The Disappearing Sea Ice

Arctic Ocean is turning red

Arctic News,

13 August, 2013

The Arctic Ocean is turning red, as sea surface temperatures rise. The NOAA map below, dated August 12, 2013, shows sea surface temperature anomalies of up to 5°C across the Arctic Ocean. Virtually all areas were the sea ice has disappeared are now colored scarlet red.

Locally, the situation can be even worse. The NOAA map below, dated August 13, 2013, shows sea surface temperature anomalies of about 8°C in many of the areas where the sea ice has disappeared.

These high sea surface temperatures are firstly caused by higher sea and air temperatures as a result of global warming. Additionally, there are many feedbacks that accelerate the temperature rise in the Arctic, as discussed at the post Diagram of Doom. Local conditions can further accelerate the temperature rise in specific areas, such as rivers bringing warm water into the Arctic Ocean.


As the map below shows, a number of large rivers end in the Kara Sea, where high temperatures have been recorded for some time. 

map from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rs-map.png

Another large river is the Mackenzie River, which ends in the Beaufort Sea, where sea surface temperatures of about 20°C are currently recorded, as the image below illustrates.

Similarly, the NOAA image below shows that sea surface temperatures of up to 18°C were recorded in the Bering Strait on August 12, 2013.

The danger of this situation is that this will warm up the seabed that can contain huge amounts of methane in the form of hydrates and free gas in sediments. At the moments, a cyclone is raging over the Arctic Ocean, and this causes warm surface waters to mix down, in many places all the way down to the seabed, due to the shallow nature of many seas in the Arctic Ocean.


As described at the FAQ page, there can be all kinds of fractures in the sediment, while there can also be conduits where methane has escaped earlier from hydrates, allowing heat to penetrate deep into the sediment and causing methane to escape. A large abrupt release of methane threatens to cause further releases and trigger runaway global warming, as described at the methane hydrates blog.