Does anyone have any thoughts on the ramifications of a 30 day ice free Arctic?
Hi Terry,
I'm in the camp that believes the
FIRST ice free Summer will last 30 days. That's not to say the first Summer <1M km
2 SIE. But once ALL the ice is gone in the CAB (ignore side shows like Baffin Bay or E. Greenland), then the storms of Autumn will blow in from the N. Atlantic and churn the surface of the Arctic ocean.
There is
LOTS of heat down there already. Only the tenuously thin fresh water lens in the Central Basin keeps a cap on it. When that heat comes to the surface, the freeze will be greatly delayed.
I'm also on record predicting 30-40 years from first sea ice-free Summer to the first sea ice-free Winter. There's some science (
Eisenman & Wettlaufer, 2008) to back this up, in that it only takes another 3 wm
-2 increase in forcings to go from seasonally ice-free to perennially ice-free. Contrast that with 15 to 20 wm
-2 needed to go from perennially ice-covered to seasonally ice-free.
Even in the 1960s, RAND Corporation scientists predicted* it would require just 40 wm
-2 to melt the Arctic ice cap (you have to convert from BTUs per fortnight).
Ramifications? How about the cessation of Arctic deep water creation, causing an interruption of global oceanic circulation? Recall, it is this vertical current and a similar one in Antarctica that carries oxygen into the depths of the ocean. Anoxia in the deep ocean caused 4 of the 5 mass extinction events in deep time. Like seafood? Like breathing?
* Fletcher, J. O., Ed. (1966).
Symposium on the Arctic Heat Budget and Atmospheric Circulation. Proceedings. Santa Monica, CA:
RAND Corp. (available in hardcopy only)
* Fletcher, J. O. (1969).
Managing Climatic Resources.
RAND Corp. (ebook PDF download)
Abstract excerpt: "it does appear to be within man's engineering capacity to influence the global system by altering patterns of thermal forcing."
* Rand Corporation Memorandum 6093-PR / November 1969, by G. A. Maykut & N. Untersteiner
Numerical Prediction of the Thermodynamic Response of Arctic Sea Ice to Environmental Changes" (ebook PDF download)
Full text for the attached figure: (Eisenman & Wettlaufer, 2008)
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/1/28/F3.expansion.html