‘Unprecedented’ polar warming creates new range of problems
Scientists are seeing surprising melting in Earth’s polar regions at times they don’t expect, like winter, and in places they don’t expect, like eastern Antarctica.
New studies and reports issued this week at a major Earth sciences conference paint one of the bleakest pictures yet of dramatic warming in the Arctic and Antarctica.
Alaskan scientists described neverbefore-seen melting and odd winter problems, including permafrost that never refroze this past winter, and wildlife die-offs.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) yesterday released its annual Arctic report card, detailing the secondwarmest year on record in the Arctic and problems, including record low winter sea ice in parts of the region, increased toxic algal blooms – which are normally a warm water phenomenon – and weather changes in the rest of the country attributable to what is happening in the far north.
‘‘The Arctic is experiencing the most unprecedented transition in human history,’’ said the report’s lead author, Emily Osborne, chief of Arctic research for NOAA.
And that means other problems. ‘‘Continued warming of the Arctic atmosphere and ocean are driving broad change in the environmental system in predicted, and, also, unexpected ways,’’ the report said.
One of the most noticeable problems was record low sea ice in winter in the Bering Sea in 2017 and 2018, scientists said. In February, the Bering Sea ‘‘lost an area of ice the area of Idaho’’, said Dartmouth College engineering professor Donald Perovich, a report coauthor.
This is a problem because the oldest and thickest sea ice is down 95 per cent from 30 years ago. In 1985, about onesixth of Arctic sea ice was thick multiyear ice, Perovich said – now it was maybe one-hundredth.
University of Alaska Fairbanks marine mammal biologist Gay Sheffield not only studies the record low ice – she lives it daily in Nome, on the Bering Sea coast.
‘‘I left Nome and we had open water in December,’’ Sheffield said at the American Geophysical Union conference in Washington. ‘‘It’s very much impacting us.’’
‘‘Having this area ice-free is having this massive environmental change,’’ Sheffield said, adding that there had been a ‘‘multi-species die-off’’ of ocean life. This included the first spring mass die-off of seals along the Bering Strait.
University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher Vladimir Romanovsky said he was alarmed by what was happening to the permafrost — ground that stays frozen for years on end. This past year, Romanovsky found 25 spots that used to freeze in January and February, but did not freeze this year. –AP