The original prediction, made in 2007, gained Wieslaw Maslowski’s team a deal of criticism from some of their peers.

Now they are working with a new computer model – compiled partly in response to those criticisms – that produces a “best guess” date of 2016.

Their work was unveiled at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) annual meeting.

The new model is designed to replicate real-world interactions, or “couplings”, between the Arctic ocean, the atmosphere, the sea ice and rivers carrying freshwater into the sea.

“In the past… we were just extrapolating into the future assuming that trends might persist as we’ve seen in recent times,” said Dr Maslowski, who works at Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

“Now we’re trying to be more systematic, and we’ve developed a regional Arctic climate model that’s very similar to the global climate models participating in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments,” he told BBC News.

“We can run a fully coupled model for the past and present and see what our model will predict for the future in terms of the sea ice and the Arctic climate.”

And one of the projections it comes out with is that the summer melt could lead to ice-free Arctic seas by 2016 – “plus or minus three years”.

It does not make predictions about the Greenland ice cap.

Thin evidence

One of the important ingredients of the new model is data on the thickness of ice floating on the sea.

Satellites are increasingly able to detect this, usually by measuring how far the ice sits above the sea surface – which also indicates how far the ice extends beneath.

Inclusion of this data into the team’s modelling was one of the factors causing them to retrench on the 2013 date, which raised eyebrows – and subsequently some criticism – when it emerged at a US science meeting four years ago.

Since the spectacularly pronounced melting of 2007, a greater proportion of the Arctic Ocean has been covered by thin ice that is formed in a single season and is more vulnerable to slight temperature increases than older, thicker ice.

Even taking this into account, the projected date range is earlier than other researchers believe likely.

But one peer – Dr Walt Meier from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado – said the behaviour of sea ice becomes less predictable as it gets thinner.

“[Maslowski's] is quite a good model, one thing it has is really high resolution, it can capture details that are lost in global climate models,” he said.

“But 2019 is only eight years away; there’s been modelling showing that [likely dates are around] 2040/50, and I’d still lean towards that.

“I’d be very surprised if it’s 2013 – I wouldn’t be totally surprised if it’s 2019.”

Crystal method

The drastic melt of 2007 remains the record loss of ice area in the satellite era, although subsequent years have still been below the long-term average.

But some researchers believe 2010′s melt was equally as notable as 2007′s, given weather conditions that were favourable to the durability of ice.

Although many climate scientists and environmental campaigners are seriously concerned about the fate of the Arctic sea ice, for other parts of society and other arms of government its degradation presents challenges and opportunities.

The Russian and Canadian governments, for example, are looking to the opportunities for mineral exploitation that will arise; while the US military has expressed concern about losing a natural defence around the country’s northern border for part of the year.

“I’m not trying to be alarmist and not trying to say ‘we know the future because we have a crystal ball’,” said Dr Maslowski.

“Basically, we’re trying to make policymakers and people who need to know about climate change in the Arctic realise there is a chance that summer sea ice could be gone by the end of the decade.

“For the national interest, the defence interest, I think it’s important to realise that 2040 is not a crystal ball prediction.”

Source BBC News

For two winters running, an Arctic chill has descended on Europe, burying that continent in snow and ice. Last year in the United States, historic blizzards afflicted the mid-Atlantic region. This winter the Deep South has endured unusual snowstorms and severe cold, and a frigid Northeast is bracing for what could shape into another major snowstorm this week.

Yet while people in Atlanta learn to shovel snow, the weather 2,000 miles to the north has been freakishly warm the past two winters. Throughout northeastern Canada and Greenland, temperatures in December ran as much as 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Bays and lakes have been slow to freeze; ice fishing, hunting and trade routes have been disrupted.

Iqaluit, the capital of the remote Canadian territory of Nunavut, had to cancel its New Year’s snowmobile parade. David Ell, the deputy mayor, said that people in the region had been looking with envy at snowbound American and European cities. “People are saying, ‘That’s where all our snow is going!’ ” he said.

The immediate cause of the topsy-turvy weather is clear enough. A pattern of atmospheric circulation that tends to keep frigid air penned in the Arctic has weakened during the last two winters, allowing big tongues of cold air to descend far to the south, while masses of warmer air have moved north.

The deeper issue is whether this pattern is linked to the rapid changes that global warming is causing in the Arctic, particularly the drastic loss of sea ice. At least two prominent climate scientists have offered theories suggesting that it is. But others are doubtful, saying the recent events are unexceptional, or that more evidence over a longer period would be needed to establish a link.

Since satellites began tracking it in 1979, the ice on the Arctic Ocean’s surface in the bellwether month of September has declined by more than 30 percent. It is the most striking change in the terrain of the planet in recent decades, and a major question is whether it is starting to have an effect on broad weather patterns.

Ice reflects sunlight, and scientists say the loss of ice is causing the Arctic Ocean to absorb more heat in the summer. A handful of scientists point to that extra heat as a possible culprit in the recent harsh winters in Europe and the United States.

Their theories involve a fast-moving river of air called the jet stream that circles the Northern Hemisphere. Many winters, a strong pressure difference between the polar region and the middle latitudes channels the jet stream into a tight circle, or vortex, around the North Pole, effectively containing the frigid air at the top of the world.

“It’s like a fence,” said Michelle L’Heureux, a researcher in Camp Springs, Md., with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

When that pressure difference diminishes, however, the jet stream weakens and meanders southward, bringing warm air into the Arctic and cold air into the midlatitudes — exactly what has happened the last couple of winters. The effect is sometimes compared to leaving a refrigerator door open, with cold air flooding the kitchen even as warm air enters the refrigerator. See * So what’s with the weather?

This has happened intermittently for many decades. Still, it is unusual for the polar vortex to weaken as much as it has lately. Last winter, one index related to the vortex hit its lowest wintertime value since record-keeping began in 1865, and it was quite low again in December.

James E. Overland, a climate scientist with NOAA in Seattle, has proposed that the extra warmth in the Arctic Ocean could be heating the atmosphere enough to make it less dense, causing the air pressure over the Arctic to be closer to that of the middle latitudes. “The added heat works against having a strong polar vortex,” he said.

But Dr. Overland acknowledges that his idea is tentative and needs further research. Many other climate scientists are not convinced, saying that a two-year span, however unusual, is not much on which to base a new theory. “We haven’t got sufficient insight to make definitive claims,” said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at a company called Atmospheric and Environmental Research in Lexington, Mass., has spotted what he believes is a link between increasing snow in Siberia and the weakening of the polar vortex. In his theory, the extra snow is creating a dense, cold air mass over northern Asia in the late autumn, setting off a complex chain of cause and effect that ultimately perturbs the vortex.

Dr. Cohen said in an interview that the rising Siberian snow might, in turn, be linked to the decline of Arctic sea ice, with the open water providing extra moisture to the atmosphere — much as the Great Lakes produce heavy snows in cities like Buffalo and Syracuse. He is publishing seasonal forecasts based on his work, supported by the National Science Foundation. Those forecasts correctly predicted the recent harsh winters in the midlatitudes. But Dr. Cohen acknowledges, as does Dr. Overland, that some of his ideas are tentative and need further research.

The uncertainty about what is causing the strange winters highlights a core difficulty of climate science. While mainstream researchers are sure that greenhouse gases released by humans are warming the Earth, they acknowledge being on shakier ground in trying to predict the regional effects of that change. It is entirely possible, they say, that some regions will cool temporarily, because of disruption of the atmospheric and oceanic circulation, even as the Earth warms over all.

Bloggers who specialize in raising doubts about climate science have gleefully pointed to the recent winters in the United States and Europe as evidence that climatologists must be mistaken about a warming trend. These commentators have not been as eager to write about the strange warmth in parts of the Arctic, a region that scientists have long predicted will warm more rapidly than the planet as a whole.

Without doubt, the winter weather that began and ended 2010 was remarkable. Two of the 10 largest snowstorms in New York City history occurred last year, including the one that disrupted travel right after Christmas. The two snowstorms that fell on Washington and surrounding areas within a week in February had no known precedent in their overall impact on the region, with total accumulations of 40 inches in some places.

But the winters were not the whole story. Even without them, 2010 would have gone down as one of the strangest years in the annals of climatology, thanks in part to a weather condition known as El Niño, which dumped heat from the Pacific Ocean into the atmosphere early in the year. Later, the ocean surface cooled, a condition known as La Niña, contributing to heavy rainfall in many places.

Despite cooling from La Niña, newly compiled figures show that 2010 was among the two warmest years in the historical record. It featured a heat wave in Russia, all-time high temperatures in at least 17 countries, the hottest summer in New York City history, and devastating floods in Pakistan, China, Australia, the United States and other countries.

“It was a wild year,” said Christopher C. Burt, a weather historian for Weather Underground, an Internet site.

Still, however erratic the weather may have become, it is not obvious to most people how global warming could lead to frigid winters. Many scientists are hesitant to back such assertions, at least until they gain a better understanding of what is going on in the Arctic.

In interviews, several scientists recalled that in the decade ending in the mid-1990s, the polar vortex seemed to be strengthening, not weakening, producing mild winters in the eastern United States and western Europe.

At the time, some climate scientists wrote papers attributing that change to global warming. Newspapers, including this one, printed laments for winter lost. But soon after, the apparent trend went away, an experience that has made many researchers more cautious.

John M. Wallace, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, wrote some of the earlier papers. This time around, he said, it will take a lot of evidence to convince him that a few harsh winters in London or Washington have anything to do with global warming.

“Just when you publish something and it looks like you’re seeing a connection,” Dr. Wallace said, “nature has a way of humbling us.”

Source NY Times

* Further reading on this topic from the Greenhouse Neutral Foundation 12^th of January 2010- ‘So what’s with the weather?’

Scientists have uncovered what appears to be a further dramatic increase in the leakage of methane gas that is seeping from the Arctic seabed.

Methane is about 20 times more potent than CO2 in trapping solar heat.

The findings come from measurements of carbon fluxes around the north of Russia, led by Igor Semiletov from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

“Methane release from the East Siberian Shelf is underway and it looks stronger than it was supposed [to be],” he said.

Professor Semiletov has been studying methane seepage in the region for the last few decades, and leads the International Siberian Shelf Study (ISSS), which has launched multiple expeditions to the Arctic Ocean.

The preliminary findings of ISSS 2009 are now being prepared for publication, he told BBC News.

Methane seepage recorded last summer was already the highest ever measured in the Arctic Ocean.

High seepage

Acting as a giant frozen depository of carbon such as CO2 and methane (often stored as compacted solid gas hydrates), Siberia’s shallow shelf areas are increasingly subjected to warming and are now giving up greater amounts of methane to the sea and to the atmosphere than recorded in the past.

This undersea permafrost was until recently considered to be stable.

But now scientists think the release of such a powerful greenhouse gas may accelerate global warming.

Higher concentrations of atmospheric methane are contributing to global temperature rise; this in turn is projected to cause further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane in a feedback loop.

A worst-case scenario is one where the feedback passes a tipping point and billions of tonnes of methane are released suddenly, as has occurred at least once in the Earth’s past.

Such sudden releases have been linked to rapid increases in global temperatures and could have been a factor in the mass extinction of species.

According to a report by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the springtime air temperature across the region in the period 2000-2007 was an average of 4C higher than during 1970-1999.

That is the fastest temperature rise on the planet, claims the university.

The recent thaw over the last decade means that some of the large reserve of carbon from organic material such as dead animals and plants in sediments is now being released into the sea and into our atmosphere.

Trapped below that is the methane hydrate now warming and leaking through holes in the defrosting sediments.

Previously it was thought much of this gas was absorbed into the sea.

But according to a recent report that Professor Semiletov and his team compiled for the environmental group WWF, the shallow depth of arctic shelves means that methane is reaching the atmosphere without reacting to become CO2 dissolved in the ocean.

Professor Semiletov’s fellow researcher aboard the Russian icebreaker that carries the ISSS team each year is Professor Orjan Gustafsson from Stockholm University in Sweden.

He said that methane measured in the atmosphere around the region is 100 times higher than normal background levels, and in some cases 1,000 times higher.

‘No alarm’

Despite the high readings, Professor Gustafsson said that so far there was no cause for alarm, and stressed that further studies were still necessary to determine the exact cause of the methane seepage.

“It is important now to understand how fast it is being released and how much is being released,” he said.

However, there is a real fear that global warming may cause Siberia’s subsea permafrost to thaw.

Some estimates put the amount of carbon trapped in shelf permafrost at 1,600 billion tonnes – roughly twice as much carbon as in the atmosphere now.

The release of this once captive carbon from destabilised ocean sediments and permafrost would have catastrophic effect on our climate and life on Earth, warn the scientists.

Source BBC News

The findings were released Oct. 21, 2010 in the Arctic Report Card, a yearly assessment of Arctic conditions.

Among the 2010 highlights:

Greenland is experiencing record-setting high temperatures, ice melt and glacier area loss;

Summer sea ice continues to decline — the 2009-2010 summer sea ice cover extent was the third lowest since satellite monitoring began in 1979, and sea ice thickness continues to thin. The 2010 minimum is the third lowest recorded since 1979, surpassed only by 2008 and the record low of 2007; and

Arctic snow cover duration was at a record minimum since record-keeping began in 1966.

There is also evidence that the effect of higher air temperatures in the Arctic atmosphere in fall is contributing to changes in the atmospheric circulation in both the Arctic and northern mid-latitudes. Winter 2009-2010 showed a link between mid-latitude extreme cold and snowy weather events and changes in the wind patterns of the Arctic, related to a phase of the Arctic Oscillation.

“To quote one of my NOAA colleagues, ‘whatever is going to happen in the rest of the world happens first, and to the greatest extent, in the Arctic,’” said Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D, under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator. “Beyond affecting the humans and wildlife that call the area home, the Arctic’s warmer temperatures and decreases in permafrost, snow cover, glaciers and sea ice also have wide-ranging consequences for the physical and biological systems in other parts of the world. The Arctic is an important driver of climate and weather around the world and serves as a critical feeding and breeding ground that supports globally significant populations of birds, mammals and fish.”

In 2006, NOAA’s Climate Program Office introduced the annual Arctic Report Card, which established a baseline of conditions at the beginning of the 21st century to monitor the quickly changing conditions in the Arctic. Using a color-coded system of “red” to indicate consistent evidence of warming and “yellow” to show that warming impacts are occurring in many climate indicators and species, the Report Card is updated annually in October and tracks the Arctic atmosphere, sea ice, biology, ocean, land and changes in Greenland.

The Report Card can be found online at http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/

UXBRIDGE, Sep 20 (IPS) – The carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have melted the Arctic sea ice to its lowest volume since before the rise of human civilisation, dangerously upsetting the energy balance of the entire planet, climate scientists are reporting.

“The Arctic sea ice has reached its four lowest summer extents (area covered) in the last four years,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in the U.S. city of Boulder, Colorado.

The volume – extent and thickness – of ice left in the Arctic likely reached the lowest ever level this month, Serreze told IPS.

“I stand by my previous statements that the Arctic summer sea ice cover is in a death spiral. It’s not going to recover,” he said.

There can be no recovery because tremendous amounts of extra heat are added every summer to the region as more than 2.5 million square kilometres of the Arctic Ocean have been opened up to the heat of the 24-hour summer sun. A warmer Arctic Ocean not only takes much longer to re-freeze, it emits huge volumes of additional heat energy into the atmosphere, disrupting the weather patterns of the northern hemisphere, scientists have now confirmed.

“The exceptional cold and snowy winter of 2009-2010 in Europe, eastern Asia and eastern North America is connected to unique physical processes in the Arctic,” James Overland of the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in the United States told IPS in Oslo, Norway last June in an exclusive interview. Paradoxically, a warmer Arctic means “future cold and snowy winters will be the rule rather than the exception” in these regions, Overland told IPS.

There is growing evidence of widespread impacts from a warmer Arctic, agreed Serreze. “Trapping all that additional heat has to have impacts and those will grow in the future,” he said.

One local impact underway is a rapid warming of the coastal regions of the Arctic, where average temperatures are now three to five degrees C warmer than they were 30 years ago. If the global average temperature increases from the present 0.8 C to two degrees C, as seems likely, the entire Arctic region will warm at least four to six degrees and possibly eight degrees due to a series of processes and feedbacks called Arctic amplification.

A similar feverish rise in our body temperatures would put us in hospital if it didn’t kill us outright.

“I hate to say it but I think we are committed to a four- to six-degree warmer Arctic,” Serreze said.

If the Arctic becomes six degrees warmer, then half of the world’s permafrost will likely thaw, probably to a depth of a few metres, releasing most of the carbon and methane accumulated there over thousands of years, said Vladimir Romanovsky of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and a world expert on permafrost.

Methane is a global warming gas approximately 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2).

That would be catastrophic for human civilisation, experts agree. The permafrost region spans 13 million square kilometres of the land in Alaska, Canada, Siberia and parts of Europe and contains at least twice as much carbon as is currently present in the atmosphere – 1,672 gigatonnes of carbon, according a paper published in Nature in 2009. That’s three times more carbon than all of the worlds’ forests contain.

“Permafrost thawing has been observed consistently across the entire region since the 1980s,” Romanovsky said in an interview.

A Canadian study in 2009 documented that the southernmost permafrost limit had retreated 130 kilometres over the past 50 years in Quebec’s James Bay region. At the northern edge, for the first time in a decade, the heat from the Arctic Ocean pushed far inland this summer, Romanovsky said.

There are no good estimates of how much CO2 and methane is being released by the thawing permafrost or by the undersea permafrost that acts as a cap over unknown quantities of methane hydrates (a type of frozen methane) along the Arctic Ocean shelf, he said.

“Methane is always there anywhere you drill through the permafrost,” Romanovsky noted.

Last spring, Romanovsky’s colleagues reported that an estimated eight million tonnes of methane emissions are bubbling to the surface from the shallow East Siberian Arctic shelf every year in what were the first-ever measurements taken there. If just one percent of the Arctic undersea methane reaches the atmosphere, it could quadruple the amount of methane currently in the atmosphere.

Abrupt releases of large amounts of CO2 and methane are certainly possible on a scale of decades, he said. The present relatively slow thaw of the permafrost could rapidly accelerate in a few decades, releasing huge amounts of global warming gases.

Another permafrost expert, Ted Schuur of the University of Florida, has come to the same conclusion. “In a matter of decades we could lose much of the permafrost,” Shuur told IPS.

Those losses are more likely to come rapidly and upfront, he says. In other words, much of the permafrost thaw would happen at the beginning of a massive 50-year meltdown because of rapid feedbacks.

Emissions of CO2 and methane from thawing permafrost are not yet factored into the global climate models and it will be several years before this can be done reasonably well, Shuur said.

“Current mitigation targets are only based on anthropogenic (human) emissions,” he explained.

Present pledges by governments to reduce emissions will still result in a global average temperature increase of 3.5 to 3.9 C by 2100, according to the latest analysis. That would result in an Arctic that’s 10 to 16 degrees C warmer, releasing most of the permafrost carbon and methane and unknown quantities of methane hydrates.

This is why some climate scientists are calling for a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels, recommending that fossil fuel emissions peak by 2015 and then decline three per cent per year. But even then there’s still a 50-percent probability of exceeding two degrees C current studies show. If the emissions peak is delayed until 2025, then global temperatures will rise three degrees C, the Arctic will be eight to 10 degrees warmer and the world will lose most its permafrost.

Meanwhile, a new generation of low-cost, thin-film solar roof and outside wall coverings being made today has the potential to eliminate burning coal and oil to generate electricity, energy experts believe – if governments have the political will to fully embrace green technologies. 

That comment in a recent article along with the following adaptation (from the French) of a story sent to me by a colleague in Quebec Canada made me reflect on why the global community is not focused and active on pushing for immediate reductions in greenhouse emission.

We don’t see it as affecting us directly today. We know the world is warming at a rate that will cause a radical shift in the way we live in the coming decades, still we don’t act. The question to be asked and for you to answer is when will you? Does it need to hit you personally, to devastate your life and that of those you love?

From the frozen north, now warming at an alarming rate comes this observation by Par Moukmouk le jeudi of the village of Pohenegamouk, not far from Montréal – I pay all credit to his observations.  

I am not alone in giving news about North. The newspapers are full. But why the focus on what happens elsewhere?

In France, Betancourt’s case occupies journalists; here is a change in the law on the census. Yes, there are many fires in Russia and floods in Pakistan, but that’s not going to pay the mortgage, or find the love of my life.

Caribou by tens of thousands are moving slowly in the treeless plain bordering the Arctic Ocean. There were mountains here, but the glaciers have crashed, it remains as soft undulations as small breasts of young women. There is not a single tree as far as the eye. Here, the permafrost layer under a few inches when pushing the moss and grass particularly abundant this year, there are tens of meters of ice mixed with soil of moraine rock crushed as finely as flour by the friction of glaciers.

A caribou walks a bit away to a clump of grass that seems appetizing. Suddenly, he sinks into the ground; he struggles to swim and wants what does widens the pool of mud around him. You hear shouting, call and then nothing, his head sank, he disappeared. The other caribou have pretended not to hear, have had nervous tremors like to hunt mosquitoes too abundant. I think they know that danger is now standing still on the ground may open under their feet and they disappear with no hope of relief. The caribou are pretending not to know.

Our small planet saw the warmest year since we are able to measure temperatures. The boreal forest burns, permafrost melts at high speed releasing billions of tons of methane much more active than the CO2 in the development of the greenhouse effect. The earth opens up beneath our feet.

Because of the current La Nina, next winter will probably be a little colder than average. This will be a good opportunity to burn more oil. The loudmouths on the radio to enjoy laughing doomsayers who talk about global warming. And we’ll pretend not to know.

Greenland's Petermann Glacier in 2009. Researchers say a quarter of the ice shelf has broken away.

August 7^th — A piece of ice four times the size of Manhattan island has broken away from an ice shelf in Greenland, according to scientists in the U.S.

The 260 square-kilometer (100 square miles) ice island separated from the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland early on Thursday, researchers based at the University of Delaware said.

The ice island, which is about half the height of the Empire State Building, is the biggest piece of ice to break away from the Arctic icecap since 1962 and amounts to a quarter of the Petermann 70-kilometer floating ice shelf, according to research leader Andreas Muenchow.

“The freshwater stored in this ice island could keep the Delaware or Hudson rivers flowing for more than two years. It could also keep all U.S. public tap water flowing for 120 days,” Muenchow said.

Muenchow’s team is studying ice in the Nares Strait separating Greenland from Canada, about 1,000 kilometers south of the North Pole.

Satellite data from NASA’s MODIS-Aqua satellite revealed the initial rupture which was confirmed within hours by Trudy Wohlleben of the Canadian Ice Service, according to the University of Delaware website.

Muenchow said the island could block the Nares Strait as it drifts south, or break into smaller islands and continue towards the open waters of the Atlantic.

“In Nares Strait, the ice island will encounter real islands that are all much smaller in size,” he said.

“The newly born ice island may become land-fast, block the channel, or it may break into smaller pieces as it is propelled south by the prevailing ocean currents. From there, it will likely follow along the coasts of Baffin Island and Labrador, to reach the Atlantic within the next two years.”

Environmentalists say ice melt is being caused by global warming with Arctic temperatures in the 1990s reaching their warmest level of any decade in at least 2,000 years, according to a study published in 2009.

Current trends could see the Arctic Ocean become ice free in summer months within decades, researchers predict.

Source CNN

“Next in the sales brochure, we are off back to the Northern Hemisphere to a balmy climate that until now has been largely overlooked by holiday makers, Siberia.”

“On offer here we have one or two new tourist attractions—thawing peat bogs!! This could be symbolized by thinking of the Olympic rings linking up and ever increasing in diameter. As the permafrost starts to melt the outside of the circles fall inward in an ever widening pool of melting peat. As the sides collapse in a positive feedback, puddles become ponds, which become lakes. A real sight, but not for any freestyle Olympic swimmer to tackle—better leave this for the extreme sports crowd. Covering an area of a million square miles and frozen for eleven thousand years, Siberia has, as is the situation with the Arctic, been storing carbon since the last ice age. The simple botanical lesson works like this. The moss and lichen surviving on the frozen permafrost over thousands of years have been slowly absorbing massive amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Until now it’s been a little too chilly for the seasonal growth to fully decompose, so for the last eleven thousand years the ever thickening, year after year layers, are now around 25 meters thick. We have on offer again, assisted by the standard no-option heater, up to a quarter of all the carbon that has been taken up in the world vegetation and soils since the last ice age. Now as average temperatures rise at three times the global average these frozen Siberian peat bogs are melting into putrid puddles, then swamps, then lakes. Lacking in oxygen, they release methane. More than twenty times more powerful and faster acting as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, the critical level of atmospheric concentrations could be reached, exceeded, and on a run to massive climatic destabilization in a heartbeat.”

“From 2002 to 2005 reports stated, that while the West Siberian peat lands had remained stable, the big thaw was now on, warming faster than anywhere on the planet. With every year the spring melt has been starting earlier and earlier adding to the positive feedback. Increasing levels of rainfall are making the area far wetter and with spring coming sooner and the winter freeze coming later, many areas of Siberia and Alaska are retaining their warmth longer. As the peat on the bottom of the lakes is converting its methane cocktail, the gases bubble to the surface. Some of the southernmost lakes are remaining unfrozen during winter, lakes that had frozen each year for thousands of years. Where the winter snow does fall, it acts as a blanket to keep the lower levels warm, where the spring melt can add even more moisture. Add to that the fact that the dark lakes, as with the expanses of open ocean in the Arctic free of sea ice, absorb more warmth the cumulative effects of warming are amplified. These areas were now being referred to as an ‘ecological landslide that is probably irreversible.’”

“Where the pebble had fallen previously on hard ground, it now falls into a quicksand of fetid swamp. Lakes of melting permafrost can be seen to stretch for hundreds of kilometers with the clear and present danger that methane release is happening at an alarming rate already.” “As the zero-degree isotherm line moves ever further north (the point at which the land reached the melting point of ice, 0 degrees centigrade) year after year it is not a case of if, but one of inevitability. Not a case of, will the methane contribute to further planetary warming, but how much and when will the critical level be reached?”

“In northern Siberia lakes are releasing methane at a rate five times higher than previously estimated. Studies by Katey Walter, an International Polar Year postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks, reported in Nature in 2006 that her team’s calculations increase the present estimates of methane emissions from northern wetlands by between 10 and 63 percent. She explains: ‘This newly recognized source of methane is so far not included in climate models.’ Estimates suggest the area has 500 gigatons (1,100 trillion pounds) of carbon, largely in the form of ancient dead plant material. Walter suggests: ‘Permafrost models predict significant thaw of permafrost during this century, which means that yedoma permafrost is like a time bomb waiting to go off—as it continues to thaw, tens of thousands of teragrams of methane can be released to the atmosphere enhancing climate change.’”

“Monitoring of methane releases is becoming an advanced area of research. London’s Royal Holloway College oversees a large international program led by Euan Nisbet to monitor emissions. Their studies suggest that releases from the West Siberian region are up to 100,000 tonnes per day, with a representative warming effect on the planet as a whole of greater than all of the emissions from the United States manmade attributable emissions. Nisbet suggests that ‘If the peat lands become wetter with warming and permafrost degradation, methane releases to the atmosphere will dramatically increase. Methane storage once released is estimated to be equivalent to all manmade emissions for the last 200 years.’

When?

“It has already started,” said the super salesman.

Get the book in hard cover or e-book HERE

Led by the University of Colorado at Boulder, the international study indicated that while the mean annual temperature on Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic during the Pliocene Epoch 2.6 to 5.3 million years ago was about 34 degrees Fahrenheit, or 19 degrees Celsius, warmer than today, CO₂ levels were only slightly higher than present. The vast majority of climate scientists agree Earth is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping atmospheric gases generated primarily by human activities like fossil fuel burning and deforestation.

The team used three independent methods of measuring the Pliocene temperatures on Ellesmere Island in Canada’s High Arctic. They included measurements of oxygen isotopes found in the cellulose of fossil trees and mosses that reveal temperatures and precipitation levels tied to ancient water, an analysis of the distribution of lipids in soil bacteria which correlate with temperature, and an inventory of ancient Pliocene plant groups that overlap in range with contemporary vegetation.

“Our findings indicate that CO₂ levels of approximately 400 parts per million are sufficient to produce mean annual temperatures in the High Arctic of approximately 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees F),” Ballantyne said. “As temperatures approach 0 degrees Celsius, it becomes exceedingly difficult to maintain permanent sea and glacial ice in the Arctic. Thus current levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere of approximately 390 parts per million may be approaching a tipping point for irreversible ice-free conditions in the Arctic.”

A paper on the subject is being published in the July issue of the journal Geology. Co-authors included David Greenwood of Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada, Jaap Sinninghe Damste of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, Adam Csank of the University of Arizona, Natalia Rybczynski of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa and Jaelyn Eberle, curator of fossil vertebrates at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and an associate professor in the geological sciences department.

Arctic temperatures have risen by about 1.8 degrees F, or 1 degree C, in the past two decades in response to anthropogenic greenhouse warming, a trend expected to continue in the coming decades and centuries, said Ballantyne. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million during the pre-industrial era on Earth to about 390 parts per million today.

During the Pliocene, Ellesmere Island hosted forests of larch, dwarf birch and northern white cedar trees, as well as mosses and herbs, including cinquefoils. The island also was home to fish, frogs and now extinct mammals that included tiny deer, ancient relatives of the black bear, three-toed horses, small beavers, rabbits, badgers and shrews. Because of the high latitude, the Ellesmere Island site on the Strathcona Fiord was shrouded by darkness six months out of the year, said Rybczynski.

Fossils are often preserved in a process known as permineralization, in which mineral deposits form internal casts of organisms. But at the Ellesmere Island site known as the “Beaver Pond site,” organic materials — including trees, plants and mosses — have been “mummified” in peat deposits, allowing the researchers to conduct detailed, high-quality analyses, said Eberle.

Ballantyne said the high level of preservation of trees and mosses at Ellesmere Island allowed the team to measure the ratio of oxygen isotopes in plant cellulose, providing information on water absorbed from precipitation during the Pliocene and which yielded estimates of past surface temperatures. The team also compared data on the width of tree rings in larch trees at the Beaver Pond site to trees at lower latitudes today to help them estimate past temperatures and precipitation levels.

The researchers also analyzed the distribution of ancient membrane lipids from soil bacteria known as tetraethers, which correlate to temperature. The chemical structure of the fossilized tetraethers makes them highly sensitive to both temperature and acidity, or pH, said Ballantyne.

The last line of evidence put forward by the CU-Boulder-led team was a comparison of Pliocene ancient vegetation at the site with vegetation present today, providing a clear “climate window” showing the overlap of the two time periods. “The results of the three independent temperature proxies are remarkably consistent,” said Eberle. “We essentially were able to ‘read’ the vegetation in order to estimate air temperatures in the Pliocene.”

Today, Ellesmere Island is a polar desert that features tundra, permafrost, ice sheets, sparse vegetation and a few small mammals. Temperatures range from roughly minus 37 degrees F, or minus 38 degrees C, in winter to 48 degrees F, or 9 degrees C, in summer. The region is one of the coldest, driest environments on Earth.

“Our findings are somewhat disconcerting regarding the temperatures and greenhouse gas levels during the Pliocene,” said Eberle. “We already are seeing evidence of both mammals and birds moving northward as the climate warms, and I can’t help but wonder if the Arctic is headed toward conditions similar to those that existed during the Pliocene.”

Elevated Arctic temperatures during the Pliocene — which occurred shortly before Earth plunged into an ice age about 2.5 million years ago — are thought to have been driven by the transfer of heat to the polar regions and perhaps by decreased reflectivity of sunlight hitting the Arctic due to a lack of ice, said Ballantyne. One big question is why the Arctic was so sensitive to warming during this period, he said.

Multiple feedback mechanisms have been proposed to explain the amplification of Arctic temperatures, including the reflectivity strength of the sun on Arctic ice and changes in vegetation seasonal cloud cover, said Ballantyne. “I suspect that it is the interactions between these different feedback mechanisms that ultimately produce the warming temperatures in the Arctic.”

In 2009, CU-Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center showed the September Arctic sea ice extent was 649,000 square miles, or 1,680,902 square kilometers, below the 1979-2000 average, and is declining at a rate of 11.2 percent per decade. Some climate change experts are forecasting that the Arctic summers will become ice-free summers within a decade or two.

In addition to its exceptional preservation of fossil wood, plants, insects and mollusks, the Beaver Pond site on Ellesmere Island is the only reported Pliocene fossil site in the High Arctic to yield vertebrate remains, said Rybczynski.

Eberle said there is high concern by scientists over a proposal to mine coal on Ellesmere Island near the Beaver Pond site by WestStar Resources Inc. headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. “Paleontological sites like the Beaver Pond site are unique and extremely valuable resources that are of international importance,” said Eberle. “Our concern is that coal mining activities could damage such sites and they will be lost forever.”

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council in Canada, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and the European Research Council.

Source Science Daily