How long arctic summer

The ice cover, while declining pretty quickly, is also showing some resilience. To date, the Earth's surface temperature has warmed by about 1. A generally agreed upon rule of thumb is that the Arctic will become ice-free in summer around the time that global warming reaches 2 degrees Celsius 3. But the likelihood of having ice-free summers very much depends on how much humans allow the climate to warm up.

Since ice-free Arctic summers are in the news again, I'm digging out an old infographic. Serreze said there is a growing consensus that the mid s is more realistic and a lot will have to do with natural variability. This refers to oscillations over decades that can naturally warm or cool regions of the globe, slowing or hastening the pace of ice-free summers in the Arctic.

Zack Labe, an expert on Arctic sea ice and a postdoctoral researcher at Colorado State University's Department of Atmospheric Science, agrees, and makes the point that the new paper does not robustly account for natural climate fluctuations. So while is possible, I wouldn't focus too much on that exact year," he said. Looking to the future, Serreze said the degree to which changes in the Arctic will impact weather patterns beyond the Arctic is still debated.

But he is more concerned about human exploitation of the region. Arctic heat wave likely due to climate change. It puts us in a very vulnerable position for sea level rise, as well as for the timing of sea ice loss.

A Government Accountability Office report suggested that nearly all of the Native villages in Alaska are at risk of coastal erosion. Scientists are watching closely to see whether the rest of this summer continues on this record-breaking trend.

For many scientists, the big question is: When will the summer sea ice disappear completely, and how will its loss reverberate across the planet?

Arctic sea ice influences climate and weather far beyond the Arctic. Its bright whiteness reflects solar heat back into the atmosphere and insulates the ocean below. The temperature difference between a cold Arctic and the hot tropics drives winds and ocean currents and influences weather globally. To better predict the future of the Arctic, scientists have looked to analogs from the past. Guarino and her colleagues focused on one period in particular.

Evidence from sediment cores from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean suggests that there was much less, or possibly no, summer ice cover at the time. Most current climate models have trouble reproducing that ice loss, and the intense Arctic warmth in general. One of the crucial tweaks the researchers made was to accurately represent the small, glistening ponds of water that form on top of ice as the hot sun melts it.

Water is darker than bright, reflective ice, and it absorbs that solar heat more readily. So once the ponds form, they accelerate the melting. Ponds like these have been observed recently to speed up melting on land-based ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

In the Arctic during the Last Interglacial, say Guarino and her colleagues, they did the same thing. With the melt ponds and some other added physics, the model generates an Arctic entirely without summer ice. The birdlife in the Arctic in the summer is also richer and more varied than in winter. Not many birds can survive in the colder weather, so the range of birds in the Arctic has its own character.

In the summertime, you may see ivory gulls, snowy owls, ravens, gyrfalcons, willow ptarmigans, and a few others. In the winter months, many of these birds migrate to Europe and even further afield to avoid the extreme winter conditions. We hope readers now have a better understanding of the Arctic in summertime. Start planning your big Arctic adventure with Expeditions Online! Sign up to be an Expeditions Online insider and receive info on exclusive deals, discounts and more!

Which starts after. Carried by ocean currents, Arctic sea ice regularly flows out toward the warmer waters in the Atlantic via the Fram Strait east of Greenland.

Early observations of sea ice coverage in the Arctic come to us both from the oral histories of native populations and from the records of early European mariners who were seeking a "Northwest Passage" to the lucrative markets in Asia. Records of sea ice near the coast of Iceland data back to the 9th century, and records became more routine in the 17th century.

British and Russian records of sea ice conditions along sailing routes became routine in the 18th and 19th centuries. Detailed shipping charts, available from the United Kingdom Met Office Hadley Centre, show that Arctic sea ice has declined at least since the mids. Satellite data have documented continued declines; since continuous satellite-based measurements began in November , data show a trend of more ice melting away during summers and less new ice forming during winters.

The Beaufort Gyre, a looping current north of Alaska, historically acted as a nursery for young ice, enabling it to thicken and grow. Ice growth in the Beaufort Gyre roughly offset the flow of ice out of the Arctic via the Fram Strait. Since the start of the 20th century, however, summers in the southern portion of the gyre have been too warm for sea ice to survive.

These changes in ice survival mean that even though the sea ice extent at the winter maximum in March has declined more slowly than the extent at summer minimum— Near the start of the satellite era in the mids, as much as one-third of the ice cover was made up of thick, multi-year ice. In , it was 5 percent. Having so much of the winter ice cover made up of thin, first year ice creates a feedback loop in which the ice is less likely to survive in the summer.

It makes the ice pack particularly vulnerable to big, single-year drops during exceptionally warm or stormy summers, drops that the ice pack is unlikely to recover from in the current climate. In addition, the thin ice is more dangerous for native Arctic people who still practice their traditional way of life, which depends on reliably thick ice for hunting and fishing activities. In coastal communities, thin ice also provides far less protection than thick ice from the pounding surf that accompanies fall and winter storms.

Arctic sea ice declines are related to the phenomenon known as Arctic amplification : more intense warming in the Arctic than over the rest of the globe.