A meteor exploded over the Bering Sea, between Alaska and Russia, with the power of 10 Hiroshima bombs in December of 2018. The event was captured by Japan’s Himawari satellite. The rock was traveling at 20 miles per second and it was only discovered on March 15, 2019, when researchers spotted the smoke trail from the exploded space rock and found the video proof from Himawari.
New Scientist has the story:
The meteor’s smoke cloud was recorded at 2350 GMT in the same location over the Bering Sea that was recorded by NASA’s monitoring sensors.
The smoke trail is almost vertical, showing that it entered the atmosphere very steeply, and it’s possible to see a long, thin shadow cast by the smoke cloud against the Earth’s cloud layer below.
He said, “It appears in the images at the right time, it is in the right location, the smoke column is almost vertical, and the smoke is very high. Much higher than any clouds in that region and too high to be a contrail.”
The giant fireball hit the atmosphere with the force of 173 kilotons of TNT, ten times the force of the atomic bomb which the US dropped on Hiroshima at the end of the second world war.
The explosion is the third-largest in modern times, after an explosion over the Russian Chelyabinsk region in 2013 and a massive explosion that occurred in Siberia, Russia, in 1908, known as the Tunguska event. That air burst was so powerful that it flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of more than 2000 square kilometres.
Meanwhile along the coast of the Bering Sea, native people are staring down the end of their food sustainability.
Monga Bay has a summary on the Arctic Sea Ice, and it was the Bering Sea that made headlines.
Gloria Dickie writes:
The exception was in the Bering Sea. Spanning 2 million square kilometers (772,000 square miles) between Alaska and Russia, the Bering Sea has had a rough go of it the past two years. Last winter, sea ice extent in the region plummeted. An unusually warm Autumn followed. By November 2018, when ice should have begun to reform, the Bering Sea experienced the lowest ice extent ever documented in the satellite record for that time of year.
Then the weather shifted.
“For December and the first half of January, sea ice expanded quite a bit… the ice extent never got up to average, but it was pretty close; we were almost at 90 per cent by the middle of January,” said Rick Thoman, a retired climatologist with the National Weather Service who now serves as an Alaska climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks International Arctic Research Center. “However, in the last week of January the weather pattern changed pretty dramatically.” An anticyclone system formed over Arctic Canada, with high pressure over northwestern Canada and low pressure in the Bering Sea. These two systems drew warm air into the region from the south, halting the formation of new ice while also pushing existing ice out to the north. Bad weather only exacerbated these losses.
“I’ve counted 15 different storms that have affected the northern Bering Sea — one every three days,” Thoman said at the start of March. These storms created strong winds and wave action that had “really eaten up a lot of the ice.” From January 27 to March 3, the Bering Sea lost 373,000 square kilometers of sea ice (144,000 square miles) — an area nearly the size of Montana. According to Thoman, this will mark only the third time in the satellite record when the winter maximum in the Bering Sea was reached in January. (Winter maximum is almost always reached during March.)
The seasonal ice in the Bering Sea is already known to be volatile, but it’s getting worse under climate change. Now the ice is thin, and sometimes mushy, which means it simply can’t withstand powerful weather systems moving through, unlike thicker ice. “It just doesn’t seem like it’s as thick or as robust as it should be,” said Thoman. “The temperatures in the Bering Sea were very warm [last year] and we’re seeing the results of that now.”
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Anchorage Daily News reports on the lack of Bering sea ice and what that means for the communities that depend on the sea ice for their sustenance. Meat from walrus, beluga whales and “for their most prized game animal from the sea, the bearded seal, or oogruk, a local elder said this week” cannot be harvested if the ice is thin or gone. March is when people from the coastal arctic would be fishing and crabbing at this time. Food deliveries via plane are threatened due to ice runways melting.
Under normal conditions, Alaska Native hunters of all three villages would be out on the ice daily searching for seals, walrus, and beluga whales, and for their most prized game animal from the sea, the bearded seal, or oogruk, a local elder said this week.
A floating buoy dubbed ‘Peggy’ has been recording and documenting ice changes in the Arctic and Bering Seas for several years now. Peggy monitors water temperatures, saltiness, and other signs up to a depth of 230 feet below the water surface. It is anchored to the sea floor west of Alaska.
Peggy’s research data is alarming, scientists say. In 2018, data from Peggy said Arctic water was warming at a rate that could spell trouble for sea life that exist from the sea floor to fish, crab, and humans on top. In their website publication, Weather and Climate, researchers said: “There were early signs that conditions in the winter of 2017 to 2018 were going to be different. By November 2017, the sea ice was already late.”
Delbert Pungowiyi, Tribal Council President of the village of Savoonga on St. Lawrence Island, said last Thursday they are worried about the scarcity of food for the villagers, about 300 in all. “It’s getting scary. We need immediate mitigation, we need help,” he said on a telephone call. “Our voices need to be heard. Our story needs to get out,” Pungowiyi added. Savoonga is about 200 air miles from Nome, the regional center.
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“Oogruk, they need ice. “Walrus, they need ice, too. I don’t know how we’re going to do it. We’re always concerned about the lack of ice. For 100-miles, there’s no ice. We’ve never seen this before,” Nayokpuk said.
Villagers in coastal villages in the region are troubled and worried now more than ever. And this is just the beginning. Native people who have depended on good ice conditions since time immemorial are in for a hard time. And it’s because of climate change and global warming, the stuff of things that are out of their control and beyond their ability to do anything about.
They are the first in line to feel the impact of big changes in Alaska’s weather, ice conditions, and food supply.