Arctic will likely see summer free of ice by 2030, research says
Global News
That would mean that by the end of the melt season in September, the Arctic would have less than one million square kilometres of sea ice, even under low emissions.
New research has moved up the time by which the Arctic Ocean is predicted to be free of summer ice.
A paper published Tuesday in the journal Nature has concluded that those northern waters could be open for months at a time as early as 2030, even if humanity manages to drastically scale back its greenhouse gas emissions.
“It brings it about a decade sooner,” said Nathan Gillett, an Environment and Climate Change Canada scientist and one of the co-authors of the study.
Gillett and his colleagues had noticed the growing differences between what climate models say should be happening to sea ice and what’s actually going on.
“The models, on average, underestimate sea ice decline compared with observations,” Gillett said.
They wanted to know how much they’d have to tweak the model to make it fit the data — and what those tweaks might reveal if they were projected into the future.
To do so, the scientists first teased out the effect of greenhouse gases from other factors that affect sea ice loss, such as artificial chemicals from aerosols or natural events such as volcanic eruptions. The impact of aerosols was found to be negligible and the study concluded that natural events contributed no more than 10 per cent of sea ice loss.
With greenhouse gases isolated as the main culprit, they then looked at how those emissions were used in their climate model. By “scaling up” the effect of greenhouse gases, the researchers achieved a much better fit with satellite images of ice cover.