It will be, without a doubt, the worst image of climate change: an Arctic orphaned by ice. A new study that compares various models and scenarios suggests that within three to six years the first day without ice in the Arctic, that is, when there is ice coverage in the Arctic Ocean of less than 1 million square kilometers; The average coverage was 6.85 million square kilometers between 1979 and 1992.
To do this, as the researchers of this new study, published in ‘Nature Communications’, A series of extreme weather phenomena should be recorded, such as an unusually warm autumn, winter and spring in the region.
«This article is a first effort, based on numerical prediction models to know when the first day with less than one million km2 of ice in the Arctic may occur, a condition accepted as an ‘ice-free day’ or passage from white Arctic to Blue Arctic”, as explained to SMC Spain Antonio Ruiz by Elvira Serraprofessor of Applied Physics and Honorary Research Professor at the University of Alcalá (Madrid).
The conclusions are supported by solid data and methods. In fact, the daily observation of the evolution trend of the Arctic ice of the ‘National Snow and Ice Data Center’ from the University of Colorado indicates this.
There are many previous works that advance in the direction of this article, but this is the first that manages to point out the first possible day for a blue arctic ocean. There are no important limitations to take into account, since the authors already point out possible uncertainties. Among these uncertainties is that this first day without ice must occur between 2027 and 2037, an interval of 10 years that is reasonable for a highly variable system such as Arctic ice.
The ice system is a nonlinear system with positive feedback, that is, every time the ice surface is reduced, less solar radiation is reflected back into spacethe surface of the free sea becomes hotter, that heat is maintained throughout the winter and the following summer there is less reflecting surface. The process speeds up.
The consequences are a very weakened polar jetwith large meanders that produce intense and repeated floods, sudden frosts and intense and repeated heat waves, in European latitudes.
«In the long term, the melting of the Greenland ice will produce a sea level rise about 100 meters high. But it is possible that before this the contribution of fresh water from these Greenland glaciers will slow down the AMOC (the global current, one of whose branches is the Gulf Stream) over the next few decades, something still being studied,” the researchers report. authors of the study.
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