Temperatures leap 40 degrees above normal as the Arctic Ocean and Greenland ice sheet see record June melting

Ice is melting in unprecedented ways as summer approaches in the Arctic. In recent days, observations have revealed a record-challenging melt event over the Greenland ice sheet, while the extent of ice over the Arctic Ocean has never been this low in mid-June during the age of weather satellites.

Steffen Olsen, an Arctic researcher with the Danish
Meteorological Institute, and dogs set out to retrieve
 oceanographic moorings and a weather station over
 meltwater topping sea ice in northwest Greenland on Thursday.

Greenland saw temperatures soar up to 40 degrees above normal Wednesday, while open water exists in places north of Alaska where it seldom, if ever, has in recent times.

It’s “another series of extreme events consistent with the long-term trend of a warming, changing Arctic,” said Zachary Labe, a climate researcher at the University of California at Irvine.

And the abnormal warmth and melting of ice in the Arctic may be messing with our weather.

Read the story from The Washington Post by Jason Samenow -  “Temperatures leap 40 degrees above normal as the Arctic Ocean and Greenland ice sheet see record June melting.”

It was 84 degrees near the Arctic Ocean this weekend as carbon dioxide hit its highest level in human history

Over the weekend, the climate system sounded simultaneous alarms. Near the entrance to the Arctic Ocean in northwest Russia, the temperature surged to 84 degrees Fahrenheit (29 Celsius). Meanwhile, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eclipsed 415 parts per million for the first time in human history.

Carbon dioxide levels from approximately 1750
 to present. (Scripps Institute of Oceanography)

By themselves, these are just data points. But taken together with so many indicators of an altered atmosphere and rising temperatures, they blend into the unmistakable portrait of human-induced climate change.

Saturday’s steamy 84-degree reading was posted in Arkhangelsk, Russia, where the average high temperature is around 54 this time of year. The city of 350,000 people sits next to the White Sea, which feeds into the Arctic Ocean’s Barents Sea.

Read the story from The Washington Post by Jason Samenow - “It was 84 degrees near the Arctic Ocean this weekend as carbon dioxide hit its highest level in human history.”

Trump’s Order to Open Arctic Waters to Oil Drilling Was Unlawful, Federal Judge Finds

WASHINGTON — In a major legal blow to President Trump’s push to expand offshore oil and gas development, a federal judge ruled that an executive order by Mr. Trump that lifted an Obama-era ban on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean and parts of the North Atlantic coast was unlawful.

Barrow, Alaska, off the Chukchi Sea in the Arctic Ocean.
A federal judge ruled that an order by President Trump
lifting an Obama-era ban on Arctic Ocean drilling was unlawful.

The decision, by Judge Sharon L. Gleason of the United States District Court for the District of Alaska, concluded late Friday that President Barack Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawal from drilling of about 120 million acres of Arctic Ocean and about 3.8 million acres in the Atlantic “will remain in full force and effect unless and until revoked by Congress.” She wrote that an April 2017 executive order by Mr. Trump revoking the drilling ban “is unlawful, as it exceeded the president’s authority.”

The decision, which is expected to be appealed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, immediately reinstates the drilling ban on most of the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Alaska, a pristine region home to endangered species including polar bears and bowhead whales where oil companies have long sought to drill. Along the Atlantic coast, it blocks drilling around a series of coral canyons that run from Norfolk, Va., to the Canadian border which are home to unique deepwater corals and rare fish species.

Read the story from The New York Times by Coral Davenport - “Trump’s Order to Open Arctic Waters to Oil Drilling Was Unlawful, Federal Judge Finds."

Warmer Arctic winters linked to more 'Snowzillas' in US north-east

The warming Arctic Ocean is linked to a two-to four-fold increase in the frequency of severe winter storms in the eastern US, according to a new study by American scientists.

Extreme snow storms have been on the increase in
north-eastern US, particularly since 1990, new research shows.

The massive storms regularly get dubbed evocative names such as "Snowzilla" or "Snowcopalypse" when they hit populated regions such as New York, stirring debate over the role of climate change.

The new study, published Wednesday in Nature Communications, noted human-induced global warming was "widely expected to increase certain weather extremes, including more intense and frequent heat waves and droughts”.

Read Peter Hannam’s story from The Age - “Warmer Arctic winters linked to more 'Snowzillas' in US north-east.”

A climate chain reaction: Major Greenland melting could devastate crops in Africa

As melting Greenland glaciers continue to pour ice into the Arctic Ocean, we have more than the rising seas to worry about, scientists say. A new study suggests that if it gets large enough, the influx of freshwater from the melting ice sheet could disrupt the flow of a major ocean current system, which in turn could dry out Africa’s Sahel, a narrow region of land stretching from Mauritania in the west to Sudan in the east.

A NASA photo shows the Heimdal Glacier in
southern Greenland, captured Oct. 13, 2015. 

The consequence could be devastating agricultural losses as the area’s climate shifts. And in the most severe scenarios, tens of millions of people could be forced to migrate from the area.

“The implications, when expressed in terms of vulnerability of the population in the region are really dramatic and bring home just how sensitive livelihoods are in this region to climatic change,” said Christopher Taylor, a meteorologist at the Center for Ecology and Hydrology in the United Kingdom and an expert on the West African climate, who was not involved with the new research.

Read Chelsea Harvey’s story on The Washington Post - “A climate chain reaction: Major Greenland melting could devastate crops in Africa.”

'My climate change' - Andrew Revkin

Some things just seem too momentous to keep in mind. One is the planet we’re living on. We’re on the third rock from the sun twenty-four hours a day, but I’ve only been to one place where that awareness is enforced by nature. Squatting on a floe of eight-foot-thick sea ice at the North Pole, drifting on the 14,300-foot-deep Arctic Ocean hundreds of miles from land, with everything in every direction south and the sun circling the horizon, you absolutely feel you are on a planet.

Another momentous thing we hardly ever think about is the thing we think with: the brain. I think about mine now quite a bit, ever since a hot July day in 2011 when my eyes started telling me conflicting stories about the nature of the world as I huffed and strained to keep up with my far fitter son running up a steep trail in the woods near my home.

My left eye told me the world was paisley. The right eye insisted all was well. I called out; we returned home. I took a shower and some aspirin, wondering if I could be having a stroke. My son drove me to the hospital. It wasn’t a stroke . . . yet.

Read “My Climate Change” by Andrew Revkin.

(Andrew C. Revkin is senior fellow for environmental understanding at Pace University’s Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies and the author of the Dot Earth blog at the New York Times).

Study shows new source of methane hydrate in Artic Ocean

Ultra-slow spreading ocean ridges were
discovered in the Arctic in 2003 by scientists
at Woods Hole Ocenographic Institution.
 

Methane, a highly effective greenhouse gas, is usually produced by decomposition of organic material, a complex process involving bacteria and microbes.

But there is another type of methane that can appear under specific circumstances: Abiotic methane is formed by chemical reactions in the oceanic crust beneath the seafloor.

New findings show that deep water gas hydrates, icy substances in the sediments that trap huge amounts of the methane, can be a reservoir for abiotic methane. One such reservoir was recently discovered on the ultraslow spreading Knipovich ridge, in the deep Fram Strait of the Arctic Ocean. The study suggests that abiotic methane could supply vast systems of methane hydrate throughout the Arctic.

The study was conducted by scientists at Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment and Climate (CAGE) at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. The results were recently published in Geology online and will be featured in the journal´s May issue.

Read the Phys.org story - “New source of methane discovered in the Arctic Ocean.”

There is nothing new under the sun - obviously

Read to the end—

The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are  growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water  too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department  yesterday from Consulafft, at Bergen , Norway ...

Reports  from fishermen, seal hunters, and explorers all point to a radical  change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures  in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely  any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29  minutes.

Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the  gulf stream still very warm.
Great masses of ice have been  replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued,  while at many points well known glaciers have entirely  disappeared.

Very few seals, and no white fish are found in  the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which  have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in  the old seal fishing grounds. Within a few years it is  predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most  coastal cities uninhabitable.

* * * * * * * *  *
This report was from  November 2,  1922, as reported by the AP and published  in The Washington Post - 89 years  ago.
******************

Verified here:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/science/globalwarming1922.asp <http://www.snopes.com/politics/science/globalwarming1922.asp>

(This was spotted by Beneath the Wisteria supporter, John Gray – thanks John)