DragonI

This Year's Hole in the Ozone Is Twice the Size of the U.S.

If you’ve been looking to cast yourself into a deep hole from which you can never return (I have!), the one in the ozone layeris a prime choice right now.

earther.gizmodo.com

The hole in the atmosphere’s ozone layer just reached its maximum annual size, experts at European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (ECMWF) said on Tuesday. The extent of the hole over Antarctica reached 8.8 million square miles (23 million square kilometers) this year, making it one of the largest and deepest ozone holes in recent history. For context, that’s more than twice the size of the entire U.S.

The ozone is the part of the planet’s atmosphere that absorbs most of the dangerous incoming ultraviolet radiation from the sun. But humans’ penchant for using ozone-depleting substances for refrigeration and air conditioning caused a hole in that layer to open up annually each year. The alarming growth of the hole led world leaders to ban the ozone-depleting chemicals in the 1980s, but the ozone hole is still a huge problem that will take decades to totally heal.

To fully heal the ozone layer and protect all life on Earth from dangerous levels of ultraviolet radiation, we’ve urgently got to stop putting chemicals into the atmosphere that mess with the ozone. A key way to do that is to ensure everyone in the world is adhering to the UN agreement known as the Montreal Protocol, under which nations pledged to rapidly phase out of using those chemicals altogether.

Summer and wildfires have become increasingly synonymous for many parts of Canada, but this year's fire focus has shifted further north. 2019 has already seen an unprecedented number of fires north of the Arctic Circle, both in North America and Eurasia in the wake of what was, globally, the hottest June on record, and what will likely be the hottest July.

Through June and the first half of July, the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), part of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, has tracked more than 100 major fires north of the Arctic Circle.

— The Weather Network

A visibly exhausted and starving polar bear wandered into a major Russian industrial city on Tuesday, hundreds of kilometres away from its natural habitat, as widespread wildfires rage across the Arctic Circle.

—  Euronews

Several wildfires and smoke between about 62°N and 69°N in #Alaska, #USA, and the #YukonTerritory, #Canada 22 July 2019 Enh. nat. col. with hot spots #Aqua #Terra #MODIS Full-size: https://t.co/UGgaX8LpaD#Wildfire album: https://t.co/5IqDrkAjrV #RemoteSensingpic.twitter.com/JYevd1nnjG

— Pierre Markuse (@Pierre_Markuse) July 23, 2019

The #siberianfires in  #KrasnoyarskKrai and #SakhaRepublic, #Russia now created a smoke lid extending over 4 and half million of sq km over central northern Asia. This is staggering. @m_parrington @CopernicusEU @DanLindsey77 

— Santiago Gassó @SanGasso July 24, 2019 

• So Much of the Arctic Is on Fire, You Can See It From Space, Live Science
• Satellite Images Ignite Alarm Over 'Unprecedented' Scale and Planet-Heating Emissions of Raging Arctic Wildfires, Common Dreams
• The Arctic is on fire in summer 2019, The Weather Network
• Unprecedented Wildfires Are Smothering The Arctic In Smoke, Forbes
• Climate crisis amplifying risk of wildfires in Arctic, World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) 
• Anchorage was 90 degrees on July 4. That's not a typo, CNN

Trump’s Order to Open Arctic Waters to Drilling Was Unlawful, Federal Judge Finds

The decision has broad implications for Mr. Trump’s effort to push drilling across the American coastline and on public lands.

www.nytimes.com

In a major legal blow to President Trump’s push to expand offshore oil and gas development, a federal judge ruled that an executive order by Mr. Trump that lifted an Obama-era ban on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean was unlawful.

The decision, by Judge Sharon L. Gleason of the United States District Court for the District of Alaska, concluded late Friday that President Barack Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawal of about 1120 million acres of Arctic Ocean from drilling “will remain in full force and effect unless and until revoked by Congress.” 

She wrote that an April 2017 executive order by Mr. Trump revoking the drilling ban “is unlawful, as it exceeded the president’s authority.”

The case adds to a growing roster of legal losses for Mr. Trump’s efforts to undo Mr. Obama’s environmental legacy. 

Most immediately, the decision will force the Interior Department to withdraw the waters of the Arctic Ocean from its forthcoming plan detailing where the federal government intends to lease federal waters to oil companies for offshore drilling. A draft of that plan published last year called for drilling off the entire United States coastline.

“While we disagree with the decision, our nation still has a significant opportunity before us in the development of the next offshore leasing plan to truly embrace our nation’s energy potential and ensure American consumers and businesses continue to benefit from U.S. energy leadership.”

The Arctic Could Still Warm Over 15 Degrees This Century Even If We Meet the Paris Agreement Pledges

A new report from the United Nations shows that it’s basically game over for the Arctic as we know it.

earther.gizmodo.com|Brian Kahn

Even if carbon pollution magically stopped tomorrow, the region’s winters would still warm an astonishing 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) by century’s end, according to the UN. Meeting the Paris Agreement pledges—which do not get us to the two degree warming goal—would lead to that level of warming by midcentury and up to 9 degrees Celsius (16.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, along the way unraveling one of the most fragile ecosystems on the planet and displacing people who have done very little to cause the disruption.

The report was released on Tuesday at a meeting of the United Nations Environment Program. The synthesis pulls together recent research and puts it all in one terrifying graphic-driven document. The litany of changes that have already occurred is unsettling, but the real shock is in what could come next.

• The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe
• Sea ice extent, which has shrunk about 40 percent since regular satellite monitoring began in 1979, could reach zero percent in summer as early as the 2030s. 
• Old, thick sea ice will likely be gone even sooner.
• Permafrost, frozen ground full of carbon, could thaw out and destroy a third of all the infrastructure in the Arctic (and also release deadly strains of anthrax).
• Rising temperatures could also unleash a host of other infectious diseases like Lyme disease, which is already on the rise in Canada.

And all these bleak findings don’t even get into other issues like plastic pollution, heavy metal contamination, or ocean acidification, all of which are and will continue to compound the region’s woes. 

Over the past three decades of global warming, the oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic has declined by a stunning 95 percent, according the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s annual Arctic Report Card.

In the Arctic Ocean, a difference of 2 degrees can be huge. If it goes from 31 Fahrenheit to 33 Fahrenheit, you’re going from ice skating to swimming. … the Arctic is an early warning system for the climate.

The oldest ice can be thought of as a kind of glue that holds the Arctic together and, through its relative permanence, helps keep the Arctic cold even in long summers.

“The younger the ice, the thinner the ice, the easier it is to go away,” said Don Perovich, a scientist at Dartmouth who coordinated the sea ice section of the yearly report.

What matters is volume — not just ice area

Putin is running Arctic circles around the United States

Russia may not own the entire Arctic, but it definitely owns everybody's attention.

www.bloomberg.com

“We all stand to make money in the Arctic, but of course this will all grind to a halt if we see a new arms race instead,” former Defense Department policy analyst Robert English

Russian officials’ rhetoric about its Arctic presence, coupled with military re-entrenchment, has been less diplomatic. It’s the flipside of what Heather Conley of CSIS has called the “maddening duality” of Russia’s strategy.

Dmitry Rogozin, deputy prime minister and director of Putin's Government Commission for Arctic Development Issues, has called the 1867 sale of Alaska a “betrayal of Russian power status” and has said that the Kremlin has a “right to reclaim our lost colonies.”

“The Arctic has always been Russian”, Artur Chilingarov 

Russian reconnaissance unit members of the Northern Fleet's Arctic mechanized infantry brigade conduct military exercises near the Lovozero settlement.

• Selfies Expose Russia’s Arctic Bases,  Digital Forensic Research Lab
• Russia's new Arctic Trefoil military base unveiled with virtual tour, BBC
• The Arctic: Frozen conflict, The Economist
• Territorial claims in the Arctic, Wikipedia

Climate change: The Arctic as it is known today is almost certainly gone | The Economist

On current trends, the Arctic will be ice-free in summer by 2040

www.economist.com

THOSE who doubt the power of human beings to change Earth’s climate should look to the Arctic, and shiver. There is no need to pore over records of temperatures and atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations. The process is starkly visible in the shrinkage of the ice that covers the Arctic ocean. In the past 30 years, the minimum coverage of summer ice has fallen by half; its volume has fallen by three-quarters.

The Arctic is not merely a bellwether of matters climatic, but an actor in them (see pages Briefing).

If the Arctic heats faster than the tropics, this difference will decrease and wind speeds will slow—as they have done, in the northern hemisphere, by between 5 and 15% in the past 30 years. Less wind might sound desirable. It is not. One consequence is erratic behaviour of the northern jet stream, a circumpolar current, the oscillations of which sometimes bring cold air south and warm air north. More exaggerated oscillations would spell blizzards and heatwaves in unexpected places at unexpected times.

A big patch of plastic garbage has been discovered in the Arctic

Scientists have discovered a new garbage patch — this time floating in the remote, frozen reaches of the Arctic. Plastics discarded in Europe and the East Coast of North America slowly drift to a watery graveyard north of Norway, according to a new study — endangering wildlife already struggling to adapt to a changing climate.

www.theverge.com|Rachel Becker

There are obscene amounts of plastic drifting, floating, and sinking through the Earth’s oceans. Between five and 13 million metric tons entered the ocean in 2010 alone, according to a 2015 study. Plastic poses a particularly acute threat to wildlife, which can become entangled in it or eat it, causing birds, fish, and marine mammals to slowly starve.

We’ve seen evidence that plastic is making its way to the Arctic — somehow. Microplastics have been found embedded in Arctic ice cores, and photos snapped from a deep-sea Arctic observatory suggest that the amount of plastic litter sinking to the ocean floor has been increasing for more than a decade. But where that plastic is coming from is something of a mystery, because the region’s inhospitable climates had prevented a thorough survey. So in 2013, the Tara Oceans circumpolar expedition zigged and zagged around the Arctic Circle, sampling for plastic.

Overheated Arctic sign of climate change 'vicious circle'

Freakishly high temperatures in the Arctic driven by heat-packed oceans and northward winds have been reinforced by a "vicious circle" of climate change, scientists said Thursday.

phys.org

Air above the Polar ice cap has been 9-12 degrees Celsius (16.2 to 21.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above average during the last four weeks, according the data from the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), which tracks hourly changes in Arctic weather.

And during several days last week, temperatures above the North Pole were a balmy zero degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit), a full 20C (36F) above the levels typical for mid-November, said Martin Stendel, a DMI climate researcher based in Copenhagen.

"This is by far the highest recorded" in the era of satellite data, starting in 1979, he told AFP.

The US National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that sea ice extent in October was the lowest on record, some 6.4 million square kilometres (2.5 million square miles).

Ice cover at the top of the globe shrank to its smallest area in 2016—some 4.14 million sq km (1.6 million sq miles)—on September 16.

"The winds carrying this heat is a temporary—and fairly unprecedented—weather phenomenon," said Valerie Masson Delmotte, a scientist at the Climate and Environment Sciences Laboratory in Paris.

A second contributor is the record-strong Pacific Ocean El Nino that tapered off earlier this year—after pumping a couple tenths of a degree of added warming into the atmosphere. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-11-overheated-arctic-climate-vicious-circle.html#jCp

“Despite onset of #PolarNight, temperatures near #NorthPole increasing. Extraordinary situation right now in #Arctic, w/record low #seaice,” added Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.

This is the second year in a row that temperatures near the North Pole have risen to freakishly warm levels. During 2015’s final days, the temperature near the Pole spiked to the melting point thanks to a massive storm that pumped warm air into the region.

So what’s going on here?

“It’s about 20C [36 degrees Fahrenheit] warmer than normal over most of the Arctic Ocean, along with cold anomalies of about the same magnitude over north-central Asia,” Jennifer Francis, an Arctic specialist at Rutgers University, said by email Wednesday.

“The Arctic warmth is the result of a combination of record-low sea-ice extent for this time of year, probably very thin ice, and plenty of warm/moist air from lower latitudes being driven northward by a very wavy jet stream.”

“The sea ice is at a record low right now, for this time of year, that’s one thing,” Serreze said. “And why it’s so low — again, there’s so much heat in the upper ocean in these ice-free areas, the ice just can’t form right now. The ocean’s just got to get rid of this heat somehow, and it’s having a hard time doing so.”

For Climate Scientists, the Siberian Anthrax Outbreak Is a Sign of What’s to Come — Pacific Standard

We don’t yet know what else lies buried within the Earth’s permafrost — which is scary, because warming in the Arctic is accelerating.

psmag.com|Eric Holthaus

If you’re a climate scientist, what happens when your dire predictions start coming true? The ongoing anthrax outbreak in Siberia is offering us a preview: What was once considered a future theoretical possibility — a re-animated deadly bacterium emerging from the permafrost — is now a reality.

Throughout July, temperatures in northern Siberia have soared as high as 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius) during what’s typically the warmest part of the year. It’s unknown exactly how the disease emerged — possibly via a thawed reindeer carcass or human remains at a crumbling, above-ground cemetery that’s typical of the region. Russia has sent troops trained for biological warfare to help establish a quarantine in what’s become the first anthrax outbreak in the region since 1941.

As my colleague Francie Diep wrote on Tuesday, this is an “apocalyptic-sounding chain of events” and the initial news coverage surely capitalized on that tone. But what’s happening in Siberia — while scary! — will not, by itself, threaten the viability of human civilization. In fact, it was expected.

Scientists have been warning for years that melting permafrost might release ancient pathogens, frozen for millennia or longer in northern soils. Over the last decade or so, bacteria have been discovered alive in Alaskan permafrost at temperatures as low as minus-40 degrees Celsius, and in permafrost layers as old as three million years in Siberia. Although the vast majority of known bacteria are harmless, we don’t yet know what’s buried up there, or how dangerous it might be to humans.

And it’s clear that, for now, weather conditions in Siberia are far outside their normal range. Last month, parts of Siberia near where the anthrax outbreak is occurring were as much as 18 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) warmer than normal, averaged over the entire month. That’s like New York City suddenly adopting the climate of Tucson, Arizona, for the whole month of July. To say the Arctic climate is off the charts this year is an understatement.

Permafrost-borne diseases are only one threat of climate change, and scientists warn that further abrupt changes are possible (if not likely) unless greenhouse gas emissions are quickly reduced. At this point, humanity has a decision to make — which is good news in the sense that a different course is still possible. But as with this week’s anthrax outbreak, if we continue to lock in future warming, we won’t be able to say we weren’t warned of the consequences.