Arctic ice is the story that won’t die – unlike the ice, which apparently will, and soon. Since the start of October, and what I hoped would be the last word on the topic, there have multiple stories demanding coverage*. Now there is more news; the Arctic is screaming…

Reports at the AGU meeting are painting a dire picture of the region’s future, with Greenland glaciers melting faster than ever before and summer sea ice predicted to be totally gone by 2013. There is also a report of some amazing thinning of ice – Alex Witze is at the conference for Nature and has the full details. Here’s an extract:

Don Perovich, of a US army cold regions and research laboratory in New Hampshire, reported on a single but extraordinary ice buoy in the Beaufort Sea. In June the buoy measured sea ice at that location as 3.3 metres thick – “really a healthy piece of ice,” as he put it. But by the end of the summer, 70 centimetres had melted off the top – and 2.2 metres (yes, metres) off the bottom.

Prophets of Doom

“The Arctic is screaming,” says Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the US snow and ice data center, noting that Greenland’s ice sheet melted 19 billion tons more than previous records (AP).

“The amount of ice lost by Greenland over the last year is the equivalent of two times all the ice in the Alps, or a layer of water more than 800 meters deep covering Washington DC,” according to Konrad Steffen, of University of Colorado at Boulder (Reuters).

“Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007. So given that fact, you can argue that maybe our projection of 2013 is already too conservative,” Wieslaw Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, explains why previous dire estimates are still too positive (BBC).

“The Earth’s ice cover is sounding an alarm – a climate alarm – and it is up to us as a society to figure out how we want to respond to that alarm,” says Waleed Abdalati head of the Cryospheric Sciences Branch at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

UPDATE

James Overland was one of the other researchers presenting results to the AGU. David Archer, from Real Climate, was there and witnessed his audience participation spot, where he invited attendees to comment on the implication of the recent melt:

The options were

• A The meltback is permanent

• B Ice coverage will partially recover but continue to decrease

• C The ice would recover to 1980’s levels but then continue to decline over the coming century

Options A and B had significant audience support, while only one brave soul voted for the most conservative option C. No one remarked that the “skeptic” possibility, that Arctic sea ice is not melting back at all, was not even offered or asked for. Climate scientists have moved beyond that.

*

The only way to fly – October 09

Ice surveyors will walk to pole – October 17

Sea change brings coast guard to Arctic – October 19

Image: Arctic Ocean, north of western Russia by Mike Dunn / NOAA Climate Program Office, NABOS 2006 Expedition