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.
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. 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.
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. Previous estimates had suggested that Arctic summer sea ice wouldn't disappear until the 2040s at the earliest. If humanity managed to bring its emissions down, year-round sea ice might even survive.
"The range is then 2030 to 2050," Gillett said. "And even under the lowest emission scenario, with the scaling the Arctic is ice-free."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. If emissions remain high, that ice-free period could last months. As well, the study is the first to measure sea ice trends for every month of the year.
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