"Inside this piece of ice is this microscopic forest; all these little bubbles, these little channels are home for these microscopic organisms.
"Oh wow, that's beautiful," exclaims biological oceanographer Mattias Cape, examining a meter-long cylinder of ice. Greenpeace is traveling from the Arctic to the Antarctic to highlight the threats facing our oceans and part of its campaign for ocean sanctuaries.With climate change and melting ice putting more pressure on Arctic sea life, the group wants more of our oceans to be set aside as protected reserves, free from commercial exploitation.Negotiations towards a Global Ocean Treaty at the UN are under way and Greenpeace is part of a broader coalition that is campaigning for legislation that would see 30% of our oceans protected by 2030. "The layer that is under the ice has been coming up closer to the surface and melting the ice from underneath." Environment. Until now, climate models have predicted a slow and steady increase of Arctic temperatures, but a new study shows that warming is occurring at a more rapid pace.“We have been clearly underestimating the rate of temperature increases in the atmosphere nearest to the sea level, which has ultimately caused sea ice to disappear faster than we had anticipated,” said Jens Hesselbjerg Christensen, a University of Copenhagen professor and one of the researchers involved in the study, in a statement.Their findings, published in the journal Nature at the end of July, showed the unusually high temperatures currently being seen in the Arctic Ocean have only been observed during the previous ice age.Ice core analyses have revealed that temperatures over the Greenland ice sheet increased several times during that time, between 10 to 12 degrees, over a period of 40 to 100 years.“Changes are occurring so rapidly during the summer months that sea ice is likely to disappear faster than most climate models have ever predicted,” Hesselbjerg Christensen said.In June 2019, a photograph of the early ice melt in northwestern Greenland made headlines around the world.It showed sled dogs struggling through five or six centimeters of meltwater pooling on top of the ice. Related impacts include ocean circulation changes, increased input of freshwater, and ocean acidification. "It's tragic to hear something like that and I think this is an extreme case of cherry picking because obviously you can find small individual good things about climate change but in the broad perspective the negative downside of this to us as humans, the environment, the ocean, will outweigh the small potential benefits substantially," says Scheller. "It has definitely thinned in this area, it has thinned everywhere" says team leader, polar physicist Till Wagner, of the University of North Carolina Wilmington.Since 1990 the thickness of sea ice here has decreased by a third, from about 3 meters to 2 meters, according to the Fram Strait Arctic Observatory.The Fram Strait is where warm waters originating in Mexico are brought up by the Gulf Stream, flowing thousands of miles through the Atlantic to meet the Arctic ice edge. In the end it's the political will that needs to be there." But it may prove to be challenging, with some powerhouse nations, including Russia and the US, looking at short term economic gains at the expense of the planet's future.The US has not signed on to the Law of the Sea treaty, the UN guidelines on how countries use our oceans, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently hailed the economic opportunities presented by shrinking levels of sea ice opening up shipping lanes and a wealth of natural resources. "It isolates the ice from the hot devil water sitting at the bottom waiting to come up" Wagner explains. The Fram Strait is the main gateway through which sea ice leaves the Arctic Ocean.
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The present study quantifies the magnitude of Arctic sea-ice loss in the boreal summer. 80% of the ice movement in and out of the Arctic Ocean happens through here. "And then right below there is this warm water, that is almost 3.5 degrees and this is the warm Atlantic water" Cape adds. "In the top layer [of the ocean] you see there is a ton of biomass between 10 meters and 30 meters" Wagner says. Sea ice is rapidly disappearing as a result of climate change and warming seawater temperatures. "We can put a deal in place that the status quo goes on or we can put a deal in place that has teeth, that will allow us to designate areas in the high seas for fully protected marine reserves," says Sune Scheller, Greenpeace's expedition leader. Experts fear that greenhouse gases trapped in the ice are being released as it melts, adding to those pumped into the atmosphere by human activities. The Arctic sea ice is melting faster than climate models predicted, researchers at the University of Copenhagen and the Danish Meteorological Institute have warned. Here, the scientists spend days working on top of the precarious ice floes, keeping a watchful eye out for polar bears while drilling into the ice to measure its thickness. The Arctic is experiencing a vast melting of sea ice. The effects of global warming in the Arctic, or climate change in the Arctic include rising air and water temperatures, loss of sea ice, and melting of the Greenland ice sheet with a related cold temperature anomaly, observed since the 1970s.