The European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites detected rapid acceleration of an Arctic glacier over the past year. The glacier, named Negribreen, is located in north Norway at the Svalbard archipelago (the same area where the Svalbard Global Seed Vault that has made international headlines when thawing permafrost began to flood the vault).
When a glacier surges the ice flows to the terminus in a very rapid amount of time. Scientists believe this is caused by changes in the amount of heat or water in the layers of a glacier.
Per the ESA:
The last time Negribreen experienced a surge like this was in the 1930s, as documented in aerial photographs. At that time, it advanced almost 12 km into the fjord in one year along a 15 km-wide section of the front. Since then the front of the glacier had been steadily retreating, with large icebergs breaking off.
This latest jump in speed began in July 2016 and has been climbing ever since – even over the cold winter months.
Monitoring glaciers in areas prone to bad weather and long periods of darkness – like the Arctic – was difficult before the advent of satellites. Radar satellites can ‘see’ through clouds and in the dark, and Sentinel-1 offers frequent and systematic coverage of the Arctic.
“Sentinel-1 provides us with a near-realtime overview of glacier flow across the Arctic, remarkably augmenting our capacity to capture the evolution of glacier surges,” said Tazio Strozzi from Swiss company Gamma Remote Sensing and scientist on Glaciers_cci.
“This new information can be used to refine numerical models of glacier surging to help predict the temporal evolution of the contribution of Arctic glaciers to sea-level rise.”
In a diary from last week, I noted that the Fram Strait will be sending out the last of the Arctic ocean’s old sea ice to the Atlantic sometime this summer. Scientists have determined that the reason is that the Beaufort Gyre is shutting down. Instead of treating old sea ice like a nursery, it has now become it’s graveyard.
NASA’s Earth Observatory in a recent post highlighted the breakdown of an ice bridge at the Nares Strait a southward flowing current, fueled by the Beaufort Gyre, sending a very large amount of ice through it each summer and fall.
The amount of ice flowing through Nares Strait in 2017 will likely be higher than usual. A key arch of pack ice that blocks other pieces of ice from entering the strait has broken apart earlier than usual. Typically, ice arches form between Ellesmere Island and Greenland in January and break down in early July. In 2017, sensors on NASA satellites observed a key arch breaking down in mid-May. The image on the left was captured on May 9, 2017, when the arch was still intact. By May 12, large pieces of sea ice had begun to break into slivers and move into the strait. By May 17, even more pack ice north of the arch had broken up.
“This breakup is in no way catastrophic,” said Nathan Kurtz, an ice scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “But it is worth noting that the early breakup of this arch puts some of the oldest and thickest Arctic sea ice in a more vulnerable state and will increase the flow of ice through the strait this year.”
That is not good news because an unusually warm winter means that the overall extent of Arctic sea ice between January and May 17, 2017, had already shrunk well below the 1981-2010 median.
Early breaks of ice arches have happened in this area before. In 2007, unusually warm winter weather prevented this ice arch from forming at all. That doubled the amount of ice that flowed through the strait that year compared to the average, according to an analysis of satellite data led by Ronald Kwok of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. While that doubling was significant, the total flow of ice through the Nares Strait that year was still just 10 percent of what regularly passes through the larger Fram Strait.
earthobservatory.nasa.gov/...
Sabrina Shankman of Inside Climate News, writes about the Arctic Council and how the U.S. weakened the final Climate Change wording in the Arctic Declaration.
But those in the negotiations know how much more aggressive it could have been.
"Ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of the people who read the declaration will not have the benefit of hindsight and will think it's pretty good and we agree with that," said Jim Gamble, who represents the Aleut International Association, a permanent participant on the council. "There's an effort to move the climate agreement and sustainable development goals forward. But for those of us who are involved in the whole negotiation, we know at various times there was stronger language."
Behind the scenes, it had been a mad dash to get the declaration finalized.
The group of negotiators—which includes representatives from each of the Arctic countries and from six indigenous groups that are permanent participants on the council—had planned to meet for an hour on May 10 to finalize grammar and other trivial changes.
But on May 9, the negotiators received a new version of the declaration from the United States that asked for six changes—all downplaying climate risks, the need for the Paris treaty or ambitious renewable energy goals. Negotiators spent a long morning huddled around a table, working line-by-line through the document projected on a screen. The other nations challenged the U.S. on every point, often joined by the indigenous groups.
Rex Tillerson signed the document after Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden caved on the US changes.