Like icebergs, much of the mass of Arctic ice lies under the surface, making studying its thickness important, as well as the area it covers. Credit: Florida State University
A sheer white glacial mountain apparently floating on the sea emerges from the freezing mists. A lone lookout cries “Iceberg!”, stirring the crew into panic, before the stomach-churning sound of ripping metal sends them to the lifeboats. It’s a familiar scene from the TV and movies, and one where the main threat comes because eight-ninths of a typical iceberg lies below the waterline. While sea ice formed from ocean water is much thinner than such glacier ice, its thickness also lies mostly beneath the surface. Consequently, knowing that thickness is “perhaps the most basic measure of how the ice is responding to climate change”, according to the University of Colorado’s James Maslanik. Although it’s possible to track the area that the Arctic ice cap covers from space, knowing the depth it reaches is harder. “While the European Space Agency has just launched Cryosat-2 to measure thickness, the US no longer has a satellite operating that is capable of directly measuring ice thickness from space,” the scientist explained.
To tackle this problem, Maslanik and Colorado colleagues Julienne Stroeve, Charles Fowler, and William Emery have turned to assessing how many summer melt periods the ice is surviving. Maslanik says not only is this closely linked to ice thickness, it also reflects the influence of many climate- and weather-related factors. Ice that survives one summer melt is called “multi-year ice”. In a Geophysical Research Letters paper soon to be published, they find that multi-year ice makes up 45 per cent of the total Arctic ice cover in 2011, down from about 75 per cent in the mid 1980s. The proportion of ice older than five years fell from 50 per cent of all ice that has survived more than one summer to 10 per cent in the same period.
“The work of our Colorado group and other researchers clearly shows extreme decreases in the area of the Arctic Ocean covered by the oldest and thickest sea ice types,” Maslanik told Simple Climate. “This loss has accelerated in recent years, and while we continue to search for factors such as natural variability that could account for the changes, the effects of large-scale warming in the Arctic, including changes in the Arctic Ocean itself, are the most likely drivers for the loss in the old sea ice.” Read the rest of this entry »
