A CANADIAN VIEW OF THE MELTING ARCTIC
By ALEX BINKLEY
November 16, 2009
The Arctic will always freeze over during the winter but it’s rapidly losing the towering multi-year ice that has kept all but the most specialized ships at bay for centuries, says Canadian Arctic researcher David Barber.
Dr. Barber is Canada research chair in Arctic System Science at the University of Manitoba and has travelled to the North for 30 years. Originally a climate change doubter, he says the differences caused by higher summer temperatures in the North are staggering.
The multi-year ice that has covered the region like a thick blanket is vanishing faster than most people realize, he said in a recent presentation on Parliament Hill. Summer navigation over the North Pole could be possible as soon as 2013, and certainly by 2030, he added. It will be a better option than Canada’s Northwest Passage, which will likely remain plugged with ice for years to come, he said.
Satellite images showing the Arctic covered by ice through the summer fail to reveal that the building-sized multi-year ice that can easily destroy vessels is far less prevalent than researchers realize, Dr. Barber said. What’s left is ice from the previous year or two.
“There is much less multi-year sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere than we think,” he said. “Recent results show that a lot of what we thought was thick multi-year is in fact heavily decayed ice overlain with very thin first-year sea ice.”
Dr. Barber recently returned from a summer research tour of the North. Sailing on the Canadian icebreaker/research ship Amundsen in late summer, “We were able to transit through this ice at a speed of 13 knots; our speed in open water is about 13.7 knots,” he said. “We’re almost out of multi-year sea ice in the Arctic. What remains is jammed up against Canada’s Arctic archipelago.” That takes it out of the most likely shipping routes.
Dr. Barber described much of the ice in the Arctic as rotten, lying in layers up to 50 centimetres thick over small chunks of older ice. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my 30 years of working in the high Arctic,” he said. “The melting is very dramatic.”
Global warming is amplified at the North and South Poles and as the ice pack shrinks, the water around it absorbs more sunlight, which further increases the temperature.
The change stresses all sea life that has adapted to the frozen environment, he said, adding that the Inuit have had to develop words for “sunburn.”
He doubts the Arctic will ever open for year-round navigation because the region will still freeze up every winter. What will be lost is the thick ice that has dominated the region for the last million years.