‘Fallen off a cliff’: Bering Sea ice disappearing at record level

In the middle of February, onethird of the ice covering the Bering Sea off Alaska’s West Coast vanished within a week when an enormous pulse of heat swept over the Arctic. Scientists were stunned.

This rapid meltdown precipitated a record-shattering decline in Bering Sea ice through the winter and into spring, which has threatened the very way of life in Alaska’s coastal villages — reliant on the ice cover for navigation and hunting.

February and March ice levels were as low as far back as scientists can reconstruct, dating back more than 160 years.

Now, the ice is almost entirely gone — just 10 percent of normal levels as of the end of April.

“We’ve fallen off a cliff: very little sea ice remains in the Bering Sea,” tweeted Rick Thoman, an Alaska-based climatologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, on April 29.

Thoman said that the ice disappeared this year four weeks earlier than in any other year except 2017, when its extent was also well below normal.

The ice extent over the Chukchi Sea, just north of the Bering Sea abutting Alaska’s northwest coast, is also abnormally depleted. It recently began its melt season earlier than ever before measured.

The ice loss has real consequences for the people in the region, scientists say. “The low sea ice is already impacting the lives and livelihoods of people in Western Alaska coastal communities by restricting hunting and fishing which are the mainstays of the economies of these communities,” Thoman said in an interview.

“Without the ice, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to put food on the table,” added Brian Brettscheider, a climate scientist with the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Scientists say no one thing caused the ice to melt so far so fast, but rather a convergence of many different factors, connected to long-term climate change and this year’s weather pattern.