On Sept. 15, 2019, Arctic sea ice reached its second-lowest minimum extent on record.
The Arctic is one of the most rapidly changing regions on the planet,
and it's warming about two to three times faster
than the rest of the globe. There is a lot going on in the Arctic.
There are some really significant wildfires happening right now -- many of them
in Siberia -- and we're seeing tremendous amount of carbon emissions in the region.
Each year, essentially, we keep seeing new record high temperatures being set
and new record low sea ice extents. There's been this kind of long-term
decline in the sea ice extent over the last four decades. Sea ice is
this really dynamic type of ice, it's the ice that forms and
melts in the Arctic Ocean, so you get new ice forming and melting
each year.
we've been able to actually use satellites to look at the area of
the ice on the Arctic Ocean, and one of the things we're noticing from that is
when we get to the summer each year, you get this minimum
of sea ice. So it covers the least area of the Arctic Ocean.
What we're seeing is that that minimum is getting increasingly
less over the last four decades, and we are losing a large amount
of sea ice every year, if you look at the trends.
And what we saw this year, there's kind of been a
heatwave essentially in the Arctic. So
temperatures at the North Pole were about 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit
higher than
for that time of year.
Something that I kind of think about every year now whenever the sea ice minimum happens is that the 13 lowest
sea ice extents on record have occurred in the past 13 years since 2007.
Sea ice is kind of this big protective blanket of bright ice that sits on the
Arctic Ocean, and it reflects the Sun's heat. It insulates the
cool atmosphere from the warmer ocean, and if you
start melting away that sea ice, you're going to warm the atmosphere more, and it's
going to affect temperature, winds, and weather, not just in the Arctic, but globally as well.
The way I kind of think about it is if you're taking
away this big protective blanket from the Arctic, you're essentially doing
a massive science experiment almost on the planet,
and it's not necessarily an experiment that I would want to
see the results of.
We are seeing more melt in the Arctic, we
are seeing earlier melt and later freeze up,
we're combining those with the models that can predict what's going to happen in the future,
and seeing that perhaps the Arctic is going to become sea ice-free sooner than we
initially thought.
There's a lot of talk for example about the kind of the temperatures in
Siberia around permafrost melting and fires in Siberia,
and that's really unusual and that's because it was so much warmer
this year than it has been in on average the last 40 years.
Temperatures in the Arctic are increasing three times as much as elsewhere in the world,
so temperature definitely can play a role in the
wildfires that we're seeing there. This year especially has been significant
for Siberia in the Russian Arctic, where
there's a town up there that's gone over 100 degrees Fahrenheit,
and which they never see happen, and also that's the same region where
there's there have been some really significant wildfires. And the smoke from
those wildfires can be seen for many miles. But the problem that we're
starting to see is that these fires are happening more frequently, and
they're more severe than they have been in past decades. We're getting
warmer temperatures, drier fuels, and more lightning, which is causing more
fires generally in the Arctic, year-by-year.
Arctic wildfires happen in these regions that have
really thick organic soils, and you say 'Wait soil burns? What?'
Well, it's it's soil, but it's organic material, too. It's like old leaves and
old moss, and it kind of gets compacted, and it can really burn.
But it's taken tens of thousands years to develop that
soil, and so when it burns, you're releasing a huge amount of carbon
into the atmosphere all at once. As a scientist, when I look at these trends,
I am concerned. Where are we gonna go from here?
That is why we keep studying this. So NASA has a number of field campaigns
that are trying to understand Arctic processes, and I think
that it's really important that we keep up the study and try to better
understand what is happening and what does that mean for people
50-100 years down the road.
EXPLORE EARTH
NASA