The concern about the ice, which has now almost completely melted, has always existed, but a new big concern related to it, has started with polar bears. In 2012, the polar bear’s DNA revealed that the iconic species had already faced extinction, likely during a hot period 130,000 years ago, but had recovered. For the researchers, the discovery led to a burning question: could polar bears come back again?
Studies like this have encouraged an ambitious plan to create a haven where arctic and ice-dependent species, from polar bears to microbes, can hunker down and wait for climate change. As such, conservationists are pinning their hopes on a region of the Arctic dubbed the Last Ice Area, where ice that persists throughout the summer will survive longer in a warming world.
Here, the Arctic will take its last stand. But how long the Last Ice Area will hold its summer sea ice remains unclear. A computer simulation released in September predicts that the last ice area could retain its summer ice pack indefinitely, if fossil fuel emissions do not warm the planet to more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, which is l ‘goal set from the Paris climate agreement of 2015.
But a recent UN report found that the climate is set to warm by 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100 with current commitments to reduce emissions, marking the end of Arctic summer sea ice.
However, some scientists hope humanity will mobilize to reduce emissions and implement technology to capture carbon and other greenhouse gases, which could reduce, or even reverse, the effects of climate change on sea ice. Meanwhile, the Last Ice Area could buy ice-dependent species time in the race against extinction, serving as a sanctuary where they can survive climate change, and perhaps one day make their return.
Frozen sea ecosystem
The Last Ice Area is a vast floating landscape of solid ice that stretches from the northern coast of Greenland to Banks Island in Canada in the west. This region, roughly the length of the west coast of the United States, home to the oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic, thanks to an archipelago of islands in Canada’s far north that prevents sea ice from moving south and melting into the Atlantic.
When sea ice from other parts of the Arctic collides with this natural barrier, it builds up, forming long ridges of ice that run for miles across the frozen landscape. From above, the area appears desolate. “It’s a pretty quiet place”says Robert Newton, an oceanographer at Columbia University and co-author of the recent sea ice model, published Sept. 2 in Science. “Much of life is at the bottom of the ice.”
The muddy underbelly of icebergs is home to plankton and unicellular algae that have evolved to grow directly on ice. These species form the backbone of an ecosystem that feeds on everything from tiny crustaceans to beluga whales, ringed seals and polar bears.
These plankton and algae species cannot survive without ice. So, as summer sea ice disappears across the Arctic, the foundations of this ecosystem are literally melting. “Much of the habitat on which arctic species depend will become uninhabitable”says Brandon Laforest, an Arctic expert at the World Wildlife Fund Canada in Montreal. “There is nowhere else for these species to go. They are literally crushed in the area of the last ice “.
The ultimate summer ice stronghold offers the opportunity to create a floating sanctuary, an arctic ark if you will, for polar bears and many other species that depend on summer ice to survive. For over a decade, WWF Canada has been a coalition of indigenous researchers and communities lobbied for the area to be protected from another threat: development by industries that may be interested in the oil and mineral resources of the region.
“The tragedy would be if we had an area where these animals could survive this bottleneck, but they don’t because it was developed commercially,” says Newton.
But for Laforest, protecting the last ice area isn’t just a matter of safeguarding Arctic creatures. Sea ice is also an important tool in climate regulation, as the white surface reflects sunlight back into space. helping to cool the planet. In a vicious circle, the loss of sea ice helps accelerate warming, which in turn melts more ice.
And for the people who call the Arctic home, sea ice is critical to food security, transportation, and cultural survival, wrote Inuit Circumpolar Council President Okalik Eegeesiak in an article from 2017 for the United Nations. “Our entire cultures and identities are based on free movement on land, sea ice and the Arctic Ocean”, wrote Eegeesiak. “Our highway is sea ice.”
The efforts of these groups have paid off. In 2019, the Canadian government decided to set aside nearly a third of the areas of the last ice as protected spaces called marine reserves. All commercial activities, until 2024, within the boundaries of the reserves is prohibited, with provisions for indigenous peoples. Environmentalists are now calling for these marine reserves to be placed under permanent protection.
Rift in the ice
However, there are some troubling signs that sea ice in the region is already precarious. Most troubling was the appearance in May 2020 of a Rhode Island-sized crack in the ice in the heart of the last ice area. Kent Moore, a geophysicist at the University of Toronto, says these unusual events could become more frequent as the ice thins. This suggests that the area of the last ice it may not be as tough as we thought, He says.
This is something that worries Laforest. He and others are skeptical that it will be possible to reverse climate change and repopulate the Arctic with ice-dependent species. “I would like to live in a world where we eventually reverse warming and promote sea ice regeneration”, he claims. “But stabilization seems a daunting task in itself.”
However, the hope remains. “All of the models show that if you drop temperatures, sea ice will revert to its historical pattern within several years,” says Newton.
To save the last of the sea ice, and the creatures that depend on it, it will be essential to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, says oceanographer Stephanie Pfirman of Arizona State University in Tempe, co-author of the sea ice study with Newton. The technology to capture carbon and prevent more carbon from entering the atmosphere already exists. The largest carbon capture facility is located in Iceland, but projects like that have yet to be implemented on a large scale.
Without such intervention, the Arctic is bound to lose the last of its summer ice before the turn of the century. It would mean the end of life on ice. But Pfirman, who suggested making the last ice area a world heritage site in 2008, says humanity has undergone major economic and social changes, such as those needed to reduce emissions and prevent warming, in the past. . “I was in Germany when the wall fell [di Berlino] and people didn’t expect it to happen, ”he says.
Protecting the last ice area means buying time to protect sea ice and species, Pfirman says. The longer we can hold onto summer sea ice, he says, the greater they are the possibilities we have to bring back Arctic species, from plankton to polar bears, from the abyss.
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