Arctic

Number of papers: 8

Arctic Sea Ice Variations in the First Half of the 20th Century: A New Reconstruction Based on Hydrometeorological Data — Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, 2024; Semenov et al.

“Our reconstruction shows a large decrease in SIA from the 1920 to 1940 concurrent with the Early 20th Century Warming event in the Arctic. Such a negative SIA anomaly is absent in HadISST1.1 data.”

Holocene variability in sea ice cover, primary production, and Pacific-Water inflow and climate change in the Chukchi and East Siberian Seas (Arctic Ocean) — Journal of Quaternary Science, 2016; Stein, et al.

The authors use new proxy methods to determine the extent of Arctic sea ice, showing large variability over time. David Middleton puts this data into context in a good blog post.

Seasonal sea-ice in the Arctic’s last ice area during the Early Holocene — Nature Communications, 2023; Detlef et al.

This paper is amazing. It’s all about anthropogenic warming of the Arctic — based on models. The authors show … “marine proxy evidence for the disappearance of perennial sea ice in the southern Lincoln Sea during the Early Holocene, which suggests a widespread transition to seasonal sea ice in the Arctic Ocean.” This paper suggests that CO2 will cause massive melting of the ice cap — as we have seen as recently as 9,000 years ago WITHOUT ANY CO2 FORCING! Researcher Susan Crockford notes that polar bears seem to have survived more than 1,000 ice-free summers during that period, so we shouldn’t worry about them in the future, regardless how it plays out.

Changes in Barents Sea ice Edge Positions in the Last 440 years: A Review of Possible Driving Forces — International Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2020; Morner et al.

This is the first report of the Barents Sea Ice Edge (BIE) project. By understanding the dynamics of the ice edge, the authors believe that the ice position is likely to start advancing southward in next decade.

Landfast sea ice in Hudson Bay and James Bay: Annual cycle, variability and trends, 2000–2019 — Elementa, the Science of the Anthropocene, 2022; Gupta et al.

“The duration of fast ice over the 19 years ranged from 150–160 days in James Bay to 170–230 days in Hudson Bay (Figure 2c). Figure 2d shows the trend of changing fast-ice duration across the Hudson Bay and James Bay. Areas like Chesterfield Inlet, Rankin Inlet and Arviat were noted to have a negative trend signifying a shortening of the fast-ice period, with the most negative trend observed around Arviat (6 days per decade). Similarly, a positive trend signifying an extended presence of fast ice was observed along eastern Hudson Bay with Belcher Islands encountering a longer fast-ice period of roughly 8 days per decade. The trends of fast-ice duration across Hudson Bay and James Bay (Figure 6) indicate a decreasing period of fast-ice presence in Chesterfield, Rankin Inlet, Arviat, Churchill, Moosonee, while fast ice was staying for a longer duration in Fort Severn, Chisasibi, Inukjuak, Akulivik and Ivujivik.”

A Synthesis of Observations and Models to Assess the Time Series of Sea Ice Mass Balance in the Beaufort Sea — JGR Oceans, 2020; Planck et al.

This is actually pretty interesting. They collected data from 8 drifting ice-measuring buoys and analyzed it. You have to read the “conclusions” section to find this:

“Seven of the eight sites, all of which were in the 21st century, showed more bottom melt than surface melt, and observed bottom melt was correlated to average ice concentration along the trajectory. Likewise, an equally strong correlation between the amount of bottom melt and the solar heat deposited into the ocean nearest the site location …”

This says most of the more recent melting occurs on the bottom of the ice, which is from a) currents, and b) solar heat deposited into the ocean. In both these cases, CO2 and atmospheric warming have nothing to do with the loss of ice. However, this is for one location. Don’t assume all ice melts from the bottom, or even much ice does.

Rapid Atlantification along the Fram Strait at the beginning of the 20th century — Science Advances, 2021; Tesi et al.

A very interesting paper showing higher-than-we-thought variability in Arctic ocean temperatures caused by the Gulf Stream bringing warm water up from the Equator. The spin on this in the media read “Catastrophic warming happening sooner than anyone thought,” when in fact this paper points to natural variability that has been going on since the isthmus of Panama was formed, blocking east-west currents. This paper shows that the Arctic was well on its way to today’s warming long before humans could get too much extra CO2 into the atmosphere. Completely in line with Jim Steele’s video series on ocean heat transport.

Arctic glaciers and ice caps through the Holocene:a circumpolar synthesis of lake-based reconstructions — Climate of the Past, 2022; Larocca & Axford

This is the perfect paper! It explicitly sounds the alarm to help get more funding, while it says things the IPCC has no interest in saying. It’s all in the abstract, let me break it down:

The paper starts: “The recent retreat of nearly all glaciers and ice caps (GICs) located in Arctic regions is one of the most clear and visible signs of ongoing climate change.” If you put that at the beginning of your paper, it is sure to be published.

“For each region and for the full Arctic, we summarize evidence for when glaciers and ice caps were smaller than today or absent altogether, indicating warmer-than-present summers, and evidence for when GICs regrew in lake catchments, indicating summer cooling. Consistent with orbitally driven high boreal summer insolation in the early Holocene, the full Arctic compilation suggests that the majority (50 % or more) of studied GICs were smaller than present or absent by ∼10 ka. We find the highest percentage (>90 %) of Arctic GICs smaller than present or absent in the middle Holocene at ∼ 7–6 ka, probably reflecting more spatially ubiquitous and consistent summer warmth during this period than in the early Holocene.” — this is the smoking gun that shows maybe there was no summer ice at all 7,000 years ago.

But then they make sure to say we’re all doomed, because “Today, the direction of orbital forcing continues to favor GIC expansion; however, the rapid retreat of nearly all Arctic GICs underscores the current dominance of anthropogenic forcing on GIC mass balance.”

They end with “In comparison, future projections of temperature change in the Arctic far exceed estimated early Holocene values in most locations, portending the eventual loss of most of the Arctic’s small GICs.”

Summary: Things are going to get really really bad. But, uh, they were already like that just 7,000 years ago.

Next: Polar bears