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“Since the dawn of this, of the modern satellite record [in] 1979, it’s [been] decreasing in all months,” Serreze said. “In September, especially. September is the end of the melt season in the Arctic, and that’s when the biggest trends have been occurring. Something like 13 percent per decade. It’s tremendous.”
Sea ice grows in the winter, when the Arctic is very cold and dark, and then dies back every summer, when the region gets pounded by nonstop sunlight. But for all of human history, there’s always been some Arctic sea ice that doesn’t melt in the summer — the thick, multiyear ice that Gordon Brower talked about.
And like Brower, Serreze says there’s much less of it now.
“It’s getting so warm now that it’s hard to form all this really old, thick, multiyear ice, and some of [it] just melts away,” Serreze said. “But we really can’t regenerate it anymore.”
That means sea ice in the Arctic is getting thinner while also covering a smaller area. And that is a very big deal because one of the most important things polar ice does for everyone on Earth is reflect sunlight and heat back into space.
Scientists call it “albedo” — how reflective something is. And Serreze says sea ice in the Arctic is “one of the of the higher albedo surfaces of our planet” —a giant, reflective shield, bouncing heat away from us.
As sea ice starts to melt, though, the Arctic reflects less solar energy and absorbs more of it. And that leads to a scary feedback loop: Less sea ice means more of the Arctic is mostly dark ocean. That dark surface absorbs more heat, which leads to more ice loss, and the process just feeds back on itself.
This is one of the reasons why the Arctic is warming up so fast.
But it’s not the end of the story of what’s changing as Arctic sea ice disappears.
The temperature difference between the cold Arctic and the warmer temperate zones is what drives the northern jet stream, the huge river of wind that flows around the northern hemisphere. As the Arctic warms and the temperature difference diminishes, some scientists think the jet stream may be getting out of whack, sometimes sending Arctic blasts south and heat waves north.
There’s still a lot to learn about all of these processes and other impacts of sea ice loss, but there’s one bottom line: Arctic sea ice has helped keep the Earth’s climate running in a more or less predictable way for thousands of years, and as humans warm up the planet, we’re making it harder for the ice to do that for us.
Which is why when Sheila Watt-Cloutier talks about Arctic people, she could be talking about all of us.
“Our lives depend on the ice, the cold and the snow,” said Watt-Cloutier, the former head of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, which advocates for the many different Inuit groups across the north.
It’s just that the people who live in the Arctic see and experience it far more directly than the rest of us. And that means much of the knowledge that people in the region have long relied on doesn’t serve the current generation here.
“Many of our elders are saying, ‘We are teaching you the traditional knowledge that we have been taught over millennia about safety, about the conditions of what is out there on that ice and snow,’” Watt-Cloutier said. “But they say there is a disclaimer now as a result of climate change, where many of our elders have said, ‘This is what I’m teaching you … however’ — and that’s the disclaimer here — “the rules are changing.””
Watt-Cloutier is from eastern Canada, thousands of miles from Utqiagvik, but she says the changes in the Arctic affect all of the 150,000 Inuit people who live here, in eastern Russia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland.
“It isn’t just the ice and the polar bear that we would be losing, but all of the wisdom [that] would go with that ice, as well. And that’s the fear that we have,” she said. “Our culture is so connected to everything that is around us, including the ice. And the ice, of course, is our life force. And as that starts to go, it minimizes our ability to live as Inuit as we’ve known it for millennia.”
That deep and tight connection was on display during a recent performance of traditional Iñupiaq dancing and drumming in Utqiagvik. The performers’ movements were all about hunting — they mimicked the paddling of the skin boats on the waves, and the careful leaps from one ice floe to another.
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