[D66] The Arctic is in a death spiral. How much longer will it exist?

[R.O.]

theguardian.com:

The Arctic is in a death spiral. How much longer will it exist?

The region is unravelling faster than anyone could once have predicted. 
But there may still be time to act



Gloria Dickie

Tue 13 Oct 2020 10.00 BST
Last modified on Tue 13 Oct 2020 14.14 BST

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At the end of July, 40% of the 4,000-year-old Milne Ice Shelf, located 
on the north-western edge of Ellesmere Island, calved into the sea. 
Canada’s last fully intact ice shelf was no more.

On the other side of the island, the most northerly in Canada, the St 
Patrick’s Bay ice caps completely disappeared.

Two weeks later, scientists concluded that the Greenland Ice Sheet may 
have already passed the point of no return. Annual snowfall is no longer 
enough to replenish the snow and ice loss during summer melting of the 
territory’s 234 glaciers. Last year, the ice sheet lost a record amount 
of ice, equivalent to 1 million metric tons every minute.

The Arctic is unravelling. And it’s happening faster than anyone could 
have imagined just a few decades ago. Northern Siberia and the Canadian 
Arctic are now warming three times faster than the rest of the world. In 
the past decade, Arctic temperatures have increased by nearly 1C. If 
greenhouse gas emissions stay on the same trajectory, we can expect the 
north to have warmed by 4C year-round by the middle of the century.
In the Arctic, the warm summer months melt away ice and the winter 
snowfall freezes it back. But as the climate warms, the Arctic loses 
more ice than it gains back.

Arctic ice in August 1980: The Greenland Ice Sheet is no longer growing. 
Instead of gaining new ice every year, it begins to lose roughly 51 
billion metric tons annually, discharged into the ocean as meltwater and 
icebergs.
August 1981: We'll keep track of the ice lost compared to August 1980.
August 2010: A chunk of ice four times the size of Manhattan breaks off 
the Petermann Glacier, causing the ice sheet to retreat 18 kilometers. 
With little snow falling during winter, Greenland’s ice cap is subjected 
to record melting which lasts 50 days longer than average.
August 2012: Driven in part by a late season cyclone, Arctic summer sea 
ice extent hits a record low.
August 2020: Following intense summer heat, Arctic sea ice melts to its 
second-lowest extent on record, nearly reaching 2012 levels.
Even if we stop all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, Arctic sea ice 
will continue melting for decades.


There is no facet of Arctic life that remains untouched by the immensity 
of change here, except perhaps the eternal dance between light and 
darkness. The Arctic as we know it – a vast icy landscape where reindeer 
roam, polar bears feast, and waters teem with cod and seals – will soon 
be frozen only in memory.

A new Nature Climate Change study predicts that summer sea ice floating 
on the surface of the Arctic Ocean could disappear entirely by 2035. 
Until relatively recently, scientists didn’t think we would reach this 
point until 2050 at the earliest. Reinforcing this finding, last month 
Arctic sea ice reached its second-lowest extent in the 41-year satellite 
record.


“The latest models are basically showing that no matter what emissions 
scenario we follow, we’re going to lose summer [sea] ice cover before 
the middle of the century,” says Julienne Stroeve, a senior research 
scientist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center. “Even if we keep 
warming to less than 2C, it’s still enough to lose that summer sea ice 
in some years.”

At outposts in the Canadian Arctic, permafrost is thawing 70 years 
sooner than predicted. Roads are buckling. Houses are sinking. In 
Siberia, giant craters pockmark the tundra as temperatures soar, hitting 
100F (38C) in the town of Verkhoyansk in July. This spring, one of the 
fuel tanks at a Russian power plant collapsed and leaked 21,000 metric 
tons of diesel into nearby waterways, which attributed the cause of the 
spill to subsiding permafrost.

This thawing permafrost releases two potent greenhouse gases, carbon 
dioxide and methane, into the atmosphere and exacerbates planetary warming.

The soaring heat leads to raging wildfires, now common in hotter and 
drier parts of the Arctic. In recent summers, infernos have torn across 
the tundra of Sweden, Alaska, and Russia, destroying native vegetation.

This hurts the millions of reindeer and caribou who eat mosses, lichens, 
and stubbly grasses. Disastrous rain-on-snow events have also increased 
in frequency, locking the ungulates’ preferred forage foods in ice; 
between 2013 and 2014, an estimated 61,000 animals died on Russia’s 
Yamal peninsula due to mass starvation during a rainy winter. Overall, 
the global population of reindeer and caribou has declined by 56% in the 
last 20 years.

Such losses have devastated the indigenous people whose culture and 
livelihoods are interwoven with the plight of the reindeer and caribou. 
Inuit use all parts of the caribou: sinew for thread, hide for clothing, 
antlers for tools, and flesh for food. In Europe and Russia, the Sami 
people herd thousands of reindeer across the tundra. Warmer winters have 
forced many of them to change how they conduct their livelihoods, for 
example by providing supplemental feed for their reindeer.

Yet some find opportunities in the crisis. Melting ice has made the 
region’s abundant mineral deposits and oil and gas reserves more 
accessible by ship. China is heavily investing in the increasingly 
ice-free Northern Sea Route over the top of Russia, which promises to 
cut shipping times between the Far East and Europe by 10 to 15 days.

The Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago could soon 
yield another shortcut. And in Greenland, vanishing ice is unearthing a 
wealth of uranium, zinc, gold, iron and rare earth elements. In 2019, 
Donald Trump claimed he was considering buying Greenland from Denmark. 
Never before has the Arctic enjoyed such political relevance.


Tourism has boomed, at least until the Covid shutdown, with throngs of 
wealthy visitors drawn to this exotic frontier in hopes of capturing the 
perfect selfie under the aurora borealis. Between 2006 and 2016, the 
impact from winter tourism increased by over 600%. The city of Tromsø, 
Norway, dubbed the “Paris of the north”, welcomed just 36,000 tourists 
in the winter of 2008-09. By 2016, that number had soared to 194,000. 
Underlying such interest, however, is an unspoken sentiment: that this 
might be the last chance people have to experience the Arctic as it once 
was.

Stopping climate change in the Arctic requires an enormous reduction in 
the emission of fossil fuels, and the world has made scant progress 
despite obvious urgency. Moreover, many greenhouse gases persist in our 
atmosphere for years. Even if we were to cease all emissions tomorrow, 
it would take decades for those gases to dissolve and for temperatures 
to stabilize (though some recent research suggests the span could be 
shorter). In the interim, more ice, permafrost, and animals would be lost.

“It’s got to be both a reduction in emissions and carbon capture at this 
point,” explains Stroeve. “We need to take out what we’ve already put in 
there.”

Other strategies may help mitigate the damage to the ecosystem and its 
inhabitants. The Yupik village of Newtok in northern Alaska, where 
thawing permafrost has eroded the ground underfoot, will be relocated by 
2023. Conservation groups are pushing for the establishment of several 
marine conservation areas throughout the High Arctic to protect 
struggling wildlife. In 2018, 10 parties signed an agreement that would 
prohibit commercial fishing in the high seas of the central Arctic Ocean 
for at least 16 years. And governments must weigh further regulations on 
new shipping and extractive activities in the region.

The Arctic of the past is already gone. Following our current climate 
trajectory, it will be impossible to return to the conditions we saw 
just three decades ago. Yet many experts believe there’s still time to 
act, to preserve what once was, if the world comes together to prevent 
further harm and conserve what remains of this unique and fragile ecosystem.

Gloria Dickie

Tue 13 Oct 2020 10.00 BST