By Patrick Lynch NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. July 19, 2016 Last Updated: July 19, 2016
Two key climate change indicators -- global surface temperatures and Arctic sea ice extent -- have broken numerous records through the first half of 2016, according to NASA analyses of ground-based observations and satellite data.
Each of the first six months of 2016 set a record as the warmest respective month globally in the modern temperature record, which dates to 1880, according to scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. The six-month period from January to June was also the planet's warmest half-year on record, with an average temperature 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the late nineteenth century.
Each of the first six months of 2016 set a record as the warmest respective month globally in the modern temperature record, which dates to 1880. Meanwhile, five of the first six months set records for the smallest monthly Arctic sea ice extent since consistent satellite records began in 1979. This video is public domain and can be downloaded from the Scientific Visualization Studio [ http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/12306 ].
Five of the first six months of 2016 also set records for the smallest respective monthly Arctic sea ice extent since consistent satellite records began in 1979, according to analyses developed by scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland. The one exception, March, recorded the second smallest extent for that month.
While these two key climate indicators have broken records in 2016, NASA scientists said it is more significant that global temperature and Arctic sea ice are continuing their decades-long trends of change. Both trends are ultimately driven by rising concentrations of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The extent of Arctic sea ice at the peak of the summer melt season now typically covers 40 percent less area than it did in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Arctic sea ice extent in September, the seasonal low point in the annual cycle, has been declining at a rate of 13.4 percent per decade.
Chunks of sea ice, melt ponds and open water are all seen in this image captured at an altitude of 1,500 feet by the NASA's Digital Mapping System instrument during an Operation IceBridge flight over the Chukchi Sea on Saturday, July 16, 2016. Credits: NASA/Goddard/Operation IceBridge
"While the El Niño event in the tropical Pacific this winter gave a boost to global temperatures from October onwards, it is the underlying trend which is producing these record numbers," GISS Director Gavin Schmidt said.
Previous El Niño events have driven temperatures to what were then record levels, such as in 1998. But in 2016, even as the effects of the recent El Niño taper off, global temperatures have risen well beyond those of 18 years ago because of the overall warming that has taken place in that time.
The first six months of 2016 were the warmest six-month period in NASA's modern temperature record, which dates to 1880. Credits: NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies
The global trend in rising temperatures is outpaced by the regional warming in the Arctic, said Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at NASA Goddard.
"It has been a record year so far for global temperatures, but the record high temperatures in the Arctic over the past six months have been even more extreme," Meier said. "This warmth as well as unusual weather patterns have led to the record low sea ice extents so far this year."
NASA tracks temperature and sea ice as part of its effort to understand the Earth as a system and to understand how Earth is changing. In addition to maintaining 19 Earth-observing space missions, NASA also sends researchers around the globe to investigate different facets of the planet at closer range. Right now, NASA researchers are working across the Arctic to better understand both the processes driving increased sea ice melt and the impacts of rising temperatures on Arctic ecosystems.
NASA's long-running Operation IceBridge campaign last week began a series of airborne measurements of melt ponds on the surface of the Arctic sea ice cap. Melt ponds are shallow pools of water that form as ice melts. Their darker surface can absorb more sunlight and accelerate the melting process. IceBridge is flying out of Barrow, Alaska, during sea ice melt season to capture melt pond observations at a scale never before achieved. Recent studies have found that the formation of melt ponds early in the summer is a good predictor of the yearly minimum sea ice extent in September.
"No one has ever, from a remote sensing standpoint, mapped the large-scale depth of melt ponds on sea ice," said Nathan Kurtz, IceBridge’s project scientist and a sea ice researcher at NASA Goddard. "The information we’ll collect is going to show how much water is retained in melt ponds and what kind of topography is needed on the sea ice to constrain them, which will help improve melt pond models."
Operation IceBridge is a NASA airborne mission that has been flying multiple campaigns at both poles each year since 2009, with a goal of maintaining critical continuity of observations of sea ice and the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.
At the same time, NASA researchers began in earnest this year a nearly decade-long, multi-faceted field study of Arctic ecosystems in Alaska and Canada. The Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) will study how forests, permafrost and other ecosystems are responding to rising temperatures in the Arctic, where climate change is unfolding faster than anywhere else on the planet.
ABoVE consists of dozens individual experiments that over years will study the region's changing forests, the cycle of carbon movement between the atmosphere and land, thawing permafrost, the relationship between fire and climate change, and more.
June heat breaks record, worse than Dust Bowl month in 1933 July 19, 2016 WASHINGTON (AP) — America's warm, wild and costly weather broke another record with the hottest June, federal meteorologists say. And if that's not enough, they calculated that 2016 is flirting with the U.S. record for most billion-dollar weather disasters. [...] http://www.nola.com/weather/index.ssf/2016/07/june_breaks_heat_billion-dolla.html [with comment]
Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier breaking up from inside out.
Rift in the Pine Island Glacier NASA
By Pakalolo 2016/11/28 18:26
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) just issued a press release [ http://news.agu.org/press-release/west-antarctic-ice-shelf-breaking-up-from-the-inside-out/ ] informing the world that a key glacier in West Antarctica is breaking up from the inside out. This suggests, said the AGU statement, that the ocean is weakening the ice on the edges of the Antarctic continent.
The Pine Island Glacier and, “the Thwaites Glacier, sit at the outer edge of one of the most active ice streams on the continent”. They provide a buttressing effect to the ice stream, by creating a backward stress that balances the downward stress of the ice trying to flow out to sea.
In 2015, a massive chunk of ice broke off of the Pine Island Glacier. AGU notes that it wasn't until they started testing for new image processing software recently “that they noticed a crack had formed at the very base of the ice shelf nearly 20 miles inland in 2013. The rift propagated upward over two years, until it broke through the ice surface and set the iceberg adrift over 12 days in late July and early August 2015.
The AGU reports:
“It’s generally accepted that it’s no longer a question of whether the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will melt, it’s a question of when,” said Ian Howat, associate professor of Earth sciences at Ohio State and lead author of the new study. “This kind of rifting behavior provides another mechanism for rapid retreat of these glaciers, adding to the probability that we may see significant collapse of West Antarctica in our lifetimes.”
snip
“Rifts usually form at the margins of an ice shelf, where the ice is thin and subject to shearing that rips it apart,” he explained. “However, this latest event in the Pine Island Glacier was due to a rift that originated from the center of the ice shelf and propagated out to the margins. This implies that something weakened the center of the ice shelf, with the most likely explanation being a crevasse melted out at the bedrock level by a warming ocean.”
Another clue: The rift opened in the bottom of a “valley” in the ice shelf where the ice had thinned compared to the surrounding ice shelf.
The valley is likely a sign of something researchers have long suspected: Because the bottom of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet lies below sea level, ocean water can intrude far inland and remain unseen. New valleys forming on the surface would be one outward sign that ice was melting away far below.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is particularly vulnerable to global warming caused by our burning of fossil fuels. It’s collapse will be catastrophic. Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers have 10 feet of sea level rise currently locked up in ice, the rapid flow of that ice into the ocean would submerge most coastal cities throughout the world.
Pine Island Glacier has undergone several major iceberg calving events over the past decades. These typically occurred when a rift at the heavily fractured shear margin propagated across the width of the ice shelf. This type of calving is common on polar ice shelves, with no clear connection to ocean-ice dynamic forcing. In contrast, we report on the recent development of multiple rifts initiating from basal crevasses in the center of the ice shelf, resulted in calving further upglacier than previously observed. Coincident with rift formation was the sudden disintegration of the ice mélange that filled the northern shear margin, resulting in ice sheet detachment from this margin. Examination of ice velocity suggests that this internal rifting resulted from the combination of a change in ice shelf stress regime caused by disintegration of the mélange and intensified melting within basal crevasses, both of which may be linked to ocean forcing.
In 2015, a 225-square-mile iceberg broke off of the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica, and researchers at The Ohio State University have discovered that the event was no ordinary breakup. The culprit: a deep subsurface rift that cracked through the ice nearly 20 miles inland—a sign that the largest ice reserve in the world may be melting sooner rather than later.
Talk like a maverick. Act like an extremist Republican.
Robinson Meyer Nov 28, 2016
There’s a pattern shaping up in the Trump administration, at least when it comes to climate change.
It works like this: Donald Trump, the president-elect himself, says something that sounds like he might be moderating on the issue. Then, his staff takes a radical action in the other direction.
“I think there is some connectivity” between human activity and the warming climate, Trump said. “There is some, something. It depends on how much.”
Of course, there is more than “some” connectivity. Scientists overwhelmingly recognize that humans have dramatically warmed the climate [ http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/ ] by emitting greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide. The atmosphere now traps heat far more efficiently than it did even 50 years ago, quickly outpacing the “normal” rate of planetary climate change [ https://xkcd.com/1732/ ].
But here’s the second part of the two-step. While Trump was saying something almost moderate, his actual transition team was acting like a more extremist version of George W. Bush-era Republicans. A day after Trump talked to the Times, The Guardian reported that the Trump administration plans could cut all of NASA’s Earth science research [ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/22/nasa-earth-donald-trump-eliminate-climate-change-research ].
NASA’s scientists do some of the finest climate and weather science in the world, and the agency’s fleet of Earth-observing satellites is peerless. Yet Bob Walker, a Trump campaign advisor, told the paper that all this was “politically-correct environmental monitoring.”
“I believe that climate research is necessary, but it has been heavily politicized, which has undermined a lot of the work that researchers have been doing,” Walker told the Guardian. He said that some projects could be moved to other agencies.
These plans are still up in the air. But the Trump team’s staffing choices should also raise concerns. Myron Ebell, who is leading Trump’s EPA transition team, helped lobby the second Bush administration [ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16112016/myron-ebell-climate-denier-epa-donald-trump ] to barely do anything to stop climate change. He has been involved in professional climate-change denial circles since the 1990s.
A staffing choice isn’t a firm policy decision, but there isn’t much ambiguity about the Trump administration’s intentions so far. Trump may be sounding a new tune on the existence of climate change. (Though some journalists read the New York Times comments [ https://grist.org/politics/trump-new-york-times-climate/ ] to mean he hasn’t changed his mind about it at all.) But his policy team seems to want to both squash research about global warming while withdrawing the United States from any diplomatic attempt to do anything about it.
That’s the Trump two-step. The president-elect may look like he’s keeping an open mind, but his transition team is acting like a more extreme version of the Bush-era climate deniers.
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