Scientific American has the numbers on an astounding demonstration of climate change that isn’t a computer prediction or a down-the-road issue. It’s happening right now.
Winter sea ice cover in the Bering Sea did not just hit a record low in 2018; it was half that of the previous lowest winter on record (2001), says John Walsh, chief scientist of the International Arctic Research Center at The University of Alaska Fairbanks. “There’s never ever been anything remotely like this for sea ice” in the Bering Sea going back more than 160 years, says Rick Thoman, an Alaska-based climatologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Though parts of the United States had a cool, wet winter with maddeningly frequent snow, that doesn’t mean that climate change has reversed, stopped, or slowed. In fact, while cool air was being pushed down to the U.S., parts of the Arctic were seeing record heat. Even in the round-the-clock darkness of a polar winter, some areas were regularly above freezing, and 40 or more degrees above average.
And even though polar bears without the ice that allows them to hunt have been the poster animal for global warming, it’s not just bears who are affected.
April should be prime walrus hunting season for the native villages that dot Alaska’s remote western coast. In years past the winter sea ice where the animals rest would still be abundant, providing prime targets for subsistence hunters. But this year sea-ice coverage as of late April was more like what would be expected for mid-June, well into the melt season. These conditions are the continuation of a winter-long scarcity of sea ice in the Bering Sea—a decline so stark it has stunned researchers who have spent years watching Arctic sea ice dwindle due to climate change.
Alaskan villagers are being displaced by loss of ice at sea, and melting of permafrost on land—all while Donald Trump, Scott Pruitt, and the whole Doubter’s Club conspires to make things worse.
In the Chukchi and Bering seas off Alaska, freeze-up used to begin in October. Ice would edge southward and build up throughout the winter until peaking in March when the sun climbs high again, and the ice would then start melting back. But autumn freeze-up in the region has begun steadily later as Arctic temperatures have risen at twice the global rate, fueling a self-perpetuating cycle of ice loss: As it melts it leaves more open water to absorb the sun’s rays in summer, and this further warms the ocean causing more ice to melt, thereby delaying the autumn freeze. In recent years that freeze had moved into November but this year temperatures were so warm the Chukchi Sea still had open ocean in December. “And that,” Walsh says, “hasn’t happened before” in recorded history.
An ice-free Arctic may be the death-knell for species and people who depend on conditions that have existed for tens of thousands of years. But it will make it easier for companies to ship cargo through the no-longer-fabled Northwest Passage. And of course it will make it easier to explore for still more fossil fuels, both in the now-open-for-business Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and in the no-longer frozen sea.
What’s really important here?