The Arctic - A "Miner's Canary"?

So then,

What has this got to do with me? Should I be worried?

It would be easy to get sentimental here by saying something like 'we're all citizens of this planet' etc etc, but I'll resist... for the time being! Basically, it matters to all of us because of the significance the Arctic is likely to have in the context of climate change during the coming decades. Although I've repeated it so many times during this blog, I'll say again that the Arctic is warming faster than any other area on the planet. The sea ice record is especially sensitive to temperature, and it has been reacting to the change at a remarkable rate, as we've seen.

In most of the world, biological responses to climate change cannot easily be separated from other things such as habitat loss and land use change, impacts which are potentially more severe. As the Arctic is far way from major populations, it gives an opportunity to see the impacts of climate change clearly, as these other factors are minimal (see assessment of pollution as a factor). Also, ecotones surrounding the Arctic are extremely sensitive as they lie on the very edge of possible habitation, meaning vegetation shifts have become apparent.

Therefore, it could be said that the changes seen in the Arctic over the last few decades are a warning sign, a miner's canary which is showing the first signs that it isn't feeling too great. It's showing signs of a relatively weak (in the context of land use changes etc in other areas) but persistent and growing force. If left alone, the potential for positive feedbacks through melting permafrost and ocean albedo effects would take the path of warming completely out of our hands. If that happens, we definitely should be worried.

As well as this, the political implications of what is happening in the Arctic may be even more pressing and potentially damaging. Tensions are already building between Arctic, and even non-Arctic nations about the resource scramble which is likely to happen now that new areas suitable for resource prospecting have been opened up. In an often cited example, in 2007 Russia planted a 1m high flag under the north pole in a symbolic move to lay their claim to resource rights in the Arctic. Of course, this significantly added to the tension surrounding the Arctic and geopolitics.

Russian flag planting mission, a global superpower laying it's claim to the billions of dollars
worth of resources beneath the Arctic.

Whether they like it or not, the environment is now an issue policy makers must act on. It will be interesting to see how things pan out from here in the Arctic. Hopefully some lessons will be learned, meaning climate change doesn't become an opportunity for further environmental damage. It should be clear then, that although the Arctic is out of sight, it would be unwise to put it out of our minds.
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As a final comment, I hope during the course of this blog I've managed to objectively comment upon the changes in

Wrapping up (2)

This is the penultimate post! (please, don't cheer too loudly). For the second half of the review (click here for the first part), I'm going to briefly consider some of the more tricky questions about the Arctic about the future. Of course, any answers are only based on past experience. It's impossible to tell what path environmental change in the Arctic will take, especially with the added complication of people who are even more unpredictable than the environment. So, here goes...

What is the likely impact of future human activity on aquatic and terrestrial arctic ecosystems?

It's only possible to extrapolate from what we know, meaning it's likely the changes seen in the past few decades are likely to continue. Also, natural systems exhibit lagged responses, especially when organisms take decades to grow. For example, shifts seen in aquatic ecosystems are very significant as they respond quickly to temperatures. Alterations to terrestrial vegetation, on the other hand, are slow, meaning the small changes evident in the past few years are probably responses to warming a few decades ago. Therefore, it's likely that aquatic communities will continue to shift with changing patterns of ice cover and benthic vegetation, woody (and perhaps even large vascular plants) will expand in extent, permafrost will melt and temperate organisms will begin to move north.

This is also a good point to bring up all the papers which I haven't had time to bring up, but indicate the potential for future changes in the Arctic as extrapolated from that seen in recent decades. In a great review article, Post et al. (2009) provided a short account of ecological responses to Climate Change in the Arctic. Changes with significant potential include range shifts (seen in moths), invasive species and phenology (see graph below).

Earlier flowering in Greenland (direct from Post et al., 2009)

Such movements in seasonality become problematic when there's a mismatch between producers and consumers. For example, a growing difference was observed between peak Caribou births and peak productivity of

Google Insights

Came across this on the internet the other day and thought it was a great way to illustrate, albeit unscientifically, broad patterns in the public consciousness. Google insights allows you to plot the daily number of web searches for a particular search term through time (plotted as a function of total searches, explained here if you're interested). As an example, here's the worldwide results for terms including 'London 2012':


There's a clear peak during summer 2005, when the games were awarded to London, and in summer 2008 during the Beijing Olympics. It's also evident that interest has been growing during 2011 as the games approach. Clearly, worldwide search terms often match up to real events, and give an indication of what's in the public awareness. So, let's apply this to the Arctic.

Starting off simply, here's the record for 'Arctic' under the science category ('all subjects' just returns loads of stuff about the Arctic Monkeys).


There's a couple of things to notice here. Firstly, interest in the Arctic during the past two years seems to have waned, especially when compared to 2004 and 2005. Also, searches increase clearly during the Northern

Wrapping up (1)

Unfortunately, it's almost time for this blog to come to an end, so for the last couple of posts I'll try and sum up what I've learned over the course of the past couple of months. At the beginning I posted a few questions that I wanted to answer, so I think these are a good place to start, so I'll use these as a structure for the next couple of posts.

How do we know the sea ice retreat in the past few years is unusual?

The blog started off by looking at this question, firstly by using satellite data. Since satellite data began in 1979, sea ice extent and thickness have been decreasing at an alarming rate. Sea-ice extent during the summer of 2011 (sept) was almost on par with the previous record low during 2007, even without the unusual weather patterns thought responsible for the 2007 low. This strongly suggests that even though sea ice doesn't decrease every winter, overall conditions are worsening for continued survival of permanent sea ice.

A number of proxy records show a sea-ice history going further back than any contemporary records. As part of the blog, I looked at two relatively new methods of constructing these histories; the IP25 biomarker and Quartz records. These, as well as other methods, including documentary and ice-diatom records, show that extent of sea ice has been strongly variable, but also strongly correlated with climate. Sea ice extent is therefore extremely sensitive to temperature changes, meaning if we were experiencing global warming today, we could expect a significant loss of sea ice. Is that what we've been seeing?

Well, the sea-ice is disappearing at a faster rate than any model used by the IPCC has forecast, even the pessimistic 'business as usual' scenarios shown on the graph below. The graph doesn't show the past 5 years, but if it did the trend would be continuing, with 2007 being the minimum.

Sea ice extent output values from 13 IPCC Global climate models with an ensemble mean in thick black.
Actual observations are shown as a thick red line. Direct from Stroeve et al 2007.

Of course, this means a few things could be happening. Firstly, there could be some unknown natural variability that

I think I need to be more careful with my wording..

Just came across a 'debate' today centring around Greenpeace and a 'claim' they made on their website which has been picked up on a number of blogs. What is interesting about it though, is that it is only about issues of clarity in an online article. Basically, errors were made on both sides. Here's the direct quote that caused the issues and link from an article about 'Arctic ice' from the Greenpeace website:

"As permanent ice decreases, we are looking at ice-free summers in the Arctic as early as 2030." http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/urgent-action-needed-as-arctic/

This was jumped on by climate change skeptics, especially after a debate started within the scientific community about whether pressure groups such as Greenpeace should 'emotionalize' the science in order to win the public over. Skeptics argued that an ice-free Arctic would be impossible as ice on land, such as the Greenland ice-sheet, has been around for 'hundreds of thousands of years' (the quotation marks are important in order to constrain