The Arctic Ocean was once frozen over for most of the year, but new research suggests by the 2050s it will see at least 60 days of open water.
A recent modeling study used climate simulations from the National Center for Atmospheric Research-based Community Earth System Model to determine how sea ice-free days changed between the years of 1850 and 2100 in the Arctic waters and made some grim predictions, the University of Colorado at Boulder reported.
"We hear all the time about how sea ice extent in the Arctic is going down," said Katy Barnhart, who led the study while at CU-Boulder's Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). "That's an important measurement if you are trying to understand broad impacts of climate change in the Arctic, but it doesn't tell us about how the changes in the sea ice in the Arctic are going to affect specific places."
Most economic activity in the Arctic exists along the coastline, so the researchers decided to concentrate on four important locations: " Drew Point, along Alaska's North Slope; the Laptev Sea, along Siberia's northern coast; Perry Channel in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (part of the Northwest Passage route); and Arctic Ocean regions east of Svalbard, Norway."
The water in Drew Point was thawed for 50 days on average between 1900 and 2000, but open-water days have now doubled. Based on this data, the models predicted that by the 2070s the region could see 200 days without sea ice. This loss of sea-ice days could exacerbate coastal erosion around Drew Point.
"We wanted to highlight places that had interesting or different stories with respect to the patterns of Arctic Ocean, atmosphere, and sea ice motion--things like coastal erosion or connections to potential sea routes," said Barnhart. "Since we don't expect the impacts of Arctic sea ice loss to be exactly the same in Alaska as in Greenland, we looked at open water days to provide a more nuanced picture of sea ice change at specific locations."
The analysis predicted that the entire Arctic coastline and much of the Arctic Ocean will experience an additional 60 days without sea ice by the year 2050, and many sites could see an even greater change.
"The Arctic is warming and the sea ice is melting, with impacts on Arctic people and ecosystems," said CIRES Fellow Jennifer Kay."By the end of this century, assuming a scenario of continued business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions, the Arctic will be in a new regime with respect to open water, fully outside the realm of what we've seen in the past."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Nature Climate Change.
