Arctic Ice Reaches Fourth-Lowest Point on Record

On Tuesday, the National Snow and Ice Data Center released data showing that on September 11, Arctic sea ice likely reached its annual low.

September is the month when Arctic ice reaches its lowest “extent” of the year, toward the end of the Northern Hemisphere summer.

Ice coverage in the Arctic this year shrunk to its fourth lowest extent on record, US scientists have announced. In 2012, for example, the record for smallest arctic sea ice cover was achieved with the help of an August cyclone, which fractured sea ice and accelerated the cover’s recession.

Matthew Alford, also from Scripps, says the Arctic Ocean in general contains waters that exhibit an upside-down temperature profile from other areas, with cold, fresh water at the surface, and warmer, saltier water down below.

In some recent years, low sea-ice minimum extent has been at least in part exacerbated by meteorological factors, but that was not the case this year.

Since the extreme low in 2012, scientists no longer get excited with a slight bump in the sea-ice minimums as the numbers still remain at low levels and suggest an ongoing downward trend. Joey Comiso, a sea ice scientist at Goddard, said that the recovery flattened last winter and will most probably reverse post this melt season. “Dwindling sea ice is a stark reminder of the destruction climate change wages on our most vulnerable wildlife and communities”.

Study has found a strong link between El Nino and the behavior of the sea ice cover around Antarctica.

In 2013, the Arctic sea ice experienced an unexpected revival, with the ice volume recorded increasing by 41%. Created by Tim Scheitlin of NCAR’s Visualization Lab, the video shows that all the ice could disappear in some Septembers as early as mid-century if human-caused climate change continues unabated. Until recently, killer whales were a rare sight in the Arctic, as their dorsal fins make swimming among heavy sea ice virtually impossible.

The research mission, known as “Arctic Mix”, is being led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab. So far, scientists have been surprised by the strength of ocean mixing they have observed in ice-free areas of the Beaufort Sea. The ocean could only attack it from the sides. “Now it’s like the invaders have tunneled in from underneath and the ice pack melts from within”, researcher Walt Meier said in a statement. However, Meier pointed out that the rate of increase is roughly just 1/3 to 1/4 that of the Arctic ice loss. Conversely, Septembers with high extent tend to occur when the atmospheric circulation over the central Arctic Ocean is more cyclonic (counterclockwise), meaning unusually low pressure at the surface.