Arctic Sea Ice

The Arctic is not an adventure playground

Some of you may already have heard about how this year
a cruise ship called Crystal Serenity is going to sail the Northwest Passage with more than 1000 guests. Prices range from $22,000 to $121,000 dollars per passenger (drinks included). Here's how the journey is being advertized:

Follow in the footsteps of intrepid explorers as you sail through unparalleled landscapes of grand glaciers, stunning fjords, and rare wildlife sightings as you learn the Arctic culture and its fascinating people.

1000 people who are eternally desperate to inflate their egos and reduce their boredom, will follow in the footsteps of McClure, Parry, Amundsen and Larsen. From their top-deck jacuzzis they will observe the blueness of that which once was white. Maybe they'll take helicopter flights to Jakobshavn Glacier and hope for a good calving, make selfies on Beechey Island in front of the Franklin crew graves, leave some trash behind. 'Look, honey, that's where the Gjøa was stuck in the ice. Can you pass me the shrimp-o-naise?'

In short, they're going to check personally the result of their actions.
With great wealth comes great responsibility. Tell the grandkids.

I'm trying to stay polite here. Someone who is more successful at staying polite and explaining the problems of this slap-in-the-face example of disaster tourism, is Suzanne Goldenberg, perhaps the best reporter on Arctic matters at the moment. Here are the final paragraphs of her latest column on The Guardian, but the stuff preceding it, is well worth reading as well:

Potential record ozone hole over the Arctic

The ozone hole as a phenomenon is mostly associated with the Antarctic, but the Arctic also has one, much more variable in size than its Southern Hemisphere sibling. This winter the stratosphere over the Arctic has been extremely cold, causing a lot of ozone to be destroyed. If things keep up, even more ozone will be lost in spring and the hole could become larger than the 2011 record ozone hole. Read more about it in this press release by the Alfred Wegener Institute.

A good article on the subject was posted on the Science website a couple of days ago, explaining what it all means and what the role of climate change is:

Record ozone hole may open over Arctic
in the spring

Lingering atmospheric pollutants and a blast of frigid air have carved an unusually deep hole in Earth’s protective ozone layer over the Arctic, and it threatens to get deeper. Atmospheric scientists are analyzing data from weather balloons and satellites for clues to how the ozone will fare when sunlight—a third factor in ozone loss—returns to the Arctic in the spring. But they are already worrying about how extra ultraviolet light might affect humans and ecosystems below and wondering whether climate change will make such Arctic holes more common or severe.Record cold temperatures in the Arctic stratospheric ozone layer, 15 to 35 kilometers up, are the proximate cause for this year’s losses, because they help to unleash ozone-destroying chemicals. “This winter has been stunning,” says Markus Rex, an atmospheric chemist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam, Germany. By next week, about 25% of the Arctic’s ozone will be destroyed, he says.

This time of year, the stratosphere tends to warm up with the breakdown of the polar vortex, a cyclone that traps cold air. But if a strong vortex persists another month as light returns to the Arctic after the dark winter, ozone losses will get much bigger, Rex says. Conditions are ripe for losses to surpass a record Arctic ozone hole observed in the spring of 2011, he adds.

At Earth’s surface, ozone is a caustic chemical and a health hazard. But in the stratosphere, it shields the planet from ultraviolet light. Scientists noticed in the 1980s that chlorine-containing chemicals commonly used in refrigerants were reacting to form compounds that ate away stratospheric ozone, especially over the poles. The 1989 Montreal Protocol led to the phaseout of those chemicals, but their long atmospheric lifetime means that seasonal ozone losses will persist well into this century. Every year, a major ozone hole opens up over Antarctica, where winters are colder and polar vortices are stronger and more stable than over the Arctic.

But this year, the Arctic could be the poster child. Cold temperatures have allowed nitric acid, mostly from natural sources, to condense and form the peculiar, iridescent clouds that have been spotted all over northern latitudes this winter. “They’re beautiful, but once I see them, I’m concerned—they’re dangerous,” Rex says. That’s because the clouds catalyze the reactions that mobilize chlorine into active chemicals that can react in the presence of sunlight to destroy ozone.

Read the rest of the article here.

Although it is said that the Antarctic ozone hole may be a factor in the sea ice increase of recent years, I'm not sure what effect this will have on Arctic sea ice, if any. But it's noteworthy nonetheless.

If the atmosphere gets cleaned up...

Everybody wants clean air. We in the West do, the Chinese do, and it'll also be high on the wish list of Indians and people from other developing nations, once their living standards go up. But good things can also have drawbacks. And in this case it could be a drawback that a place like the Arctic really doesn't need, as this recent Alaska Dispatch News article explains:

Cleaner atmosphere means more Arctic sea-ice melt, study says

This April 9, 2015 natural-color satellite image shows sea ice and cloud streets between Labrador and Greenland. A recent study found that cleaner air -- the result of efforts to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide and other harmful aerosols -- will also have the unwelcome side effect of hastening the melt of Arctic sea ice. NASA Earth Observatory

To protect human health and safeguard the environment, governments and utility companies around the world have worked -- successfully -- to reduced the amount of sulfur dioxide released into the atmosphere.

But there's a downside to cleaning the air of sulfur dioxide and similar pollutants: Arctic sea ice is more exposed to solar heat, and more of it melts.

Now, Environment Canada researchers, in a study published in Geophysical Research Letters, have put a number on the sea-ice melt that reduced emissions of sulfur dioxide (and certain other aerosols, tiny particles that are suspended in the atmosphere) are expected to cause: about 400,000 square miles or 1 million square kilometers.

That's the amount of ice melt, according to the study's calculation, that's likely to be attributable to reductions of human-caused emissions of sulfur dioxide and similar light-reflecting air pollutants by the end of the century. That figure will account for 25 to 40 percent of the expected seasonal sea-ice melt, depending on future emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the study says.

That doesn't mean there should be a slowdown in air-quality controls, said one of the study’s authors.

“We want to avoid that interpretation,” said Nathan Gillett, an Environment Canada research scientist and manager of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis.

Removing sulfur dioxide and other pollutants from the air is important to protect people and the environment, even if it also removes some material that shields Arctic sea ice from melt, Gillett said.

“We’re really just pointing out that it’s part of the picture and should be considered,” he said. “We’re not trying to weigh costs and benefits of sulfur dioxide here."

Read the rest here.

Bromine, chlorine and mercury

After this 2012 blog post on Arctic pollution, it's time to return to the subject, if only because Arctic sea ice is proving to be a significant factor in changes in atmospheric chemistry, leading to increases in mercury concentrations in the Arctic. This happens through sea ice melting during summer, and an increase in leads and cracks during winter.

In the past couple of days two papers were published that show the relationships. The first, Convective forcing of mercury and ozone in the Arctic boundary layer induced by leads in sea ice by Moore et al., was published in Nature and deals with bromine. This Science Daily article explains it well:

Cracked Sea Ice Stirs Up Arctic Mercury Concern

Image credit: University of Hamburg, Germany

Jan. 15, 2014 — Vigorous mixing in the air above large cracks in Arctic sea ice that expose seawater to cold polar air pumps atmospheric mercury down to the surface, finds a NASA field campaign. This process can lead to more of the toxic pollutant entering the food chain, where it can negatively affect the health of fish and animals who eat them, including humans.

Scientists measured increased concentrations of mercury near ground level after sea ice off the coast of Barrow, Alaska, cracked, creating open seawater channels called leads. The researchers were in the Arctic for the NASA-led Bromine, Ozone, and Mercury Experiment (BROMEX) in 2012.

"None of us had suspected that we would find this kind of process associated with leads," said Son Nghiem, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Nghiem is the BROMEX principal investigator and a coauthor of a paper reporting the discovery published in Nature on Jan. 15.

The mercury-pumping reaction takes place because open water in a lead is much warmer than the air above it, according to study lead author Chris Moore of the Desert Research Institute, Reno, Nev. Because of that temperature difference, the air above the lead churns like the air above a boiling pot. "The mixing is so strong, it actually pulls down mercury from a higher layer of the atmosphere to near the surface," Moore said. The mixing, marked by dense clouds spewing out of the leads, extends up into the atmosphere about a quarter-mile (400 meters). Moore estimates this may be the height where the mercury pumping occurs.

Almost all of the mercury in the Arctic atmosphere is transported there in gaseous form from sources in areas farther south. Scientists have long known that mercury in the air near ground level undergoes complex chemical reactions that deposit the element on the surface. Once the mercury is completely removed from the air, these reactions stop. However, this newly discovered mixing triggered by leads in the sea ice forces down additional mercury to restart and sustain the reactions.

Leads have become more widespread across the Arctic Ocean as climate change has reduced Arctic sea ice cover. "Over the past decade, we've been seeing more new sea ice rather than perennial ice that has survived for several years. New ice is thinner and saltier and cracks more easily. More new ice means more leads as well," said Nghiem.

Read the rest of the article here, or the press release at NASA JPL.

The second study, High levels of molecular chlorine in the Arctic atmosphere by Liao et al., was published in Nature Geoscience and deals with chlorine.
For a background story we turn to the Georgia Tech News Center:

Dark Snow Project

I've waited with this blog post to kick off a second round of donations for this worthy project, aimed at measuring the impact of changing wildfire and industrial soot levels on snow and ice reflectivity.

Because of a lack of government funding Dr. Jason Box from the Byrd Polar Research Center (here's his blog) is now trying to raise through crowdfunding the money that is needed to fly to the top of the Greenland ice sheet and take samples. This data is very useful, as the reflectivity of the Greenland ice sheet has been decreasing steadily for a while now. The effects of this decrease have been documented here and elsewhere around the web last summer, when practically all of the surface of the ice sheet was melting at some point, a rare occurance.

Lower reflectivity of course means more melting, so reducing soot emissions might be a great help in slowing down the current melting trend of the Greenland ice sheet (and perhaps some of the Arctic sea ice melt as well), but for that we need to know how big a role soot is playing in all of this.

This video from Peter Sinclair's blog explains it all
(please watch if you haven't already):

You can donate at the Dark Snow Project website.

Another project that Dr. Box is involved in, is called Extreme Ice Survey, and that's the organisation that delivered the footage that was used for the popular Chasing Ice documentary:

Shell drill spill?

It all sounds so simple: Arctic sea ice is retreating, so let's get over there and start some off-shore drilling! Unfortunately the Arctic isn't a friendly place, not to humans and not to oil executives.

Commenter Lodger links to this ominous news article about the Kulluk, "a $290 million offshore oil rig operated as part of Shell’s Arctic drilling efforts in summer", that has washed up at Ocean Bay on Sitkalidak Island, close to Kodiak Island's southeast shores.

All of it is worth a read, but here's the most interesting bit:

It's been a tumultuous several days for the Kulluk, which saw itself disconnected from the tug boats charged with moving the vessel from Alaska to the Lower 48 for the winter. Earlier this year, the Kulluk performed exploratory drilling in the Beaufort Sea for Shell.

For Shell, which has invested more than $4.5 billion to drill for oil and gas in Alaska’s Arctic, the latest troubles raise questions about how prepared the company -- as well as the Coast Guard -- are for problems in the far north.

The Kulluk and its tug weren't operating above the Arctic Circle when the problems started late last week. And the Coast Guard's Alaska headquarters at Kodiak are located relatively nearby the grounded Kulluk, making response efforts easier than in the Arctic, where the agency has no base. That has some Alaskans wondering what would happen if similar troubles ever occur in the much more remote and hostile Arctic Ocean.

"The implications of this very troubling incident are clear -- Shell and its contractors are no match for Alaska’s weather and sea conditions either during drilling operations or during transit," said Lois Epstein, the Arctic program director for The Wilderness Society, late Monday in a statement. "Shell’s costly drilling experiment in the Arctic Ocean needs to be stopped by the federal government or by Shell itself, given the unacceptably high risks it poses to both humans and the environment."

The tugs Aiviq and Nanuq tow the mobile drilling unit Kulluk while a Coast Guard Jayhawk helicopter lifts off from the Kulluk with a crew member aboard Saturday. The Royal Dutch Shell rig ran aground Monday, after days of problems with its towing journey in the Alaskan Gulf (source: Petty Officer 1st Class Sara Francis/U.S. Coast Guard, via NPR).

This is happening as we speak. The oil rig is grounded in "rocky" Ocean Bay, with 150,000 gallons of diesel, oil, and hydraulic fluid on board, with the following not-so-reassuring weather forecast:

Good news for polar bears

Recently I wrote a post on Arctic pollution, describing the deposit of toxic mercury through bromine 'explosions'. This subject utterly depresses me. But luckily it isn't all doom and gloom for the polar bears, at least with regards to pollution.

Apparently the concentration of PCBs and other industrial poisons in polar bears has gone down in the past decade. CFKs, PCBs have been or are being reduced, maybe GHGs are next? Because accumulating poisons is one thing, but loss of Arctic sea ice is even more dangerous for polar bears and many other creatures (such as homo sapiens).

From the Alaska Dispatch:

Arctic pollution

A while back my daughter was busy with a project concerning the Inuit people, and to give her an idea of what living in the high North looked like, we watched Robert J. Flaherty's epic 1922 documentary Nanook of the North. I was doubly interested because I had been reading about how the Inuit diet (high in animal fats) made cancer and coronary diseases practically non-existent until modern processed foods were introduced.

As unhealthy as processed foods may be, reverting to the traditional diet would probably be suicide. It has been known for quite a while that dioxins and other toxic substances from all over the world are accumulating in the Arctic food web, but now it appears that the decline in Arctic sea ice is causing a direct increase in another toxic substance: mercury.

Last week a paper was published in the Journal of Geophysical research by Son V. V. Nghiem et al., called Field and satellite observations of the formation and distribution of Arctic atmospheric bromine above a rejuvenated sea ice cover. From the press release:

Remotely operated aircraft measure Arctic soot

Hat-tip to Climate Denial Crock of the Week.

 

Small, new, remotely-operated, unmanned aircraft are being flown in the Arctic to measure black soot. The soot is produced by burning diesel fuel, agricultural fires, forest fires, and wood-burning stoves. It is transported by winds to the Arctic, where it darkens the surface of snow and ice, enhancing melting and solar warming. See http://saga.pmel.noaa.gov/ and http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/edd/manta.html