Global Warming

Melting Arctic Ice Causing More Methane Emissions

The melting of the Arctic ice cap is encouraging more natural emissions of methane — one of the most potent greenhouse gases driving climate change.

Researchers at Sweden’s Lund University worked with Dutch and American colleagues to find that the recent accelerated melt of sea ice around the North Pole is allowing the Arctic’s surface waters to absorb more heat and promote the growth of microorganisms in the adjacent tundra.

Those microbes in turn give off natural methane emissions that promote even further climate change and sea ice loss.

This feedback loop of warming and melting appears to have increased with virtually every new cycle over the past decade.

“While numerous studies have shown the effects of sea ice loss on the ocean, there are only a few that show how this oceanic change affects ecosystems on the surrounding land," said study author Frans-Jan Parmentier.

The findings were published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Microbes in recently thawed Arctic tundra are emitting the powerful greenhouse gas methane because of the greater summertime melt of the polar ice cap.

Global Warming

Global Warming Disrupting Arctic Life for the Caribou

Earth’s climate has changed constantly during the 4 billion years that life has lived on this planet. But usually, it changes slowly. When the climate has changed quickly, species that failed to adapt died off, often in shocking numbers. The quickly warming Arctic is now forcing caribou to adapt.

The caribou breeding cycle is timed to the sun, not to temperature. It is timed so that baby caribou will be born during late May or early June, every year, without exception. Plants are different. They time their growth cycle to the temperature. They can be awakened early.

Before the Arctic started warming, these two cycles were in sync. A pregnant caribou could count on there being plenty of nutrient-rich vegetation around in May, when she needed it most, to feed the single baby calf growing within her.

Climate change is decoupling these cycles. Plants are erupting out of the ground earlier in the year. By the time pregnant caribou arrive at their birthing grounds, the vegetation has already peaked. Mothers are becoming malnourished. Fewer calves are being born, and fewer are surviving their crucial first few months. And even when they do survive, they are still vulnerable, to overhunting, and to diseases carried north by deer that would never have survived the Arctic chill of yesteryear.

Caribou populations are reeling. And now they face a new menace - Mosquitoes.

The Arctic mosquito, a larger, furrier version of the ubiquitous pests, are getting a longer breeding season as Arctic ponds warmed earlier in the year, researchers from Dartmouth have found.

The large flying insects are a nuisance to humans but potentially harmful to wildlife, especially caribou. While they're not known to spread disease, the persistent insects can drive the caribou to remote snowbanks or hilltops to seek shelter. They will go to the top of windy hill. When they do that, they are often moving to areas with no food or no quality food.

The earlier the insects hatch, the bigger a problem they become for the caribou since they overlap with the birth of caribou calves, researchers said, noting that if the calves are forced to retreat to snowier or more desolate areas, they could die without adequate nutrition. In the Arctic, temperatures have increased at twice the global rate in the past 100 years, according to the study.

Increased mosquito abundance, in addition to northward range expansions of additional pest species, will have negative consequences for the health and reproduction of the caribou.

Global Warming

Thousands of walruses wash ashore as global warming devastates Alaskan Arctic

The extreme loss of Arctic sea ice due to climate change is forcing thousands of walruses to crowd ashore on a remote barrier island off Alaska, and threatening their survival.

The first reported sighting of animals forced to come ashore in the Chukchi Sea was by a photographer on 23 August, and confirmed by villagers in the remote hamlet of Point Lay late on Thursday, the US Fish and Wildlife Service said.

Such landings, forced by the absence of sea ice on which to rest and feed, put the animals at risk of stampede in the limited space of the barrier island.

The animals are easily spooked by aircraft or onlookers, government scientists warned. Trampling deaths are one of the biggest natural risks.

Sea ice cover in the winter months fell to a new low this year because of climate change and abnormal weather patterns.

Some scientists believe the Arctic could be entirely ice-free in the summer months by the 2030s – with profound effects for local indigenous communities that rely on the ice, as well as wildlife that depend on extreme conditions.

Since 2000, the forced migration of walruses and their young to barrier islands such as Point Lay — known as a “haul out” — has become an increasingly regular occurrence, according to US government scientists.

Last year, as many as 40,000 animals, mainly females and their young, were forced ashore. It was the biggest known haul-out of its kind in the US Arctic, according to government scientists. The Federal Aviation Authority re-routed flights and bush pilots were told to keep their distance to avoid a stampede.

Environment

Plant Pests Killed Off By Arctic Vortex Chill

The brutal Arctic vortex chill that brought shivers to people living across North America appears to have also killed off a large number of tree-eating forest pests.

The coldest air to reach Minnesota in decades was probably deadly to pests such as the emerald ash borer, which forest officials say has killed more than 10 million trees.

U.S. Forest Service biologist Robert Venette said that 80 percent of those insects could have been exterminated by temperatures plunging to between minus 22 and minus 26 degrees Fahrenheit.

Venette explained that it takes that kind of cold to reach beneath the bark of infected trees, where the pests winter in a larval state.

The cold is also believed to have killed off a large number of gypsy moths, which eat the leaves of more than 300 species of trees, shrubs and other plants.

But the extreme cold also split or cracked the limbs and stems of some trees, leaving them vulnerable to insects and other threats.

Environment

Ice-Free Arctic Ocean in 2030?

Vast uncertainty remains over the causes of melting Arctic sea ice and when it may disappear altogether during the summer, which would have consequences for oil explorers, shipping firms and the fight against climate change.

The answer will depend on the balance of natural and manmade causes.

Last September sea ice reached its lowest level in the satellite record, which dates back to 1979, a development that has implications for local native communities and wildlife, local coastal erosion and possibly northern hemisphere weather.

Under the albedo effect, dry snow reflects more than 80 percent of solar radiation; bare ice 65 percent; and open water just 5 percent.

And increasing expanse of open water each summer warms up faster than ice-covered sea, meaning new ice will be thinner and more vulnerable the following year.

There are various underlying causes of the melt.

Rising greenhouse gas emissions drive up air and sea temperatures.

Water from a warmer Atlantic entering the Arctic Ocean through the Fram Strait between eastern Greenland and Svalbard, an island due north of Norway.

A similar inflow of warmer Pacific water through the Bering Strait has long been identified as an important process that causes the thinning of ice in the central Arctic.

There are also weather effects that may be natural, partly natural or entirely due to greenhouse gas emissions affecting Arctic ice.

A particular weather pattern contributed to a big melt six years ago by sending warm air towards the central Arctic, according to researchers from the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany.

The cumulative impact from rising greenhouse gas emissions, which combined with a few freak summers, ice export and the albedo effect could finish off summer sea ice rather quickly.

Increasingly, scientists and researchers are coming to believe that a seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean might be realized as early as 2030.

Environment

The Arctic Ocean is increasingly becoming the world’s garbage dump, with twice as much plastic trash and other litter covering its seabed compared to 10 years ago.

The amount of human refuse seen at the Arctic deep-sea observatory was found to be even greater than in a deep-sea canyon near the Portuguese capital of Lisbon.

Arctic Warming

A rare summer storm blasted the Arctic this week, beginning off the coast of Alaska, and moving over much of the Arctic Sea for several days before dissipating.

Nasa reports that Arctic storms such as this one can have a large impact on the sea ice, causing it to melt rapidly through many mechanisms, such as tearing off large swaths of ice and pushing them to warmer sites, churning the ice and making it slushier, or lifting warmer waters from the depths of the Arctic Ocean.

“It seems that this storm has detached a large chunk of ice from the main sea ice pack. This could lead to a more serious decay of the summertime ice cover than would have been the case otherwise, even perhaps leading to a new Arctic sea ice minimum,” said Claire Parkinson, a climate scientist with NASA Goddard. “Decades ago, a storm of the same magnitude would have been less likely to have as large an impact on the sea ice, because at that time the ice cover was thicker and more expansive.”

 

Earthquakes

The past couple of days have seen few magnitude 5.0 earthquakes.

5.0 Earthquake hits north of Svalbard in the Arctic.

 

Climate Change

Large areas of the European and Asian Arctic tundra encompassing more than 100 000 square kilometers are turning into forest.

Scientists report that this change is happening faster than expected with tundra plants growing more than 2 metres over the past decade to become small trees.

The forestation of the tundra may speed up global warming by reducing the amount of light reflected by the Earth - i.e. by absorbing more heat.

 

Climate Change

Scientists report that carbon dioxide levels in the Arctic have reached 400 parts per million [ppm]. Years ago, when levels passed 350 ppm, scientists said that was the highest safe level for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Levels were at 275 ppm in the pre-industrial age.

At present only the Arctic is showing levels of 400 ppm, with the global average being 395.

Global Warming

Scientists have identified at least 150 000 sites in the Arctic (Alaska and Greenland) where methane gas is actively bubbling to the surface, mainly along the edges of lakes where the ice margins are retreating due to the melting ice. The Arctic is the fastest warming region on the planet, and the release of this gas which has been trapped for millennia beneath the ice, together with the methane being released across Siberia due to the melting of the permafrost layer may significantly affect the rate of global warming.