After unusual Arctic storms, sea ice coverage in region is plummeting
Right now, a few hundred miles northwest of the tiny community of Tuktoyaktuk in Canada's Northwest Territories, a sailboat called the Northabout is fighting harsh winds and rough waters in the open Beaufort Sea.
The ship has sailed more than 5,000 miles since leaving Bristol, England, on June 19, but still has a long ways to go.
"This little Irish boat should be given the Freedom of Westport," wrote David Hempleman-Adams, the expedition's leader, in a ship's log on Wednesday.
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"It has travelled through the Irish Sea, North Sea, Norwegian Sea, Barents Sea, Kara Sea, Laptev Sea, East Siberian Sea, Chukchi Sea and now the Beaufort sea. Each sea has had its quirks. Laptev the hardest with the ice, and then closed behind us," Hempleman-Adams wrote.
The vessel, part of a project called the Polar Ocean Challenge, is closing in on the crew's goal of circumnavigating the Arctic to call attention to sea ice loss and climate change.
All that remains is a successful traversing of the Northwest Passage.
While that would have been a perilous and inhospitable task for voyagers in previous centuries all the way to the start of the melt season in 2007, we are now living in an era where the Passage is routinely navigable in late summer.
In keeping with this, satellite images show that routes through the Passage are now relatively ice-free.
In fact, if they want to, the Hempleman-Adams and the rest of the ship's crew could actually sail nearly all the way to the North Pole, since sea ice cover is largely absent to about 86 degrees north, according to Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado.
It's not out of the question that the North Pole will become a geographical marker in open water, rather than ice cover, sometime in the next few weeks.
Serreze called this situation "pretty darned unusual.”
An 'interesting end' to the 2016 ice melt season
In an interview with Mashable, Serreze said sea ice coverage across the different regions of the Arctic has fallen dramatically in association with a series of unusually powerful summertime Arctic storms during August.
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These large storms helped force the ice to move around in a cyclonic, counterclockwise motion and break up, making individual pieces of ice more vulnerable to melting by coming into contact with milder than average ocean temperatures.
And although the end of the sea ice melt season in mid-September is quickly approaching, the decline in ice extent and thickness has not been slowing much, Serreze said.
It's expected that the sea ice minimum will show that the 2016 melt season led to the second or third-lowest ice extent on record, failing to beat the ice melt that occurred in 2012.
It used to be the case that a stormy summer in the Arctic meant cloudier and cooler than average conditions, which led to less sea ice loss. However, that is not the case this year, and Serreze and other researchers at his organization are trying to figure out why.
One likely reason is that there is simply less sea ice cover, and thinner ice, now than there was just a decade ago after ice loss linked to human-caused global warming.
“The rules are starting to change now," Serrezze said. "The response of the ice to a big storm today is probably different than the ice's response to the same storm 10 years ago.”
“We’re puzzling on this," he said.
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The 2016 melt season started off slow, but dramatically accelerated in August, according to Zack Labe, a PhD student at the University of California at Irvine who keeps a close eye on Arctic sea ice trends.
"We are seeing quite an ‘interesting’ end of the melt season," Labe said in an interview. The storms, followed by another weather pattern that also favors ice loss, are leading to more sea ice melt, he says.
"Favorable conditions for more losses are likely to persist into the foreseeable short-term. We are very close to dropping below 2011 and 2015 overall minimums, so 2016 is definitely locking in at least 3rd (likely 2nd) lowest sea ice extent on record," Labe told Mashable via a Twitter message exchange.
"A large portion of the ice is quite thin and fragmented over the Central Arctic Basin. If we had a summer more favorable for melt, this year would have most certainly been even closer or likely exceeded 2012’s melt," Labe said.
With projections for Arctic ice cover showing a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean within the next few decades, it's likely that the Northabout will be joined in its route by many larger, more polluting, vessels.
In fact, Serreze says he's heard much more about the massive cruise ship, Crystal Cruises' Serenity, that is taking high-paying customers on a sail through the Northwest Passage. Online ship tracking shows the vessel has already made it through most of the Northwest Passage.
It's possible the two ships passed close to one another on their disparate journeys. One representing the future of Arctic tourism, the other warning of the consequences of that future.
Andrew Freedman is Mashable's Senior Editor for Science and Special Projects. Prior to working at Mashable, Freedman was a Senior Science writer for Climate Central. He has also worked as a reporter for Congressional Quarterly and Greenwire/E&E Daily. His writing has also appeared in the Washington Post, online at The Weather Channel, and washingtonpost.com, where he wrote a weekly climate science column for the "Capital Weather Gang" blog. He has provided commentary on climate science and policy for Sky News, CBC Radio, NPR, Al Jazeera, Sirius XM Radio, PBS NewsHour, and other national and international outlets. He holds a Masters in Climate and Society from Columbia University, and a Masters in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University.
