Finding nature’s part in Arctic ice loss puts spotlight on human role

University of Reading's Jonny Day talks about his studies into what's contributed to Arctic ice loss

The area of the Arctic covered by ice is set to reach a record low this year* – and much of the ongoing decline is down to man-made global warming. That’s what recent research into the role of three potential natural causes of change in ice coverage done by Jonny Day from the University of Reading, UK, and his colleagues suggests. In a paper published online in scientific journal Environmental Research Letters last month, they studied these three existing sea and wind movement patterns in five different climate models. They found that one in particular, the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation (AMO), could be responsible for between one-twentieth and three-tenths of the decline in sea ice since the 1970s. “Our work suggests that the AMO has contributed to getting us to this low sea ice state, but does not tell the whole story,” Jonny told Simple Climate. “It is still likely that man-made global warming is the major contributor to the dramatic decline in sea ice.”

Arctic sea ice loss has surprised researchers, as it’s faster than predicted by leading climate models gathered together by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That made Jonny and his co-workers from the Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences and University of Tokyo in Japan want to look at why this was. In particular, they wanted to see how much might be down to hard-to-predict ‘internal’ climate patterns, rather than problems with measurements of the ice or models. “The large mismatch between climate model projections of sea ice and observations in the last IPCC report was concerning,” Jonny said “My colleagues and I thought that internal or ‘natural’ climate variability may play a role.”

The possible sources of that natural variability include the Arctic Oscillation (AO), which varies between stronger and weaker winds circulating the Arctic. The other two sources come from the ocean, where the AMO is a long-term cycle of temperature change. The final source, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), is a large-scale ocean flow pattern that carries warm upper waters north and returns cold, deep water south. But a limited set of measurements available for the AMO and AMOC poses researchers a problem. “The oceanic causes of variability we discuss are not well observed, making such analysis difficult,” Jonny said.