The Arctic: Global Warming’s Canary in the Coal Mine
August 30th, 2010by Beth Gray
Photo taken from Discovery Magazine article: http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/055
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) explains that “the Arctic is global warming’s canary in the coal mine.” This environmentally sensitive area of the globe has been in danger for decades but recent images provide visual proof of just how dire the situation is. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado provides a daily update on the declining volume and size of Arctic sea ice. The daily images show where the sea ice boundary currently is with an orange line showing where it was in 1979. The NSIDC reports that as of August 16, “Arctic ice extent was 5.95 million square kilometers.” This may seem like a massive amount of ice but as NSIDC notes, this represents a decrease of some 1.68 million square kilometers below the 1979 to 2000 average for the season.
Though Arctic sea ice does melt during the Arctic summer (a time when the region experiences 24 hours of sunshine), this season’s melt has been dramatic. A recent Washington Post article explains that “After going into the melt season with more ice over a larger area than recent years, sea ice extent plummeted by a daily rate of 26,000 square miles per day during May, which was the highest rate of loss ever observed for the month since satellite records of sea ice began in 1979.” On his blog, Nick Sundt, Director of Communications, Climate Change Program at the World Wildlife Fund, put this figure into perspective writing, “That is an area roughly half the size of the entire United States (including Alaska)…” As if the analyses from satellite images was not startling enough, however, researchers studying the region are finding that the situation is worse than even the satellite images are showing. In a Time Magazine article earlier this year, David Barber, an Arctic climatologist at the University of Manitoba, describes his experience in visiting the area: “Some of what satellites identified as thick, melt-resistant multiyear ice turned out to be…’full of holes, like Swiss cheese. We haven’t seen this sort of thing before.’”
