A fishing vessel sails in the ice fjord near Ilulissat, Greenland September 12, 2017. REUTERS

From an Article by Cassandra Garrison, Reuters via Portside, August 16, 2020

Greenland’s ice sheet may have shrunk past the point of return, with the ice likely to melt away no matter how quickly the world reduces climate-warming emissions, new research suggests.

Scientists studied data on 234 glaciers across the Arctic territory spanning 34 years through 2018 and found that annual snowfall was no longer enough to replenish glaciers of the snow and ice being lost to summertime melting.

That melting is already causing global seas to rise about a millimeter on average per year. If all of Greenland’s ice goes, the water released would push sea levels up by an average of 6 meters — enough to swamp many coastal cities around the world. This process, however, would take decades.

“Greenland is going to be the canary in the coal mine, and the canary is already pretty much dead at this point,” said glaciologist Ian Howat at Ohio State University. He and his colleagues published the study Thursday in the Nature Communications Earth & Environment journal.

The Arctic has been warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the world for the last 30 years, an observation referred to as Arctic amplification. The polar sea ice hit its lowest extent for July in 40 years.

The Arctic thaw has brought more water to the region, opening up routes for shipping traffic, as well as increased interest in extracting fossil fuels and other natural resources.

Greenland is strategically important for the U.S. military and its ballistic missile early warning system, as the shortest route from Europe to North America goes via the Arctic island.

Last year, President Donald Trump offered to buy Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory. But Denmark, a U.S. ally, rebuffed the offer. Then last month, the U.S. reopened a consulate in the territory’s capital of Nuuk, and Denmark reportedly said last week it was appointing an intermediary between Nuuk and Copenhagen some 3,500 kilometers away.

Scientists, however, have long worried about Greenland’s fate, given the amount of water locked into the ice. The new study suggests the territory’s ice sheet will now gain mass only once every 100 years — a grim indicator of how difficult it is to re-grow glaciers once they hemorrhage ice.

In studying satellite images of the glaciers, the researchers noted that the glaciers had a 50% chance of regaining mass before 2000, with the odds declining since.

“We are still draining more ice now than what was gained through snow accumulation in ‘good’ years,” said lead author Michalea King, a glaciologist at Ohio State University.

The sobering findings should spur governments to prepare for sea-level rise, King said. “Things that happen in the polar regions don’t stay in the polar region,” she said.

Still, the world can still bring down emissions to slow climate change, scientists said. Even if Greenland can’t regain the icy bulk that covered its 2 million square kilometers, containing the global temperature rise can slow the rate of ice loss.

“When we think about climate action, we’re not talking about building back the Greenland ice sheet,” said Twila Moon, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center who was not involved in the study. “We’re talking about how quickly rapid sea-level rise comes to our communities, our infrastructure, our homes, our military bases.”

Sea ice along Greenland’s coast this year!

From an Article by John Schwartz and Henry Fountain, New York Times, December 11, 2018

Persistent warming in the Arctic is pushing the region into “uncharted territory” and increasingly affecting the continental United States, scientists said Tuesday.

“We’re seeing this continued increase of warmth pervading across the entire Arctic system,” said Emily Osborne, an official with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who presented the agency’s annual assessment of the state of the region, the “Arctic Report Card.”

The Arctic has been warmer over the last five years than at any time since records began in 1900, the report found, and the region is warming at twice the rate as the rest of the planet.

Dr. Osborne, the lead editor of the report and manager of NOAA’s Arctic Research Program, said the Arctic was undergoing its “most unprecedented transition in human history.”

In 2018, “warming air and ocean temperatures continued to drive broad long-term change across the polar region, pushing the Arctic into uncharted territory,” she said at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington.

The rising air temperatures are having profound effects on sea ice, and on life on land and in the ocean, scientists said. The impacts can be felt far beyond the region, especially since the changing Arctic climate may be influencing extreme weather events around the world.

The new edition of the report does not present a radical break with past installments, but it shows that troublesome trends wrought by climate change are intensifying. Air temperatures in the Arctic in 2018 will be the second-warmest ever recorded, the report said, behind only 2016.

Susan M. Natali, an Arctic scientist at Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts who was not involved in the research, said the report was another warning going unheeded. “Every time you see a report, things get worse, and we’re still not taking any action,” she said. “It adds support that these changes are happening, that they are observable.”

The warmer Arctic air causes the jet stream to become “sluggish and unusually wavy,” the researchers said. That has possible connections to extreme weather events elsewhere on the globe, including last winter’s severe storms in the United States and a bitter cold spell in Europe known as the “Beast From the East.”

The jet stream normally acts as a kind of atmospheric spinning lasso that encircles and contains the cold air near the pole; a weaker, wavering jet stream can allow Arctic blasts to travel south in winter and can stall weather systems in the summer, among other effects.

“On the East Coast of the United States where the other part of the wave comes down,” Dr. Osborne said, “you have these Arctic air temperatures that are surging over into the lower latitudes and causing these crazy winter storms.”

The rapid warming in the upper north, known as Arctic amplification, is tied to many factors, including the simple fact that snow and ice reflect a lot of sunlight, while open water, which is darker, absorbs more heat. As sea ice melts, less ice and more open water create a “feedback loop” of more melting that leads to progressively less ice and more open water.

And as Arctic waters become increasingly ice-free, there are commercial and geopolitical implications: New shipping routes may open, and rivalries with other countries, including Russia, are intensifying.

What on Earth Is Going On? Sea ice is diminishing, quickly.

The federal government has issued the report card since 2006. It has continued to do so under the Trump administration, which has approved other scientific reports about global warming and the human greenhouse gas emissions that cause it, despite President Trump’s rejection of climate science.

Over all, “the effects of persistent Arctic warming continue to mount,” the new report said. “Continued warming of the Arctic atmosphere and ocean are driving broad change in the environmental system in predicted and, also, unexpected ways.”

Some of the findings in the research, provided by 81 scientists in 12 countries, included:

The wintertime maximum extent of sea ice in the region, in March of this year, was the second lowest in 39 years of record keeping.

Ice that persists year after year, forming thick layers, is disappearing from the Arctic. This is important because the very old ice tends to resist melting; without it, melting accelerates. Old ice made up less than 1 percent of the Arctic ice pack this year, a decline of 95 percent over the last 33 years.

Donald K. Perovich, a sea-ice expert at Dartmouth College who contributed to the report, said the “big story” for ice this year was in the Bering Sea, off western Alaska, where the extent of sea ice reached a record low for virtually the entire winter. During two weeks in February, normally a time when sea ice grows, the Bering Sea lost an area of ice the size of Idaho, Dr. Perovich said.

The lack of ice and surge of warmth coincides with rapid expansion of algae species in the Arctic Ocean, associated with harmful blooms that can poison marine life and people who eat the contaminated seafood. The northward shift of the algae “means that the Arctic is now vulnerable to species introductions into local communities and ecosystems that have little to no prior exposure to this phenomenon,” the report said.

Reindeer and caribou populations have declined 56 percent in the past two decades, dropping to 2.1 million from 4.7 million. Scientists monitoring 22 herds found that two of them were at peak numbers without declines, but five populations had declined more than 90 percent “and show no sign of recovery.”

Tiny bits of ocean plastic, which can be ingested by marine life, are proliferating at the top of the planet. “Concentrations in the remote Arctic Ocean are higher than all other ocean basins in the world,” the report said. The microplastics are also showing up in Arctic sea ice. Scientists have found samples of cellulose acetate, used in making cigarette filters, and particles of plastics used in bottle caps and packaging material.

“The report card continues to document a rapid unraveling of the Arctic,” said Rafe Pomerance, chairman of Arctic 21, a network of organizations focused on educating policymakers and others on Arctic climate change. “The signals of decline are so powerful and the consequences so great that they demand far more urgency from all governments to reduce emissions.”

The report was issued as delegates from nearly 200 countries were meeting in Poland for the latest round of climate talks stemming from the Paris Agreement, the landmark climate accord that was designed to reduce planet-warming emissions.

Mr. Trump has vowed to withdraw from the agreement. At the talks, the United States joined with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Russia in refusing to endorse a major report to the conference on the effects of climate change around the world.

At a news conference Tuesday announcing the findings of the Arctic report, Tim Gallaudet, a retired Navy admiral who is the acting NOAA administrator, was asked if he or any other senior NOAA officials had ever briefed Mr. Trump on climate change or the changes in the Arctic.

“The simple answer is no,” he said.

Scientists leave no doubt about the extreme rate of Arctic ice melting

From an Article by Jon Queally, Common Dreams, March 1, 2018

‘This is the biggest story of our lifetimes.’ No, not the impossible-to-ignore dysfunction within the current administration.

The arctic is experiencing the hottest winter since record-keeping began.

Sea ice is seen in this photo from NASA’s Operation IceBridge research aircraft off the northwest coast on March 30, 2017 above Greenland. With historically low sea ice extent and unprecedentedly high temperatures this winter, the Arctic has been one of the regions hardest hit by climate change.

“It’s never been this extreme,” said Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), citing record temperatures in Greenland and elsewhere above the Arctic circle in recent weeks.

“This is an anomaly among anomalies. It is far enough outside the historical range that it is worrying – it is a suggestion that there are further surprises in store as we continue to poke the angry beast that is our climate,” Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, told the Guardian this week in reaction to the historically high temperatures.

“This is too short-term an excursion to say whether or not it changes the overall projections for Arctic warming,” says Mann. “But it suggests that we may be underestimating the tendency for short-term extreme warming events in the Arctic. And those initial warming events can trigger even greater warming because of the ‘feedback loops’ associated with the melting of ice and the potential release of methane (a very strong greenhouse gas).”

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See also: Arctic warming: scientists alarmed by ‘crazy’ temperature rises

New environmental threats generating more greenhouse methane into the earth’s atmosphere

Article by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor & Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

Those of us who follow the science of global warming realize it is not a simple thing. It involves many phenomena. It involves some that are very important but are far from everyday concerns, such as the currents of the ocean. Many more keep turning up. Here are a couple that are new.

Deserts everywhere have a “biocrust” or Biological Soil Crust, sometimes known as microbiotic crust. We tend to think of deserts as places which have few or no plants, and hence no life. Not so, biologists tell us. In time, even the most arid areas develop a layer of life from one eighth of an inch thick to several inches thick. They are valuable to consolidate the surface and prevent soil from moving in wind and as a result of occasional rains. Unfortunately, biocrusts are rather delicate compared to soil cover by vascular plants.

Biocrusts are composed of complex mixtures of cyanobacteria, moss, lichens, bacteria and fungi. They are driven by photosynthesis and rare rains. They have the ability to desiccate (dry up completely) and come to life again quickly when a rain occurs. They remove carbon dioxide from the air and replace it with oxygen. They fix nitrogen from the air, and support further growth, in part by securing necessary nutrients from the arid soil and by binding sand grains together. Perhaps one of the most important attributes from the human point of view is they reduce or prevent dust storms.

The composition of biocrusts varies from place to place on the earth’s surface, and by different soil conditions in any local area. They are vulnerable to trampling. A footfall may take 10 years to recover, and much longer, up to 250 years where it is very dry. Now, as scientists who study them are finding out, changes in temperature and rainfall also jeopardize them. They are a global warming problem in the western United States and from the high latitudes to the Sahara and Ecuador.

A good short article about biocrusts in Arizona in particular is here.

Pictures of biocrusts are here and here. The second has two videos of how desert mosses can turn green in less than a minute when they are rehydrated by rain or pouring on water! The fuzzy object in the foreground of the second is an eyedropper, and you can see the individual plants!

The second threat of our article is methane release from melting permafrost. You may have heard of that before, but it is a continuing and increasing concern. Human carbon dioxide release depends largely on burning hydrocarbon fuels, although some other industrial scale processes also release it. This is directly attributable to intentional human activity.

Methane has an industrial component also, due to leaks in production, which increases with greater use of methane for fuel. However, the biggest worry is uncontrollable natural release from melting permafrost. Permafrost is the layer of frozen earth characteristic of the far north and a few other places where the temperature has been below freezing most of the tine. For a map of location see here, click on small map to the right for an enlargement.

The area of permafrost is huge, about 24% of the ice free land area of the northern hemisphere. Entrapped in this frozen earth and water is vegetation, which slowly rots and produces methane in the absence of air, and methane rising from the deep toward the surface is trapped here, too, since the beginning of the last ice age, 25,000 years ago.

The first reference in this section has in the middle of the page two graphs, one of the average annual temperature at a selected point in Siberia in red and a second of Bonanza Creek, near Fairbanks, Alaska. Much of this area is thawing, releasing the methane. The Arctic is warming twice as fast the Equatorial Region.

The worry is what is called “positive feedback,” an uncontrollable forward change in a process which results from the change itself. In this case, warming causes methane to be released and even more, uncontrollable warming, out of proportion to the human activity.

This article states that methane equivalent to 205 gigatons of carbon dioxide could be released by the melting of permafrost. This alone could contribute an extra half degree of warming, according to a study it mentions. This is a low estimate compared to some that are out there.

Here are pictures of holes in permafrost, most of them the result of escaping gases. The prospect is horrifying, both for the residents where it occurs but looking forward to the future of a hot earth with many consequences!