Wandel Sea / North East Greenland

[Espen]

Wandel Sea:

A big piece of sea ice is on the move north of Prinsesse Margrethe Ø / Island aprox. 5000 - 6000 km2 or similar to + / - 90 times Manhattan!

http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/imagery/single.cgi?image=crefl2_143.A2013157072500-2013157073000.250m.jpg

[Espen]

The "Stubborn Hook" at Nordostrundingen will soon be history for this season, beware the first image below is from yesterday!!
The "piece" that went off today is only +/- 450 km2!

http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/imagery/single.cgi?image=crefl2_143.A2013177034500-2013177035000.250m.jpg

[TerryM]

Nice catch Espen!
The Spring tide on the 25th was a big one & may have damaged other fast ice areas.


Terry

[Espen]

Antarctic Bay / North East Greenland is now sea ice free (just about 150 km2):

[Wipneus]

Some thick (I assume) ice floes get stranded in the Nord and erode away from there.

[bairgon]

Those chunks are from thick ice which was moved on 9th Feb.

Visible in that image, and also more clearly in the image below, is a rather large chunk of ice (300km long in total?) separated from where Independence Fjord and others open out to the Wandel Sea.

A crack is visible in http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/images/MODIS/Nord/20170208s01a.ASAR.jpg then 2 days later on 10th Feb they have separated: http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/images/MODIS/Nord/20170210s01a.ASAR.jpg

[DrTskoul]

Some thick (I assume) ice floes get stranded in the Nord and erode away from there.

Grinder...

[oren]

The export machine keeps on humming.

[Adam Ash]

In spite of winter's best efforts, I doubt that any intrepid explorer is going to be able to walk to the North Pole again.

[Wipneus]

Follow up: the eroding/grinding continues.

[Tor Bejnar]

Thanks, Wipneus, for the movie.  I was surprised when the several large "white" (old thick, I presume) floes got stuck on the northeastern corner of Greenland a couple weeks ago, as they had been 'nicely' tumbling along near the shoreline.  I wonder if the near-shore sea floor is shallow enough for floes to become grounded (especially if getting 'tumbled' as they flowed eastward), then the northern 'half' got sheared off because of the relentless pressure of 'the lemmings going off the cliff' (or 'ice being exported').

[oren]

As if all these old floes can't wait. They are simply rushing to get out the Fram

[Reginald]

Arctic’s ‘Last Ice Area’ May Be Less Resistant to Global Warming

The region, which could provide a last refuge for polar bears and other Arctic wildlife that depends on ice, is not as stable as previously thought, according to a new study.

New York Times, By Henry Fountain, July 1

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/climate/arctic-sea-ice-climate-change.html

Last August, scientists aboard an icebreaker that had been drifting with the ice across the Arctic Ocean in a yearlong research expedition decided to take a detour to the North Pole.

They needed to get there quickly, so they used satellite data to find a route where the concentration of sea ice was low enough for the icebreaker, the Polarstern, to push through easily. They found it in an unlikely place, the Wandel Sea, just north of Greenland.

“This area used to be one that was chock-full of this old, thick sea ice,” said Melinda Webster, a researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who was on board for this part of the Mosaic expedition. “It’s not what we encountered when we went through there.”

Scientists have now shown why ice conditions in the Wandel Sea were vastly different last summer. The warming Arctic climate thinned the ice, they say, and an unusual shift in winds pushed much of it out of the sea.

“As it is typically with extreme events, there’s an underlying climate change component,” said Axel J. Schweiger, a climate scientist at the University of Washington and the lead author of a paper describing the research published Thursday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

==

Communications Earth & Environment, July 1

Accelerated sea ice loss in the Wandel Sea points to a change in the Arctic’s Last Ice Area

Abstract:
The Arctic Ocean’s Wandel Sea is the easternmost sector of the Last Ice Area, where thick, old sea ice is expected to endure longer than elsewhere. Nevertheless, in August 2020 the area experienced record-low sea ice concentration. Here we use satellite data and sea ice model experiments to determine what caused this record sea ice minimum. In our simulations there was a multi-year sea-ice thinning trend due to climate change. Natural climate variability expressed as wind-forced ice advection and subsequent melt added to this trend. In spring 2020, the Wandel Sea had a mixture of both thin and—unusual for recent years—thick ice, but this thick ice was not sufficiently widespread to prevent the summer sea ice concentration minimum. With continued thinning, more frequent low summer sea ice events are expected. We suggest that the Last Ice Area, an important refuge for ice-dependent species, is less resilient to warming than previously thought.

Ugh - forgot the link! https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-021-00197-5

[Espen]

And it is not any better this year, within at month the gate into Independence Fjord will be open:

[VeliAlbertKallio]

The water circulation in case of the Wandel Sea is very interesting indeed! Astrid Lyså looked at the coastal sands deposition of the Independence Fjord and discovered it having remained all year open during the Independence I culture of Greenland. These were migrants from Central Siberian cost to this area (DNA evidence of hair sample) who established the first Greenlandic culture.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081020095850.htm

Her discovery of the open Wandel Sea and the Independence Fjord coast in the past emerged when she looked at the so-called elevated beaches of the Independence Fjord where there is absence of any sea ice grounding marks. Instead, the uplifted coastal sands are only patterned by the waves of the ice-free seas. Adding to this surprise, the region was very balmy as the Independence I culture people lived in very thin leather tents (remains survive due to xeric air).

Open sea

”The beach ridges which we have had dated to about 6000-7000 years ago were shaped by wave activity,” says Astrid Lyså. They are located at the mouth of Independence Fjord in North Greenland, on an open, flat plain facing directly onto the Arctic Ocean. Today, drift ice forms a continuous cover from the land here.

Astrid Lyså says that such old beach formations require that the sea all the way to the North Pole was periodically ice free for a long time.

”This stands in sharp contrast to the present-day situation where only ridges piled up by pack ice are being formed,” she says.

However, the scientists are very careful about drawing parallels with the present-day trend in the Arctic Ocean where the cover of sea ice seems to be decreasing. “Changes that took place 6000-7000 years ago were controlled by other climatic forces than those which seem to dominate today,” Astrid Lyså believes.

When I responded to the UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar's authorised UN General Assembly Ethnoclimatology Motion (101292) to UNFCCC at the Talanoa Dialogue at Bonn in 2018, I chose the Wandel Sea and the Independence Fjord coastal ice conditions as a part of my key evidence on two occasions using the Wandel Sea ice free circumstances to drill my point of view.

I put forward a modified version (UNFCCC 65045) of Columbia University's the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory LDEO's old geophysical model of Maurice Ewing and William Donn in which I suggested a flip from the exogenic to endogenic heat sourcing as causative of the Lake-Snow Effect that above old LDEO model stipulated for the Ice Age (in place of Milutin Milanković's orbital forcing effects on insolation). UNFCCC 65045: page 25 onwards with Astrid Lyså's finding on p. 34. https://www.academia.edu/36396474/United_Nations_General_Assembly_Motion_101292_for_UNFCCCs_Talanoa_Dialogue

The very fact that the Independence I era sea side has been uplifted rather violently up so that the last patterns of waves in sand remain visible, I have no doubt that this region all the way to Iceland received heated Atlantic water from those large Pleistocene era VE8 effusive lava floods on seabed) to keep the people of Independence I culture alive in balmy seaside so far in the north. 

So, it is definitely correct view to see that this region is receiving uplifted water from the Fram Strait and beyond to form polnyas. There couldn't have been huge topographic changes in historic time other than extinction of the relic hot spots that still existed to support Independence I people. So the uplifting eddies remain up to this day!

Astrid Lyså's findings stellar rise to a flagship argument against any unusual global warming in the Arctic Ocean within the climate change denialist community, she toned down her earlier statements like above under pressure (to reduce anti-IPCC ammunition by What's Up With That).

Thanks, Jim. In the Wandel Sea, indeed.

In the fall and winter of 2019-2020 ocean heat was very high all over the Atlantic side including the Wandel sea. Last fall and winter the same pattern as 2017-2018 happened with heat advecting into the Wandel sea in midwinter.

I think Uniquorn is right that the submarine topography has an impact in this region but so do extreme wind events that open up large polynyas and so does thin ice that provides less insulation. These winds and thin ice are a set up for Atlantic water to spin into the Wandel sea in eddies, cool, densify and mix with the cold fresh water flowing out of the Arctic ocean into the Fram strait.

The heat content maps indicate that there was mixing in midwinter under the ice and that mixing slowed the normal thickening of the ice in the Wandel sea.