Photograph lays bare reality of melting Greenland sea ice

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/18/photograph-melting-greenland-sea-ice-fjord-dogs-water

Alison Rourke and Fiona Harvey
Mon 17 Jun 2019 19.56 EDT

Rapidly melting sea ice in Greenland has presented an unusual hazard for research teams retrieving their oceanographic moorings and weather station equipment.

A photo, taken by Steffen Olsen from the Centre for Ocean and Ice at the Danish Meteorological Institute on 13 June, showed sled dogs wading through water ankle-deep on top of a melting ice sheet in the country’s north-west. In the startling image, it seems as though the dogs are walking on water.

The photo, taken in the Inglefield Bredning fjord, depicted water on top of what Olsen said was an ice sheet 1.2 metres thick.

His colleague at the institute, Rasmus Tonboe, tweeted that the “rapid melt and sea ice with low permeability and few cracks leaves the melt water on top”.

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Melting events such as the one pictured would normally not happen until later in the summer, in late June or July. Mottram said it was too soon to say what role global warming had played, because although these temperatures were unusual, the conditions were not unprecedented and “still a weather-driven extreme event, so it’s hard to pin it down to climate change alone”.

In general, however, she said: “Our climate model simulations expect there to be a general decline in the length of the sea ice season around Greenland, [but] how fast and how much is very much dependent on how much global temperature rises.”

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On Saturday, the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang said European weather models showed that temperatures over parts of Greenland peaked at 22.2C (40F) above normal last Wednesday, the day before the photo was taken.

Above-average temperatures over nearly all of the Arctic ocean and Greenland during May have led to an early ice retreat, with the second-lowest extent of ice in the 40-year satellite record being registered, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre.
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The centre said that Arctic sea ice for May was 12m square kilometres (4.7m square miles), 1.13m square kilometres below the 1981-2010 average.

Air temperatures at the end of May along the western Greenland coast were as much as 7C [12.6F] above the 1981–2010 reference average for the month, the centre said. It also recorded Arctic ocean temperatures of 2-4C [3.6-7.2F] above the average.

“The melting is big and early,” Jason Box, an ice climatologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, told the Washington Post.

At a local level, the sea ice melt provides significant problems for communities in Greenland, who rely on it for transport, hunting and fishing.

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