I started writing this on Friday afternoon in Fram Strait, the body of water lying the north end of Greenland and the archipelago of Svalbard, in the Greenland Sea. Up on the bridge, Pete and Bob guide the ice-covered Arctic Sunrise through some scattered sea ice, while fulmars freewheel past on the wind.
There may not be very much sea ice where we are right now, at around nearly 80 degrees north, and just over 4 degrees east, but we're soon heading back into the thick stuff again. Earlier in the week we experienced lots more, when the ship was pack bumping and grinding its way deep in the ice pack.
We left the town of Longyearbyen, in Svalbard on Sunday afternoon, September 13th having deposited our group of oceanographers and glacialogists, Gordon, Fiamma, Leigh, Jim and Dave, along with some members of the crew, like Eric and Steffan. Joining us, we had a team of polar oceanographers led by Dr Peter Wadhams of the University of Cambridge, and Frida, a campaigner who works at Greenpeace Nordic in Oslo. I've wanted to visit Svalbard for years; my brief glance sailing in, and then departing on a beautiful evening didn't disappoint – stunning mountains and glaciers, huge skies, and apparently, more polar bears than people.
By Monday we were into start of the sea ice, and by Tuesday, really in the thick of it. Peter and his team were looking out for a good ice floe to work on. Later, he joined his colleagues Keith, Steeve and John to deploy an ice mass-balance buoy to measure how fast the ice of the Arctic Ocean is melting. The buoys temperature measurements that take a temperature profile through the ice along with collecting data heat conductivity, and then transmit that data back to the laboratory via satellite.
This is all part of a study to try to understand the rate of melt of sea ice in the Arctic, including why sea ice here is disappearing so fast, and why certain kinds of sea ice are disappearing faster than others, such as pressure ridges. While the Arctic Sunrise was pushing slowly through the sea ice a few days ago, it was sobering to learn that there used to be an awful lot more of it. On Friday, the NSIDC in the United States announced that the minimum area of summer Arctic sea-ice extent had hit the third lowest level in recorded history, after 2007 and 2008, and was 1.61 million square kilometers (620,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average minimum and 1.28 million square kilometers (490,000 square miles) below the thirty-year 1979 to 2008 average minimum.
Here's some of the areas recorded from the last few years:
- 2005: 5.57 million km2 (2.15 million square miles)
- 2007: 4.28 million km2 (1.65 million square miles) - Lowest ever recorded
- 2008: 4.67 million km2 (1.80 square miles) - Second lowest ever recorded
- 2009: 5.10 million km2 (1.97 million square miles) - Third lowest ever recorded.
Back to the science work on board the Arctic Sunrise, John, based at the University of Cambridge has been using what's become known as the "magic show" – a small black tent with laser equipment inside, that's he using to perfect an understanding of how fast ice is thinning, while Steeve, based in Villefranche in France has been catching plankton to study the effects of ocean acidification caused by climate change on microscropic marine animals.
According to Peter, during a briefing he gave us earlier in the week, "we are entering a new epoch of sea ice melt in the Arctic Ocean due to climate change; in five years' time most of the sea ice could be gone in summer with just an 'Alamo of ice' remaining north of Canada's Ellesmere Island".
"In twenty years' time," he added, "that will also be gone, leaving the Arctic Ocean completely ice-free in summer. It's clear we can't rely on current models of prediction for sea ice melt, as they have been constantly outpaced since the 1980s".
"In the last few years", Peter continued, "there has been an unprecedented retreat of the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean during summer months, but this starts during the winter. So there's a decline in the rate of growth of sea ice during the winter, an increase in the rate of melt in the summer and now the thickness of Arctic sea ice has diminished much more rapidly that it had in previous decades. At some point, the ice will not grow enough in winter to match summer melting, and the summer ice will disappear, all in one go."
This is sobering stuff; the effects of losing summer ice barely even computes – and I'm sitting here in the middle of it. First of all there's the knock-on warming effect of losing the ice – instead of sea ice reflecting infra-radiation back into space, instead there would be more dark ocean, absorbing more heat, leading to more thermal expansion in the ocean, which is a factor in sea level rise. There have been news headlines in the last couple of weeks about two German ships, the Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight, making their way along the Northeast Passage – basically across the top of Russia – with cargo from South Korea. With less summer sea ice, the reasoning is that it's shorter and faster to send cargo ships through this route; however, the safety and environmental aspects of this idea seem badly thought out, if at all; the waterway is not open and clear, the ships still require icebreaker escort. With less summer sea ice, various countries are posturing over claims on resources; most absurd of all is the idea that less summer ice means more opportunities for extracting oil from the Arctic sea bed, when it was fossil fuels substance that got us into this climate trouble in the first place.
There's the accelerating effect of climate change on the eco-system here; we've had several polar bear sightings in the last week, hundreds of miles from any land. This is true polar bear territory; I mean that in the broadest sense, for polar bears are wanderers of the sea ice – they spend so much time hunting on the frozen Arctic seas that they are referred to as marine mammals. We've seen some seals out here too, though not many in the last week.
A few nights ago came across the site of a polar bear kill; an ice floe strewn with blood and tufts of fur. In the middle of the floe lay the carcass of the seal, completely frozen. Out here there's ringed, harp, bearded and hooded seals, that not only exist on a seafood diet, but actually breed and give birth on the sea ice itself. If there's less sea ice, that has a knock-on effect for the seals and bears.
During the week, a gyrfalcon was spotted circling the Arctic Sunrise; the largest of the falcons, and apparently the world's fastest bird (reaching up to 200 kilometres an hour), it spent a few minutes chasing northern fulmars around the ship before it briefly alighted on the tail of "Lucky Bird", our helicopter. Since then the falcon has reappeared a couple of times. Gyrfalcons breed all around the coast of Greenland, and historically have been regarded as an iconic creature –the medieval Vikings settlers in south Greenland used to export live gyrfalcons as a luxury item; according to the book I'm reading at the moment, "Collapse" by Jared Diamond, makes mention of the fact that 12 Greenland gyrfalcons were used "to ransom the Duke of Burgundy's son after he was captured by the Saracens" in 1396.
This morning, Geerard, or "Number Two", as well all refer to him, reported seeing a male snow bunting this morning, while we were at about 80 degrees north. While this relatively small bird lives around the coast of Greenland and throughout Svalbard, it's interesting to see one out here – it's not a seabird, and I would have expected them to be migrating south to Europe, Russia or the United States by now, not on a commuter flight between Greenland and Svalbard.
It'll be three months this Tuesday since I joined the Arctic Sunrise, at Nuuk, at the far side of Greenland. For most of the people on board, it's been a longer trip than that, since they sign on in Amsterdam. There's another week and a half left in our Arctic voyage; and there's less than three months left until the Copenhagen climate summit. We can see what's going on here in the Arctic; others are bearing witness to what's going on around the world, where sea level rise amongst other climate change factors are threatening livelihoods and stability. We're calling… no, we're demanding that world leaders get their act together in Copenhagen, and come together to make a bold, ambitious deal that that will mean decisive action by developed countries for a 40% cut in greenhouse gases by 2020; they also need to invest $140 billion per year to help developing countries deal with the impacts of climate change, stop deforestation and switch to a low carbon economy. Anything less is a total waste of effort, and the adoption of blind ignorance climate change.
- Dave
