#15 Congestion in the Arctic?

Members of the Healy science crew watch the Louis St.-Laurent's helicopter, which travels with the Louis,

do a fly-by, far, far from land

September 1, 2008

Apologies for the delays in posting, due to technical difficulties on this end.

What are all these ships doing here? or "Three’s a real crowd"

My last entry was Xinhua’s coverage of the Xuelong, or Snow Dragon, a Chinese research vessel. We saw her both on radar and with the naked eye (she was about 15 miles away). Folks who have sailed the Arctic Ocean many times said how exceptionally rare it is to see another vessel up here. Larry Mayer, our chief scientist, said he has never seen another vessel, other than for a pre-planned rendezvous. Many others echoed the same experience; that it felt very, very strange to see another ship in the Arctic.

So you can imagine the dismay on board at seeing two more vessels (on radar) in two more days. The first was the Louis Saint Laurent, the Canadian icebreaker that will join the Healy for the next leg of its journey. That was less of a surprise, although this was not a planned meeting. The Healy will break ice for the Louis, a smaller Canadian icebreaker, which will tow seismic mapping equipment. The picture shows their ship’s helicopter coming to check us out --- a little show of Canadian muscle, perhaps? Another fog-bow showed up about the same time they did.

The third foreign vessel spotted this week was the Mirai, a Japanese research ship that is "ice-strengthened", but not an icebreaker. The only sign we had of it, some 30 miles away, was its trail on our radar mapping system (all ships must broadcast their unique AIS code – automated identification signal).

This hard evidence of increased interest in the Arctic from non-Arctic states reflects the fact that, as it melts, the Arctic Ocean is opening up to more traffic of all kinds. The Arctic Council will soon issue the final version of its interim 2006 Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment to provide some sense of the number of vessels plying the Arctic. The final report is expected in the fall of 2008. Until the interim report, nobody has really had a firm grasp on the number of non-military vessels in the Arctic Ocean.

#14 China in the Arctic

11:40, August 03, 2008
Icebreaker Xuelong sails into Arctic

The icebreaker Xuelong, the carrier for China's third scientific Arctic expedition, sailed into the Arctic early on Saturday, and the scientists aboard will get down to their Arctic research soon.

The Xuelong, or "Snow Dragon," crossed into the Arctic region at 01:58 local time (1358 GMT Friday) with some 110 scientists on board. The Arctic region covers an area of 21 million square kilometers the North Pole.

Members of China's third scientific Arctic expedition celebrate their entrance into the Arctic region August 2, 2008. (Xinhua)

The team will conduct comprehensive observations and research on the the Chukchi Sea, the submarine plateau of the Chukchi Sea and the Canada Basin, and is scheduled to return to the Port of Shanghai, China, on Sep. 25.

Zhang Haisheng, chief scientist of the team, said that as the Arctic has a notable influence on the climate in China, the current expedition will focus its research on the Arctic climate change's impact on climate change in China, as well as the unique biological and genes resources, and Arctic geology and geophysics.

The icebreaker set off on July 11 from Shanghai and reached the Arctic Circle after a three-week journey through the Sea of Japan, the Sea of Okhotsk, the Bering Sea and the Bering strait.

Source: Xinhua
Copyright by People's Daily Online, All Rights Reserved

#13 Ice III

Satellite image concentration of sea ice on Canadian Archipelago (right side, purple = thicker ice)
Ice – III
Melting and Moving Ice
2008-08-30The few media reports that filter their way through our limited internet access this far north show that experts are expecting new lows in arctic ice yet again this summer. Traveling with an ice scientist on board the Healy allows us to understand better what we are seeing first-hand as we pass through what is clearly a melting and shifting ice scape. Dr. Pablo Clemente-Colon, originally from Puerto Rico, is the lead scientist at the National Ice Center, which is part of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
A few statistics from Pablo help set the scene for what we are seeing: a mix of differently aged ice and a disappearance of the thickest, oldest multi-year arctic ice. As more multi-year ice melts each summer, it is harder for it to recover in winter. The thicker, older ice is replaced with younger, thinner ice, which also melts more quickly in the summer. Both kinds of melting open up more water and create more melt pools on what ice remains: both kinds of water are darker than snow and ice. With increasingly less (white) ice to reflect solar energy and increasingly more (dark) water to absorb it, the feedback loop is exacerbated and melting is accelerated, in what is known as the albedo effect.

Slide courtesy of Dr. Pablo Clemente-Colón

Summer is always a melting season for arctic ice, but over the 28 years since 1979, when satellite measurements first began, the drop in summer ice coverage of the Arctic has been considerable. Pablo provided the first two figures below; the NSIDC* provided the last one, showing the following declines in summer ice coverage in the Arctic:

September 1979: 14.16 million km2
September 2007: 3.98 million km2
August 2008*: 3.43 million km2

*From the National Snow and Ice Data Center, which is a separate entity from the NIC.
With some two weeks still to go in the Arctic summer the last figure above is likely to drop even more. And this is despite the fact that the past winter (2008-08) was colder than the year before and allowed the ice to recover some over the winter months.

The preceding information about the extent of ice cover is gathered primarily by satellite. Ice thickness is another important indicator, measured by buoys that are positioned in the ice and drift with it throughout the various arctic seasons. Buoy data over the last twenty years shows a decrease in thickness of the ice (see figure above).

Based on these figures and other observations, ice experts seem to agree that the actual rate of ice decrease is faster than in previous years. There is simply not much 10+ year ice now left. The thickest ice we have seen appears to be more along the lines of 4 to 5 year ice; only when we stopped at the ice island to deploy the buoy did we come close to seeing thicknesses indicating an age of 8 to 10 years old multi-year ice. As Pablo says, the "precipitous decrease in older ice 1988-1990" is simply continuing. Once that older ice disappears, either by melting or by being moved out of the Arctic by wind and ocean currents, it is much harder to keep the overall ice pack intact.

The image below shows the difference between 1987 and 2007 in the amount of multi-year ice (in white). Steve Howard, the high school science teacher who is traveling with us, describes the movement of ice in the arctic as follows. Since I shared his misconception about how ice moves in the Arctic, I pick up his narrative there:

"One major misconception that I had was that the thickest part of the Arctic Ice Cap was centered on the North Pole. I see now that the ice coverage up here is very dynamic, with wind and water currents pushing the floes around the Arctic Ocean basin like flakes in a cereal bowl. Currently, the thickest ice is not centered on the Pole, but closer to the northern coast of Greenland and the Canadian Archipelago. [As Pablo indicates]… . the Arctic sea ice is retreating faster than previous climate change models had predicted, a consequence of an overall warming of the Arctic at twice the global rate in combination with other atmospheric and oceanic processes…. Anomalous weather patterns, perhaps associated with o ther global changes, have helped blow a lot of this ice out of the Arctic Basin and into the Atlantic Ocean, where it drifts southward and eventually melts." To read more of Steve’s chronicles of day-to-day activities and life on board the Healy, visit his blog.

#12 Ice II - Buoy reprise

Ice II - Buoy reprise
Friday, 2008-08-29
Well, we finally reached a spot on the old multi-year ice floe that allowed one of the weather buoys to be deployed. If you look at the pictures of the ice above, you will see in part why an ice liberty was decided against (an ice liberty being the chance for all crew to get out onto the ice). There were too many melt pools and structural uncertainties. What you can see in the view from the deck is that the ice was so thick we could not break our way any further into it to get to a more stable section. This is the thickest and oldest multi-year ice we have seen the entire trip, and the type of ice that is so rapidly disappearing from the Arctic (see my Ice – III blog entry #13 for more details).

Landing folks on the ice is quite an effort. The Coast Guard crew uses a crane to lift the open steel box (the "man cage") from deck to ice, carrying one or two people each trip. The first two on ice are the rescue swimmer (yellow suit) and armed polar bear watch. (Polar bears can come out of nowhere at about 30 mph). Both men check the ice for the best place for the others to work. Once the buoy and three other men were on the ice they were able to drill a hole and set up the buoy pretty quickly. The whole operation took about an hour (not including the travel time into the ice floe).

I promised a short bit about Walt Lincoln and Peter Legnos, the business partners who designed and built the buoys. They are engineers, seamen and adventurers, now both based in Connecticut. Walt’s quiet intelligence and vision reflect his MIT PhD and his time as a submariner and Navy captain. Peter started building and sailing boats when he was just a high school kid; decades later he still hasn’t stopped experimenting in the vessels and buoys he designs. They both saw the need for an arctic buoy that could operate in water or in ice.
Until recently, most of the US National Ice Center buoys were built for ice covered polar waters and designed to be deployed on multi-year ice. As the multi-year ice melts, those buoys are sinking and researchers need to find new ways to fill in data gathering blanks. This is where the seasonal buoys that Walt and Peter are developing come in. A NOAA Small Business Innovative Research Grant funds production of their buoys, which are being deployed as part of the larger International Arctic Buoy Program (IABP). The IABP is not a classic international organization, but acts as a forum for sharing of buoy information amongst the arctic states, and other interested states and entities (e.g. Japan, the World Meteorological Organization). All of the members coordinate to provide as much buoy coverage as possible for monitoring ice, weather and other data in the Arctic Ocean. The IABP is yet another example of a functioning mechanism between arctic states that does not need the formal structural requirements of international organizations yet manages to provide an effective forum for the states that know most about a particular arctic issue to address it first hand.