At the end of July, 40% of the 4,000-year-old Milne Ice Shelf, located on the north-western edge of Ellesmere Island, calved into the sea. Canada’s last fully intact ice shelf was no more.
On the other side of the island, the most northerly in Canada, the St Patrick’s Bay ice caps completely disappeared.
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Two weeks later, scientists concluded that the Greenland Ice Sheet may have already passed the point of no return. Annual snowfall is no longer enough to replenish the snow and ice loss during summer melting of the territory’s 234 glaciers. Last year, the ice sheet lost a record amount of ice, equivalent to 1 million metric tons every minute.
The Arctic is unravelling. And it’s happening faster than anyone could have imagined just a few decades ago. Northern Siberia and the Canadian Arctic are now warming three times faster than the rest of the world. In the past decade, Arctic temperatures have increased by nearly 1C. If greenhouse gas emissions stay on the same trajectory, we can expect the north to have warmed by 4C year-round by the middle of the century.
In the Arctic, the warm summer months melt away ice and the winter snowfall freezes it back. But as the climate warms, the Arctic loses more ice than it gains back.
Arctic ice in August 1980: The Greenland Ice Sheet is no longer growing. Instead of gaining new ice every year, it begins to lose roughly 51 billion metric tons annually, discharged into the ocean as meltwater and icebergs.
August 1981: We’ll keep track of the
ice lost compared to August 1980.
August 2010: A chunk of ice four times the size of Manhattan breaks off the Petermann Glacier, causing the ice sheet to retreat 18 kilometers. With little snow falling during winter, Greenland’s ice cap is subjected to record melting which lasts 50 days longer than average.
August 2012: Driven in part by a late season cyclone, Arctic summer sea ice extent hits a record low.
August 2020: Following intense summer heat, Arctic sea ice melts to its second-lowest extent on record, nearly reaching 2012 levels.
Even if we stop all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, Arctic sea ice will continue melting for decades.
There is no facet of Arctic life that remains untouched by the immensity of change here, except perhaps the eternal dance between light and darkness. The Arctic as we know it – a vast icy landscape where reindeer roam, polar bears feast, and waters teem with cod and seals – will soon be frozen only in memory.
A new Nature Climate Change study predicts that summer sea ice floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean could disappear entirely by 2035. Until relatively recently, scientists didn’t think we would reach this point until 2050 at the earliest. Reinforcing this finding, last month Arctic sea ice reached its second-lowest extent in the 41-year satellite record.
A walrus rests on an ice floe near Svalbard, Norway. A new study predicts that summer sea ice floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean could disappear entirely by 2035.
Photograph: Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket/Getty Images
“The latest models are basically showing that no matter what emissions scenario we follow, we’re going to lose summer [sea] ice cover before the middle of the century,” says Julienne Stroeve, a senior research scientist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center. “Even if we keep warming to less than 2C, it’s still enough to lose that summer sea ice in some years.”
At outposts in the Canadian Arctic, permafrost is thawing 70 years sooner than predicted. Roads are buckling. Houses are sinking. In Siberia, giant craters pockmark the tundra as temperatures soar, hitting 100F (38C) in the town of Verkhoyansk in July. This spring, one of the fuel tanks at a Russian power plant collapsed and leaked 21,000 metric tons of diesel into nearby waterways, which attributed the cause of the spill to subsiding permafrost.
This thawing permafrost releases two potent greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, into the atmosphere and exacerbates planetary warming.
The soaring heat leads to raging wildfires, now common in hotter and drier parts of the Arctic. In recent summers, infernos have torn across the tundra of Sweden, Alaska, and Russia, destroying native vegetation.
