New measurements indicate that the effects of global warming are much worse than previously suspected and could lead to a complete melting of Arctic summer ice in as little as 13 years, a leading climate scientist says.
The finding follows a U.N. report that accelerated warming would have catastrophic implications for humans and wildlife, leading to food and water shortages across the planet.
The sea ice data were salvaged from a British Royal Navy submarine, the HMS Tireless, which was conducting exercises under the Arctic last month until an onboard explosion.
Two Royal Navy sailors died in the blast, the effects of which, perhaps ironically, were dampened by the polar ice, said Peter Wadhams, an oceanographer at Cambridge University who has made numerous submarine expeditions to measure the thickness of the Arctic ice for more than 40 years.
Wadhams and a colleague, Nick Hughes, survived the explosion and managed to preserve their data, which suggest that sea ice in the summer could soon disappear altogether, Britain’s ITN Television reported Tuesday.
Scientists had previously predicted that the summer sea ice would disappear from the Arctic by 2040. But Wadhams’ measurements indicate that the thinning was already approaching 50 percent and that the ice could disappear by 2020.
“What’s happening to the Earth as a whole is a catastrophe, and the disappearance of Arctic sea ice has got to be one of the first indicators of the catastrophic changes,” Wadhams told ITN’s Lawrence McGinty. “It’s something we can see. We can see it from space — the Arctic pack ice is there, it’s white, and soon it won’t be there.”
If the findings — which were collected by measuring the ice with three-dimensional sonar equipment and assessing water temperature and salt levels — are confirmed, they would represent a significant acceleration of the damaging effects long predicted from global warming.
“Peter’s result, and, indeed, other results about how much open water there is in the winter in the Arctic these recent winters — how little multi-year ice there is now, ice that survives several seasons — this is all part of a pattern that suggests things are happening more quickly than we had expected,” said Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey.
Scientist says projection ‘overly pessimistic’
Walt Meier, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, called Wadhams’ 13-year projection “extreme, but not completely implausible,” and cautioned that the thinning could simply be the result of “compression of thicker ice into a smaller region.”
“It’s dangerous to extrapolate into the future, especially from such a short period,” Meier told MSNBC.com on Tuesday. While Wadhams’ estimates “are not totally out of line with possibility,” he added, “my feeling is that estimates of 13 to 20 years for the loss of summer sea ice are overly pessimistic.”
Wadhams is one of the world’s most respected oceanographers specializing in climate science. His measurements of the Arctic ice on a similar expedition in 1996 showed that the ice had thinned each summer by an average of 40 percent between the 1970s and 1990s. The new research, which is funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, suggested that the rate of annual summer thinning is accelerating.
The thickness of the sea ice around both poles has long worried climate specialists because the cycle of freezing and thawing creates a “feedback loop.” As the ice thins over time, it is able to absorb less heat from the atmosphere, which causes even more warming.
U.N.: Too late to reverse impact
In a sign that the cycle is expanding year-round, measurements by the Snow and Ice Data Center showed last month that the winter sea ice this year was the second smallest on record.
In a report issued Friday, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the effects on wildlife could be major, with the most immediate impact on Arctic wildlife like seals and polar bears.
The effects of accelerated global warming would be more broad around the globe, the panel said, warning that 20 percent to 30 percent of plant and animal species were at increased risk of extinction. Some parts of Europe could lose up to 60 percent of their species by 2080, it said.
In addition, as many as 130 million people could face severe food and water shortages across Asia by 2050, the report said. By the 2080s, wheat could disappear entirely from the African continent.
“Even the most stringent mitigation efforts cannot avoid further impacts of climate change in the next few decades,” the report concluded.
Research was aboard sub that exploded
Wadhams and Hughes undertook the expedition aboard the HMS Tireless, a Royal Navy submarine that was conducting joint exercises under the Arctic ice with the United States when a self-contained oxygen generation candle exploded March 21. The submarine’s nuclear reactor was not affected, the British Defense Ministry said, but two sailors died and another was injured.
“It was a huge bang, and I was expecting to die,” Wadhams told reporters by telephone after the explosion. But the ice he was studying was so thin, he said, that the sub was able to to smash its way through as it surfaced, limiting the damage.
The research team’s sonar equipment was crushed as the Tireless surfaced, Wadhams said, but by then, it had already completed surveying more than 2,000 kilometers of the Arctic from Spitsbergen, a Norwegian island, to Alaska.