each summer, it now lasts for weeks. Another factor is that when snow melts and refreezes, it becomes darker overall, so it absorbs sunlight more efficiently. When it melts completely, the ice underneath is darker still.

    “Snow absorbs about 20 percent of the energy that hits it and reflects the rest,” Tedesco said. “Ice absorbs more like 60 or 70 percent.” And in fact, a study that came out in June showed that Greenland’s albedo, or reflectivity, is lower than normal this year.

    The ice melt on in the Arctic Ocean (which doesn’t contribute to sea-level rise) is different in many ways. Storms that roil the area can break up the ice and speed its melting, and strong winds can literally push ice out of the Arctic ocean altogether. Neither of these happens to the thick ice on Greenland. The sea ice, moreover, is melting not just from the warmer air temperatures above, but also from the warmer ocean below.

    Still, the two are clearly related, Tedesco said. “The record for Greenland surface melt came in 2010, while the record melting for sea ice came in 2007. But 2007 was also a huge melting year for Greenland.” Combined with the faster slippage of glaciers toward the sea over the past decade or so, the prospects for rising seas over the next century and beyond are not encouraging.

  2. jcwinnie
    Posted 2012-8-16 at 1:35 pm | Permalink

    Greenland sets new summer melt record, “On the east coast, the west coast, at high elevations, in the north, there was a disproportionate amount of melting, both in terms of extent and duration, with respect to previous years,” said Marco Tedesco of the City University of New York.

  3. jcwinnie
    Posted 2012-8-16 at 4:08 pm | Permalink

    Scientists scurry to figure out the status of glaciers on the roof of the World

  4. jcwinnie
    Posted 2012-8-29 at 9:37 pm | Permalink

    With still two to three weeks left in its melt season, new data has confirmed that Arctic sea ice has melted to an all-time low since record keeping began. SF Examiner reports that Arctic sea ice has melted to an all-time low

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