On NASA’s Global Climate Change page, you can view an astonishing fracturing of sea ice on the Beaufort, covering hundreds of miles. It began in late January and continued through March, 2013. It’s not unusual for Arctic ice to fracture — it’s subject to ocean currents and storms that continually grind plates of sea ice together — but it is startling to see so much of it go at once. What’s different, says Walt Meier of the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC), is that this ice formed since last fall. It’s seasonal or “first-year” ice, and less durable, as ices go.
Last summer’s record melt-off reduced the amount of multiyear ice on the Beaufort (the salt concentrates into droplets of brine as ice crystals form and over time the droplets escape to the sea, leaving an ice that’s more rigid behind). “Multiyear ice used to cover up to 60 percent of the Arctic Ocean, it now covers only 30 percent,” says the NSIDC. By end of February 2013 (according to NASA Goddard, the NSIDC says March 15), the winter maximum of Arctic sea ice had been reached, but it was fifth-paltriest freeze-up of the past 35 years.
Up on Cooper Island, off Barrow, Alaska, researchers George and Penelope had a front-row seat, and posted about it for the Friends of Cooper Island blog: “Dramatic Early Breakup of the Beaufort.” We spoke to George Divoky a few years ago about “global warming as seen from Cooper Island” — after decades of research on Black Guillemots, he was having to respond to climate change in order to continue his work. For one thing, hungry polar bears were visiting the island to feast on Guillemot eggs, and after losing a few tents to their curiosity, he had to build a shack and keep a rifle handy.
For Divoky, who worries that the pace of change could spell the end of Cooper Island Black Guillemots, the story isn’t captured wholly by satellite views of ice:
While the media regularly reports on observed decreases in sea ice extent and volume, they typically ignore that it is not just a physical loss of ice that is occurring but that an entire ecosystem and its biotic components are being disrupted and diminished. Loss of ice in the western Beaufort Sea in the last decade is why Black Guillemot parents stopped feeding their young Arctic Cod in August and why polar bears now are regular visitors to Cooper Island.
Nor is Seattle, so far south, comparatively, immune to the effects of the presence (or not) of Arctic ice. What’s known as the Arctic Oscillation either spools up truly frigid around the Pole, or lets it roam southward. Historically, the Arctic Oscillation in a negative phase has resulted in it being more likely for stormy cold snaps to make their way to our doors. Unseasonable spring freezes are the sort of thing that keep Eastern Washington vineyard owners, for instance, in cold sweats. But the Arctic Oscillation is just a name for a dynamic pattern that exists because of there being millions of square miles of Arctic ice in the first place — at some point as the ice retreats, and multiyear ice especially decreases, the AO’s icebox refrigeration may shut down.
