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Meltdown in the North

David Shepherd
Institute of Geosciences
University of Campinas - UNICAMP
Scientific American, October 2003.
www.sciam.com

The cooperation between scientists of different fields and the measurements they have made over the last decades has painted a disturbing picture of climate change in the Arctic: summer temperatures at their highest level in 400 years, and the lengthening of the snow-free season in the Arctic by several days per decade.
Some of the effects of climate change are also becoming apparent, as glaciers shrink at a rate 3 times larger today than they did 10 years ago. Permafrost is thawing, which has lead to an increase in the discharge of fresh water into the Arctic Basin from Russian rivers (studies of the paleo-record indicate that dramatic changes in global ocean circulation, and therefore climate, would happen if the outflow of water from the Arctic Basin became fresher than a certain level). The warmer weather has encouraged the spreading of vegetation, altering the local carbon cycle. Most strikingly, the area covered by ice has decreased by 3% per decade since satellite surveying began in 1972, and the thickness of the ice coverage has decreased as much as 40% in the last decades.
Since in the global climatic system the Arctic receives heat transferred from equatorial regions, climate change in the Arctic is without question connected to climate change on a global level. However, due to the complex nature of the processes (and their interactions) that govern climate in the Arctic, it is not known whether the warming of the Arctic can be attributed to natural warming following the Little Ice Age which ended around 1850 or to man made Greenhouse Warming. An effort to coordinate research efforts by federal agencies in countries around the Arctic has lead to the creation of SEARCH (Study of Environmental Arctic Change), which has already made discoveries concerning patterns of wind circulation in the Arctic. Hopefully, enough will be discovered to elucidate the causes of Arctic warming, and predict the consequences for the Arctic and the world.

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