New research by Yale University and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution warns of calamitous climate impacts, due to a doubling of Arctic Ocean “heat content” in a massive pool of water that originated hundreds of miles away in the Pacific Ocean (“via the Chukchi Sea and Alaskan Coastal Current”), and also from the retreating edges of the deep ( 1.2 miles) and year-round ice covered Canadian Basin, where there are an ebb and flow of melting Arctic sea ice each and every summer.
This has been caused by the solar heating of ice-free surface waters in the N. Chukchi Sea. That particular area of the Chukchi is the pathway for stratified waters (halocline) entering the Beaufort Gyre. This is extremely complicated science, and researchers are doing all they can to figure out what is going on in the rapidly warming Arctic.
In the Arctic, the surface waters are colder than the warmer temperatures below, by a few degrees. This stratification of the water column is what keeps the water from mixing, permitting sea ice to grow, and keeping the climate stable.
The PRI, a consortium of Arctic climate scientists, writes that there is trouble occurring in the gyre, posing a threat to Europe and North America with even more severe winter cold and storms than in years past. Warming is also changing the jet stream, notes PRI, causing the “loopiness” that allows bitter cold Arctic temperatures to penetrate south to the world’ s temperate zones, and that zone’s temperatures to be sucked to the Arctic, melting ice during the winter.
The Beaufort Gyre, an immense 60-mile-diameter pool of cold freshwater and sea ice, is “stuck” in a clockwise rotation that should have ended years ago. Its eventual reversal could send massive amounts of chilly water straight toward western Europe, plunging it into brutal winters and disrupting fisheries.
The gyre spins in the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska and Canada and south of the North Pole. When this ocean current spins clockwise, it traps Arctic ice and freshwater melt. When it spins the other way, it ejects that ice and freshwater out past Greenland into the North Atlantic, making weather in Northern Europe cooler. It is a natural phenomenon, but something has gone awry with the way it operates, as its periodic reversal is way overdue.
Typically, cyclonic storms occur every five to seven years in the North Atlantic and move into the Arctic, causing the gyre to weaken and reverse direction, explains journalist Ed Struzik, a fellow with the Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen's University and author of “Future Arctic: Field Notes from a World on the Edge.” In recent years, however, the Arctic has been warming faster than the rest of the planet, and scientists speculate this has caused the gyre to stay in a clockwise direction for more than a dozen years.
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So the gyre just keeps getting bigger, spinning faster and collecting more water, Struzik says. “Imagine all of the water that we have in the Great Lakes — that’s the amount of freshwater trapped in the Arctic just waiting to get out.”
Heat currently trapped below the surface has the potential to melt some of the Arctic region's sea ice pack if it reaches the surface, according to researchers.The new phenomenon of a massive influx of warm water is not an immediate threat to sea ice, say scientists, but the warm water under the Arctic Ocean’s sea ice was described by John Toole of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution as a “ticking time bomb”.
“We document a striking ocean warming in one of the main basins of the interior Arctic Ocean, the Canadian Basin,” said lead author Mary-Louise Timmermans, a professor of geology and geophysics at Yale University.
The upper ocean in the Canadian Basin has seen a two-fold increase in heat content over the past 30 years, the researchers said. They traced the source to waters hundreds of miles to the south, where reduced sea ice has left the surface ocean more exposed to summer solar warming. In turn, Arctic winds are driving the warmer water north, but below the surface waters.
“This means the effects of sea-ice loss are not limited to the ice-free regions themselves, but also lead to increased heat accumulation in the interior of the Arctic Ocean that can have climate effects well beyond the summer season,” Timmermans said. “Presently this heat is trapped below the surface layer. Should it be mixed up to the surface, there is enough heat to entirely melt the sea-ice pack that covers this region for most of the year.”
The CBC expands on the study results.
Unlike other oceans, where deeper layers tend to have colder temperatures, the Arctic has been known to have a warmer subsurface, said co-author John Toole. But the sustained temperature increase in this warm layer was a surprise.
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"That heat isn't going to go away," he said. "Eventually ... it's going have to come up to the surface and it's going to impact the ice."
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The amount of heat diffused from the warm water to the cold water above is relatively small now, she said. For the heat to quickly affect other layers and the overlaying ice, something would need to happen to mix the separated waters, like a strong wind. "But wind input is largely buffered by sea ice cover sitting over top," she said.
Hopefully, Daily Kos blogger and sea ice expert, FishOutOfWater, will share his thoughts on this pool of warm water.
Robert Scribbler provides an excellent explanation of what the heat means for the Arctic in the below clip. He is an environmental, social justice and economic writer. The comments in his stories contain some of the most insightful thoughts from climate scientists that you can find.
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