Alberta researcher says sea ice in Antarctica lowest since 1986: ‘It’s serious, it’s really bad’
Global News
A Calgary researcher, who has spent the last eight months in Antarctica studying sea ice, says he has seen first-hand how big an effect climate change has had in the region.
A Calgary researcher, who has spent the last eight months in Antarctica studying sea ice, says he has seen first-hand how big an effect climate change has had in the region.
Vishnu Nandan, a post-doctoral associate with the University of Calgary, along with Robbie Mallett, from the University of Manitoba, have been studying ways to improve how radar satellites measure the thickness of Antarctic sea ice and snow.
The research is part of a British-based project called DEFIANT — Drivers and Effects of Fluctuations in sea Ice in the ANTarctic — which aims to deploy a state-of-the-art ground-based radar system that mimics the satellites in space.
“We actually came knowing we wouldn’t have a lot of sea ice, because it’s been really warm,” Nandan said in a phone interview from Rothera Research Station on Adelaide Island, nearly 1,900 kilometres south of the Falkland Islands.
“We came in where we had the lowest sea ice on record over the past many decades, so we didn’t have sea ice much and we had really thin ice in the winter.”
Nandan said the issue is that the area gets so much snow, sometimes up to a metre, that it’s difficult to get accurate satellite readings of snow and sea ice thickness.
They’ve been collecting data from the ground-based radar system to account for errors and correct satellite algorithms to produce accurate measurements critical for climate change projections.
Nandan did similar research a few years ago in the central Arctic Ocean, when he was on an icebreaker for a year in an extended examination of global warming from a vantage point close to the North Pole.