Схід сонця у Гренландії / William Bossen, Unsplash
New research concludes that the Arctic Ocean could experience its first ice-free day as early as 2027. The Arctic will become darker, and this is bad news.
According to new research, published on Monday, November 3, in the journal Nature, this “ominous milestone for the planet” is likely to occur within nine to twenty years from 2023. This will happen regardless of whether greenhouse gas emissions are reduced. The most pessimistic forecasts suggest it could happen in as little as three years.
“The first ice-free day in the Arctic will not fundamentally change the situation. However, it will demonstrate that we have fundamentally altered one of the defining characteristics of the natural environment in the Arctic Ocean, which is that it is covered with sea ice and snow all year round, due to greenhouse gas emissions,” said study co-author Alexandra Yan, a climatologist from the University of Colorado Boulder.
The ice coverage of Earth’s oceans has been measured using satellites since 1979. Sea ice plays a crucial role in regulating the temperature of the ocean and air, supporting marine habitats, and feeding ocean currents that transport heat and nutrients around the globe.
The surface of the sea ice also reflects some of the sun’s energy back into space in a process known as the albedo effect. This works in reverse too — the melting of sea ice exposes darker waters that absorb more solar rays. This means that over time, the Arctic has transformed from a refrigerator to a radiator, and it is now warming four times faster than the rest of the world.
The rapid warming has had dramatic and noticeable consequences. The area of the planet’s most northern sea ice, which averaged 6.85 million km² from 1979 to 1992, sharply fell to 4.28 million km² this year. The drastic decrease means that future climate fluctuations are likely to push the ice below 1 million km², below which the region is considered “ice-free.”
Using 11 climate models and 366 simulations, researchers found that this day could come within three to six years. This forecast is made only in the nine most pessimistic simulations, which assumed a series of unusually warm seasons. But all simulations ultimately predicted that an ice-free day is inevitable — more likely in the 2030s.
Despite the grim findings, the study has a positive conclusion — a sharp reduction in carbon dioxide emissions significantly delays the onset of the ice-free day and mitigates the climate shock caused by the loss of Arctic ice.
Source: LiveScience