Arctic Ocean is turning red

The Arctic Ocean is turning red, as sea surface temperatures (SST) rise. The NOAA maps below, dated August 12, 2013, show sea surface temperature anomalies across the Arctic Ocean of up to 5°C (9°F). Virtually all areas were the sea ice has disappeared are now colored scarlet red.

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The (updated) animation below shows SST anomalies from June 3 to August 26, 2013.

For a full-size animation, see http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/Products/ocean/sst/anomaly/anim_full.html

Locally, the situation can be even worse. The NOAA map below, dated August 13, 2013, shows that areas where the sea ice has disappeared in the Arctic Ocean can be exposed to sea surface temperature anomalies higher than 8°C (14.4°F).

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These anomalies are very high, even when compared to some of the recent years, when the decline of sea ice extent didn't look as bad as it appears now.

Many people may only look at the sea ice, assuming that things are fine as long as there is no dramatic decrease in sea ice area or extent (see Cryosphere Today image right).

However, there are many other things to consider, as described in the earlier post Cyclone raging over thin ice. Most importantly, sea surface temperature anomalies this high are very alarming!

For comparison, the image below shows August sea surface temperature anomalies in 2007, 2010 and 1011.

from: http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/ocean.html

These high sea surface temperature anomalies are firstly caused by higher sea and air temperatures as a result of global warming. Additionally, there are many feedbacks that accelerate the temperature rise in the Arctic, as discussed at the post Diagram of Doom. Local conditions can further accelerate the temperature rise in specific areas, such as where warm water from rivers flows into the Arctic Ocean.

As the map below shows, a number of large rivers end in the Kara Sea, where high temperatures have been recorded for some time.

map from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rs-map.png

Another large river is the Mackenzie River, which ends in the Beaufort Sea, where sea surface temperatures of about 20°C (68°F) are currently recorded, as the image below illustrates.

Similarly, the NOAA image below shows that sea surface temperatures of up to 18°C (64.4°F) were recorded in the Bering Strait on August 12, 2013.

Note that the melting season still has quite a while to go. Arctic sea ice volume minimum is typically reached around halfway into September, which is more than one month away. On September 12-13, 2011, temperatures of 6-7°C were reached over East Siberian Arctic Shelf, and up to 9°C along the coast of Alaska.

The danger of this situation is that this dramatic rise in temperature anomalies will not remain restricted to surface waters, but that heat will penetrate the seabed which can contain huge amounts of methane in the form of hydrates and free gas in sediments.

Submarine pingoes: Indicators of shallow gas
hydrates in a pockmark at Nyegga, Norwegian Sea -
Hovland et al., Marine Geology 228 (2006) 15–23

At the moment, a cyclone is raging over the Arctic Ocean, and this causes warm surface waters to be mixed down, in many places all the way down to the seabed, due to the shallow nature of many of the seas in the Arctic Ocean.

As shown on the image right and also described at the FAQ page, there can be all kinds of fractures in the sediment, while there can also be conduits where methane has escaped earlier from hydrates, allowing heat to penetrate deep into the sediment and causing methane to escape.

Methane is kept stable inside hydrates as long as the temperature remains low. Since methane expand some 160 times in volume, compared to its compressed frozen state inside the hydrate, warming of even a small part of a hydrate can cause destabilization across the entire hydrate. It may take only a small rise in temperature of a single conduit in the sediment to set off a large abrupt release of methane, which subsequently threatens to cause further releases elsewhere in the Arctic Ocean and trigger runaway global warming, as described at the methane hydrates blog.

Warm water keeps flowing into the Kara Sea

The image below, from methanetracker.org, shows methane levels at 1950 and higher in yellow, for the period of July 17 to July 23, 2013.

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The temperature map below, for July 26, 2013, from Wunderground, shows that high temperatures are still prominent in Russia, at much the same location where most of the methane in above image shows up.

High temperatures warm up the water flowing into the Kara Sea, as shown on the image below for July 26, 2013, from the Danish Meteorological Institute.

Open Water at North Pole

Images from the North Pole Environmental Observatory are now showing large areas with open water at the North Pole. The image below is from Webcam 2, dated July 22, 2013.

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Furthermore, the number of spots with methane readings of over 1950 ppb appears to be rising. See related posts below to compare. Particularly worrying are the large number of spots over the Kara Sea. Also note the spot over Greenland in the top-left corner of the image below.

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The webcam shows water at the North Pole. Clearly, there still is some ice underneath the water, as is evident from the stakes that have been put into the ice to indicate the depth of surface water.

Surface water can build up as a result of melting as well as due to rain.

As the image on the right shows, the ice is getting very thin. In between the North Pole and Siberia, a wide corridor has developed where the ice is between zero and one meters thick.

Surface water could extend over this corridor, all the way to edge of the ice, in which case it effectively becomes part of open water.

The presence of water in areas close to the North Pole has been discussed in a number of earlier posts, such as this one.

The image below, from the Danish Meteorological Institute, gives some idea of the extent of the sea surface temperature anomalies that have been particularly prominent in the Kara Sea for some time.

Meanwhile, more water has appeared around Webcam2. Below are four later images, the top two images captured on July 24, 2013, the third one captured on July 25, 2013, while the bottom one was captured on July 26, 2013.

Note that the buoy associated with Webcam2, while originally positioned at the North Pole, has meanwhile moved away substantially from that location, as indicated by the image below, from http://imb.crrel.usace.army.mil/

Ice thickness image run July 26, valid July 27, 2013 for scale, see image further above. Buoy data up to July 28, 2013, buoy position: 84.87 N, 4.29 W.

On the animation above right, the track is shown against a sea ice thickness map, showing sea ice at webcam2's current position that is two meters thick.

So, while satellite images may indicate that the sea ice is still several meters thick in many locations, huge amounts of surface water may be present on top. The albedo of water is far lower than ice, so less sunlight is reflected back into space and a lot more heat is absorbed by the water, further accelerating the sea ice melt. This spells bad news for the remaining sea ice, since the melting season still has quite a bit of time to go.

Let's end with a video uploaded at youtube by climatecentral.org covering the period from April 16 to July 25, 2013.

Related posts

- Open Water In Areas Around North Pole (posted June 22, 2013)
- Watching methane over Arctic Ocean (posted July 20, 2013)
- Heat, Fires and Methane (posted July 20, 2013)
- High methane readings over Kara Sea (posted July 18, 2013)
- Methanetracker (posted July 9, 2013)

High methane readings over Kara Sea

Arctic sea ice extent 2013 (brown line on NSIDC-image below) is more and more following the same path it did last year (dashed line), when extent reached a record minimum, and in 2007 (blue line), the previous record minimum.

Even more worryingly, sea ice is very thin, as the Naval Research Laboratory animation below shows; large areas with a thickness of 1 meter to zero persist close to the North Pole, as discussed in an earlier post; the image below, from the North Pole Environmental Observatory shows lots of water and that it's raining at the North Pole.

The above animation also shows the retreat of sea ice from the Kara Sea, north of Siberia, over the past 30 days.

As can be expected, high sea surface temperature anomalies show up in areas where the sea ice has retreated, as shown by the DMI image below.

Most worryingly, high methane readings appear over the Kara Sea, as shown on the image below.

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