Arctic Sea Ice Volume at record low.

[BenBurch]

BTW, and I should have mentioned it sooner, but that was also a total misuse of the very specific term polynia. A polynia is associated with a land mass, and the edges of the Arctic. What you get far out on the pack are called "leads."

 

[Trakar]

I highly doubt that. The models all tend to show periods of rapid decline interspersed by periods of more stability on the way down to an ice free summer sometime around the middle of the century. Most are underestimating the decline so it could happen sooner but in a study a couple years ago only 1 run of one model has indicated that will be as early as the next decade.

Admitting that such is on the slim edge of potential, I'll still hold with sometime in the middle of the next decade (~2025) we'll see an ice-free Arctic, and believe that a couple of hard summers in a row could push that up a few years. Probably won't become a regular annual feature till around mid -century, but so far I've been consistently wrong on the conservative side of such predictions.

 

[Trakar]

Yeah 14 years was the earliest I'd seen and that was a couple years ago so 2010 -2020 is very unlikely but 2030-2050 pretty high probability no matter what steps we took.

Only a strong volcanic presence might reverse that for a while. There is simply too much warming in the pipeline even if we stopped adding to the problem.

Ahh, I see too much ambiguity in my dating
Decades of the 21rst century from my usual thinking
(without wanting to get into an discussion about "0" years)
2000-2009
2010-2019
2020-2029
etc.,.

so, "mid-decade ice-free arctic in the summer sometime in the next decade" referred to the middle of the next decade, we are currently at the beginning of the second decade of the 21rst century so the middle of the next decade is the middle of the third decade.

No real biggy, just glad, for once, that issues aren't getting worse faster than anticipated,...which seems to have been the situation for most of the last few decades.

 

[CapelDodger]

This year is well outside the normal range of variation over the past 30 years. That is highly unlikely to be weather, and the fact that we have strung together multiple years that are very low and you have climate.

I don't think we can simply transfer the characteristic time of climate to the Arctic ice. (I hope I'm using the term correctly.) They are very different things. casebro tried to do that for the sake of some shallow sophistry, but let's not let him lead us down that path.

When it comes to models (which you mention in your next post), climate models get their input on ice from ice-behaviour models, which Hansen famously described as "useless" some time ago. Denialists made the description famous by misrepresenting what he said, of course, and implying that he meant climate models and/or models of any sort. The truth is that ice-behaviour models have turned out to be highly inaccurate and conservative.

In defence of glaciologists and their ilk, their hasn't been much investment in their models and ice is much more difficult to model than climate. Climate is a doddle in comparison. Ice models have to cope with three phases of water and interactions between them, the atmosphere and land. At least in the Arctic Ocean land only features in one dimension around the edge and is soon disconnected but all the same it's a tricky business.

I think we have to look at ice breakups we are familiar with, such as on lakes and rivers. Something we know about those is that for a long time nothing obvious happens and then quite suddenly it all falls apart and goes away. That's a seasonal phaenomenon, of course, but I think we're seeing something analogous happening in the Arctic. The surface area changes more slowly than the volume, the ice that's there is getting warmer (which is not obvious until it reaches melting-point), and its getting easier for wind and currents to move it away (as happened in 2007, when weather patterns were unusual but not unprecedented while the effect of them was remarkable).

Which is why I tend towards sooner rather than later for an ice-free Arctic Ocean, within the next decade, given that there'll always be some floating ice there even its only icebergs from Greenland.

And I steer clear of "the North Pole" because look where that gets anybody . Ten square metres of open water precisely at the North Pole can be put forward as precedent for what we're seeing in the Arctic Ocean as a whole. Denial is all about focus, not about the big picture.

eta : for "next decade" please read "current decade", as in before 2020

 

[CapelDodger]

ETA: of course, there is still some ice there, but before you insist that this is meaningful ice that means that the pole is not truly "ice free", please promise me that when, in the doomsayer-prophesied "ice-free summer", I point out that there is still plenty of ice to be found, you will not then insist that this ice isn't meaningful and doesn't count for purposes of falsifying the prophesy.

I don't doubt that some people will be nit-picking "ice-free Arctic Ocean" even while merchant fleets blithely sail through it in summer. There'll be icebergs from Greenland to fall back on for a long time yet.

And in winter some people will be claiming that Arctic sea-ice is recovering, they just won't get so much coverage in what remains of the mainstream media.

 

[BenBurch]

A patch of open water you can only reach with a submarine is only navigable in a Climate Truther's version of reality.

 

[Dancing David]

That's funny: Apparently we have photographs and written accounts of submarines meeting at the North Pole in open water in 1987, and of "large polynyas (areas of open water)," at the North Pole in 1959.

ETA: of course, there is still some ice there, but before you insist that this is meaningful ice that means that the pole is not truly "ice free", please promise me that when, in the doomsayer-prophesied "ice-free summer", I point out that there is still plenty of ice to be found, you will not then insist that this ice isn't meaningful and doesn't count for purposes of falsifying the prophesy.

Maybe you should follow the conversation and not engage in drive by critique:

What was the percentage and thickness of the old ice in 1987 and 1959 ?

So in terms of what has been discussed (albeit in more depth in other threads), what is the difference between old, multiyear ice and newer ice?

So compared to polynas in 1987 and 1957 what is the percentage of open water, extent of ice coverage and the percentage of old vs. new ice?

But of course you straw argument and exaggeration doesn't help your argument either.

 

[BenBurch]

Large area anomaly for this point in the season;

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png

Tracking below 2007;

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png

 

[BenBurch]

The plunge continues with the latest week's data;

 

[BenBurch]

Note that it is now THREE Standard Deviations from the trend line... I hope not for long.

 

[macdoc]

And we are breaking all sorts of heat records in Eastern Canada, shattering is more appropriate but not sure the same weather systems are engaged as Western Canada is definitely on the cool side.

There was an article a year ago or more showing how the open water was shifting the storm tracks and weather systems of the Arctic further south - that's the dipole pattern that has been frequent the last couple of years with warmer weather in the Arctic and cooler highs on the northern continents.

When the Pacific starts flowing steadily through the Arctic ocean - we'll see pretty massive change in ice....and there is evidence of species migration already.

I wonder if that is in play with this anomaly.

 

[BenBurch]

So the current anomaly from the TREND is about 4000 cubic kilometers.

What is that in Joules of energy?

((4 * (10 ** 18)) * cc) * 333 (J / cc) = 1.33200 * 10**21 joules

In Megaton equivalents;

(1.33200 * ((10 ** 21) joules)) / (4.18400 petajoules) = 318 355.641

That's more energy than was ever in the arsenals of the US and USSR at the peak of the cold war...

 

[BenBurch]

The plunge continues in the most recent report (5/30), almost 3.5 standard deviations below the already-declining trend line;

 

[macdoc]

and perhaps the lowest in thousands of years....

This should answer the "natural variance" nonsense

Arctic ice at low point compared to recent geologic history
June 2, 2010 by Pam Frost Gorder Arctic ice at low point compared to recent geologic history

Leonid Polyak

Less ice covers the Arctic today than at any time in recent geologic history. That's the conclusion of an international group of researchers, who have compiled the first comprehensive history of Arctic ice.

For decades, scientists have strived to collect sediment cores from the difficult-to-access Arctic Ocean floor, to discover what the Arctic was like in the past. Their most recent goal: to bring a long-term perspective to the ice loss we see today.

Now, in an upcoming issue of Quarternary Science Reviews, a team led by Ohio State University has re-examined the data from past and ongoing studies -- nearly 300 in all -- and combined them to form a big-picture view of the pole's climate history stretching back millions of years.

"The ice loss that we see today -- the ice loss that started in the early 20th Century and sped up during the last 30 years -- appears to be unmatched over at least the last few thousand years,"

more
http://www.physorg.com/news194719743.html

 

[BenBurch]

Its the rate of change of the anomaly that concerns me most.

 

[macdoc]

Yeah - now we do the NAO is shifting so perhaps a combination of natural cycle and agw plus I personally think the flow from the Pacific has to be in play - it's showing up in the Beaufort sea - and hidden from the satellites

Ice Is 'Rotten' in the Beaufort Sea

ScienceDaily (Jan. 23, 2010) — Recent observations show that Beaufort Sea ice was not as it appeared in the summer of 2009. Sea ice cover serves as an indication of climate and has implications for marine and terrestrial ecosystems.


In early September 2009, satellite measurements implied that most of the ice in the Beaufort Sea either was thick ice that had been there for multiple years or was thick, first-year ice.
However, in situ observations made in September 2009 by Barber et al. show that much of the ice was in fact "rotten" ice -- ice that is thinner, heavily decayed, and structurally weak due to a uniform temperature throughout.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100121164011.htm

so what we thought was multi-year was really just porridge

 

[Almo]

Note that it is now THREE Standard Deviations from the trend line... I hope not for long.

That's kind of scary, actually.

 

[r-j]

Why?

 

[macdoc]

accelerated rate of change

 

[Wangler]

Yep, the last time it was close to being this low was back in 1962.