{"id":527,"date":"2013-08-12T17:21:55","date_gmt":"2013-08-12T17:21:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iccinet.org\/?p=527"},"modified":"2013-10-28T02:39:09","modified_gmt":"2013-10-28T02:39:09","slug":"august-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/august-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"August 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Cryosphere Ice Watch<\/strong><\/p>\n

Every year about this time, my thoughts become distinctly maudlin.\u00a0 For much of human history and in many cultures still today, the death watch was a staple of the end of human life:\u00a0 family and friends gathering at the bedside for days and even weeks, sitting in witness and support with the dying as life slipped away.<\/p>\n

These weeks of August and early September have begun to feel like a death watch for the ice and snow of the Arctic region.\u00a0 Each spring as the sun comes up, sea ice, snow cover and Greenland\u2019s ice sheets begin to melt and shrink: very slowly at first, and accelerating in the month of May.\u00a0 (For ICCI, this is complemented by the \u201cfire watch\u201d of our work in Eurasia:\u00a0 watching as lines of forest and field burning sweep inexorably northwards from Kazakhstan and Ukraine into northern Russia from March to June, following the line of snow melt.)<\/p>\n

It is a mixed feeling, this ice watch.\u00a0 On the one hand, one wants the ice to last as long as possible, not set new records for minimum or melt.\u00a0 We know the global climate depends on it:\u00a0 for albedo (reflecting as much heat as possible back into space), for preserving the permafrost (preventing \u201cnatural\u201d releases of methane and carbon from these frozen soils, which could equal the impact of all greenhouse gases released in the industrial era), and for preventing sea level rise. (Greenland\u2019s loss of ice has accelerated from 50 gigatons prior to about 2004, to 200gT a year in 2004-08, to 350gT in the past four years.\u00a0 1 gigaton is a square kilometer of ice — 300gT equals about a millimeter of sea level rise).<\/p>\n

At the same time, there is a desire for attention to these changes:\u00a0 to get people to realize just how much we are changing the planet from historical human norms so politicians feel empowered to take the steps they really do realize (these are not foolish people, no matter their rhetoric) are necessary.\u00a0 And that means rooting for another record-breaking melt season.<\/p>\n

Greenland\u2019s crisis has passed for this summer.\u00a0 Its peak melt usually occurs in mid-July.\u00a0 After the shock of last year when 97% percent of the surface was melting, unprecedented since observations began in 1979 (and showing only a handful of similar occurrences going back 1000 years in ice cores), this year the peak melting encompassed only about 45% of the ice sheet.<\/p>\n

But that is still twice the observed average of around 20%.<\/p>\n

For the sea ice, the jury is still out:\u00a0 the summer minimum is not normally reached until the sun goes down on September 21.\u00a0 That sea ice watch used to involve whether we would break the \u201cunprecedented\u201d 2007 record.\u00a0 Last year caught everyone by surprise, when that record was beaten not in September, but on August 22: and the decline continued well into September.\u00a0 Indeed, the ice extent was not back \u201cup\u201d to the 2007 minimum until the last weeks of October.\u00a0 As of this writing, we look to set a second low, but not a minimum:\u00a0 the melt started late, though accelerated and nearly caught up to 2012 in mid-July.\u00a0 Stay tuned.<\/p>\n

I once confided this guilty ice watch to a well-known ice scientist, and was surprised when he agreed.\u00a0 \u201cWe really can\u2019t save the ice at this point anyway,\u201d he said.\u00a0 \u201cMight as well try to get some attention out of it when it goes.\u00a0 But I know what you mean, it\u2019s a sick way of looking at things.\u201d<\/p>\n

We\u2019re probably a few years away still from a real ice death watch: the summer when all of the sea ice disappears, or we see melting across all of Greenland\u2019s surface, every year; or the new [northern hemisphere] \u201cwinter\u201d ice watch:\u00a0 the ice shelves off Antarctica during the southern hemisphere summer.\u00a0 But if the researchers are right, it is only a matter of \u201cwhen,\u201d and sooner may indeed be better than later, if it motivates action.\u00a0 A sick way of looking at things, indeed.<\/p>\n

Update: \u00a0The 2013 summer minimum of 5.1 million km2 <\/sup>was reached on September 13; it was the sixth lowest on record, and over one million km2<\/sup> below the 1981-2010 average minimum.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Cryosphere Ice Watch Every year about this time, my thoughts become distinctly maudlin.\u00a0 For much of human history and in many cultures still today, the death watch was a staple of the end of human life:\u00a0 family and friends gathering at the bedside for days and even weeks, sitting in witness and support with […]\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ice-blog"],"modified_by":"admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":604,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527\/revisions\/604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccinet.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}