Climate News

November 28, 2012

Mark F. Meier, one of the nation's most prominent glaciologists, and a leader in the study of glacier melt's effect on rising on sea levels, died Sunday in Boulder. He was 86.

At the time of his death, Meier was director emeritus at Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), where he served as director from 1985 to 1994. He also was professor emeritus of geological sciences at the University of Colorado. Meier moved to Boulder in 1985.

"He was one of the pioneers, when it comes to sea-level rise, basically telling people, 'This is a real phenomenon, this is going to happen, and you're not going to stop it unless you do something,'" said Jim White, current INSTAAR director. "And they didn't do anything."

White added, "Mark was where the rubber meets the road, in terms of translating science to society."

Hurricane Sandy caused its devastation to low-lying areas of the northeast United States less than a month before Meier's death. But Meier didn't need to see its wreckage to affirm what he'd been saying for years.

"I don't know that Mark needed vindication," White said. "Mark's understanding of the physics of melting ice, which is simple stuff, really, was profound. He knew what was going to happen. But he wasn't the type to sit back and say, 'See, I told you so.'"

The cascading effect from the proliferation of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, compounding recent urban nightmares such as flooded subways and tunnels, according to White, is what Meier had been forecasting "for a long time. This day was coming."

Tad Pfeffer, a fellow at INSTAAR and professor of civil, environmental and architectural engineering at CU, worked alongside Meier. He said Meier maintained his professional involvement in glacial studies long after stepping down at INSTAAR. Meier also kept up on his work a CU, authoring two professional papers as recently as 2009, and even took part in a seminar at INSTAAR shortly before Thanksgiving.

"The work that he is most well known for now," Pfeffer said, "is his work on global assessments of glaciers and ice caps all around the world; not just studying one glacier in detail, which he also did a lot of (most notably the massive Columbia Glacier on Prince William Sound in Alaska), but also looking at what all the glaciers are doing, and adding it up as a critical part of assessing present-day sea level rise -- as well as projecting it into the future."

Meier, an Iowa native, formed the glaciology department for the U.S. Geological Survey in 1956, and received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1957.

He took part in glaciological studies during the International Geophysical Year (1957-58), then directed the U.S. Geological Survey's Project Office -- Glaciology in Tacoma, Wash., until assuming the directorship post at INSTAAR.

During the International Geophysical Year and International Hydrological Decade (1965-1975), Meier was a principal organizer of systematic measurement and assessment of glacier mass balance in North America. He also was a pioneer in the use of remote sensing in glaciology, and the leader of investigations of tidewater glacier dynamics in Alaska.

His many awards and honors include the Distinguished Service Award of the U.S. Department of the Interior, as well as three medals from the USSR Academy of Sciences.

Meier, who is survived by his wife, Barbara, as well as his children and grandchildren, also made his mark as a painter. He favored working in acrylics. Meier's landscapes of high mountains and polar regions were featured in local exhibits.

"Some were very abstract," Pfeffer said. "And you could see that same kind of artistry in his scientific work, as well. Back when people drafted by hand, his maps were beautiful examples of calligraphy."

Contact Camera Staff Writer Charlie Brennan at 303-473-1327 or brennanc@dailycamera.com.

Source: http://www.dailycamera.com/science-environment/ci_22085000/boulders-mark-f-meier-pioneer-glacial-melt-study?source=email
 

November 26, 2012

The wild and dramatic cascade of ice into the ocean from Alaska’s Columbia Glacier, an iconic glacier featured in the documentary “Chasing Ice” and one of the fastest moving glaciers in the world, will cease around 2020, according to a study by the University of Colorado Boulder.

A computer model predicts the retreat of the Columbia Glacier will stop when the glacier reaches a new stable position -- roughly 15 miles upstream from the stable position it occupied prior to the 1980s. The team, headed by lead author William Colgan of the CU-Boulder headquartered Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, published its results today in The Cryosphere, an open access publication of the European Geophysical Union.

The Columbia Glacier is a large (425 square miles), multi-branched glacier in south-central Alaska that flows mostly south out of the Chugach Mountains to its tidewater terminus in Prince William Sound.

Warming air temperatures have triggered an increase in the Columbia Glacier’s rate of iceberg calving, whereby large pieces of ice detach from the glacier and float into the ocean, according to Colgan. “Presently, the Columbia Glacier is calving about 2 cubic miles of icebergs into the ocean each year -- that is over five times more freshwater than the entire state of Alaska uses annually,” he said. “It is astounding to watch.”

The imminent finish of the retreat, or recession of the front of the glacier, has surprised scientists and highlights the difficulties of trying to estimate future rates of sea level rise, Colgan said. “Many people are comfortable thinking of the glacier contribution to sea level rise as this nice predictable curve into the future, where every year there is a little more sea level rise, and we can model it out for 100 or 200 years,” Colgan said.

The team’s findings demonstrate otherwise, however. A single glacier’s contribution to sea level rise can “turn on” and “turn off” quite rapidly, over a couple of years, with the precise timing of the life cycle being difficult to forecast, he said. Presently, the majority of sea level rise comes from the global population of glaciers. Many of these glaciers are just starting to retreat, and some will soon cease to retreat.

“The variable nature and speed of the life cycle among glaciers highlights difficulties in trying to accurately predict the amount of sea level rise that will occur in the decades to come,” Colgan said.

The Columbia Glacier was first documented in 1794 when it appeared to be stable with a length of 41 miles. During the 1980s it began a rapid retreat and by 1995 it was only about 36 miles long. By late 2000 it was about 34 miles long.

The loss of a massive area of the Columbia Glacier’s tongue has generated a tremendous number of icebergs since the 1980s. After the Exxon Valdez ran aground while avoiding a Columbia Glacier iceberg in 1989, significant resources were invested to understand its iceberg production. As a result, Columbia Glacier became one of the most well-documented tidewater glaciers in the world, providing a bank of observational data for scientists trying to understand how a tidewater glacier reacts to a warming climate.

Motivated by the compelling imagery of the Columbia Glacier’s retreat documented in the Extreme Ice Survey -- James Balog’s collection of time-lapse photography of disappearing glaciers around the world -- Colgan became curious as to how long the glacier would continue to retreat. To answer this question, the team of researchers created a flexible model of the Columbia Glacier to reproduce different criteria such as ice thickness and terminus extent.

The scientists then compared thousands of outputs from the computer model under different assumptions with the wealth of data that exists for the Columbia Glacier.

The batch of outputs that most accurately reproduced the well-documented history of retreat was run into the future to predict the changes the Columbia Glacier will most likely experience until the year 2100. The researchers found that around 2020 the terminus of the glacier will retreat into water that is sufficiently shallow to provide a stable position through 2100 by slowing the rate of iceberg production.

The speediness of the glacier’s retreat is due to the unique nature of tidewater glaciers, Colgan said. When warming temperatures melt the surface of a land glacier, the land glacier only loses its mass by run-off. But in tidewater glaciers, the changes in ice thickness resulting from surface melt can create striking changes in ice flow, triggering an additional dynamic process for retreat.

The dynamic response of the Columbia Glacier to the surface melt will continue until the glacier reaches its new stable position in 2020, at roughly 26 miles long. “Once the dynamic trigger had been pulled, it probably wouldn’t have mattered too much what happened to the surface melt -- it was just going to continue retreating through the bedrock depression upstream of the pre-1980s terminus,” Colgan said.

Colgan next plans to attempt to use similar models to predict when the Greenland glaciers -- currently the major contributors to sea level rise -- will “turn off” and complete their retreats.

The future for the Columbia Glacier, however, looks bleak. “I think the hope was that once we saw climate change happening, we could act to prevent some irreversible consequences,” Colgan said, “but now we are only about eight years out from this retreat finishing -- it is really sad. There is virtually no chance of the Columbia Glacier recovering its pre-retreat dimensions on human time-scales.”

The study was funded by NASA, and co-authors on the paper include W. Tad Pfeffer of CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, Harihar Rajaram of the CU-Boulder Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering, Waleed Abdalati of the National Aeronautic and Space Administration in Washington, D.C., and Balog of the Extreme Ice Survey in Boulder, Colo.

The complete study is available online at http://www.the-cryosphere.net/6/1395/2012/.

Contact:


William Colgan, CIRES, 011-45-5290-1585


William.Colgan@colorado.edu


Jane Palmer, CIRES science writer, 303-883-4398


Jane.Palmer@colorado.edu

November 13, 2012

Analysis of 90 years of observational data has revealed that summer climates in regions across the globe are changing -- mostly, but not always, warming --according to a new study led by a scientist from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences headquartered at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“It is the first time that we show on a local scale that there are significant changes in summer temperatures,” said lead author CIRES scientist Irina Mahlstein. “This result shows us that we are experiencing a new summer climate regime in some regions.”

The technique, which reveals location-by-location temperature changes rather than global averages, could yield valuable insights into changes in ecosystems on a regional scale. Because the methodology relies on detecting temperatures outside the expected norm, it is more relevant to understand changes to the animal and plant life of a particular region, which scientists would expect to show sensitivity to changes that lie outside of normal variability.

“If the summers are actually significantly different from the way that they used to be, it could affect ecosystems,” said Mahlstein, who works in the Chemical Sciences Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory.

To identify potential temperature changes, the team used climate observations recorded from 1920 to 2010 from around the globe. The scientists termed the 30-year interval from 1920 to 1949 the “base period,” and then compared the base period to other 30-year test intervals starting every 10 years since 1930.

The comparison used statistics to assess whether the test interval differed from the base period beyond what would be expected due to yearly temperature variability for that geographical area.

Their analysis found that some changes began to appear as early as the 1960s, and the observed changes were more prevalent in tropical areas. In these regions, temperatures varied little throughout the years, so the scientists could more easily detect any changes that did occur, Mahlstein said.

The scientists found significant summer temperature changes in 40 percent of tropical areas and 20 percent of higher-latitude areas. In the majority of cases, the researchers observed warming summer temperatures, but in some cases they observed cooling summer temperatures.

“This study has applied a new approach to the question, ‘Has the temperature changed in local areas?’ ” Mahlstein said. The study is in press in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union.

The study’s findings are consistent with other approaches used to answer the same question, such as modeling and analysis of trends, Mahlstein said. But this technique uses only observed data to come to the same result. “Looking at the graphs of our results, you can visibly see how things are changing,” she said.
In particular the scientists were able to look at the earlier time periods, note the temperature extremes, and observe that those values became more frequent in the later time periods. “You see how the extreme events of the past have become a normal event,” Mahlstein said.

The scientists used 90 years of data for their study, a little more than the average lifespan of a human being. So if inhabitants of those areas believe that summers have changed since they were younger, they can be confident it is not a figment of their imagination.

“We can actually say that these changes have happened in the lifetime of a person,” Mahlstein said.
Co-authors on the study were Gabriele Hegerl from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and Susan Solomon from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

CIRES is a joint institute of CU-Boulder and NOAA.

Contact:

Irina Mahlstein, CIRES, 303-497-4746


Irina.Mahlstein@noaa.gov


Jane Palmer, CIRES science writer, 303-883-4398


Jane.Palmer@colorado.edu

National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) teachers have a unique opportunity to request complimentary tickets for showings of the new documentary "Chasing Ice" at Chez Artiste in Denver, November 23-29th.



"Chasing Ice," one of the biggest environmental films of the year, follows acclaimed environmental photographer James Balog to the Arctic where he captures time-lapse images of the world's changing glaciers in the face of climate change. University of Colorado Boulder professors served on a team of science advisors for the film, including Jim White who is featured in our Learn More about Climate (LMAC) video series. 



Chasing Ice has won nearly 20 awards at film festivals around the world, including: The Sundance Film Festival – Excellence in Cinematography Award: US Documentary and the Environmental Media Association’s 22nd Annual Best Documentary Award. For more information about the film and to watch the trailer, visit http://www.chasingice.com/ 



Ticket requests are fulfilled on a first-come, first served basis and admission is not guaranteed. To request tickets, fill out the form at http://bit.ly/icetickets. Please use the code "COLOED" on the request form.

November 5, 2012

A new University of Colorado Boulder study shows for the first time that episodes of reduced precipitation in the southern Rocky Mountains, especially during the 2001-02 drought, greatly accelerated development of the mountain pine beetle epidemic.

The study, the first ever to chart the evolution of the current pine beetle epidemic in the southern Rocky Mountains, compared patterns of beetle outbreak in the two primary host species, the ponderosa pine and lodgepole pine, said CU-Boulder doctoral student Teresa Chapman. The current mountain pine beetle outbreak in the southern Rockies -- which range from southern Wyoming through Colorado and into northern New Mexico --is estimated to have impacted nearly 3,000 square miles of forests, said Chapman, lead study author.

While the 2001-02 drought in the West played a key role in pushing the pine beetle outbreak into a true regional epidemic, the outbreak continued to gain ground even after temperature and precipitation levels returned to levels nearer the long-term averages, said Chapman of CU-Boulder’s geography department. The beetles continued to decimate lodgepole pine forests by moving into wetter and higher elevations and into less susceptible tree stands -- those with smaller diameter lodgepoles sharing space with other tree species.

“In recent years some researchers have thought the pine beetle outbreak in the southern Rocky Mountains might have started in one place and spread from there,” said Chapman. “What we found was that the mountain pine beetle outbreak originated in many locations.  The idea that the outbreak spread from multiple places, then coalesced and continued spreading, really highlights the importance of the broad-scale drivers of the pine beetle epidemic like climate and drought.”

A paper on the subject was recently published in the journal Ecology. Co-authors on the study include CU-Boulder geography Professor Thomas Veblen and Tania Schoennagel, an adjunct faculty member in the geography department and a research scientist at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. The National Science Foundation funded the study.

Mountain pine beetles are native insects that have shaped the forests of North America for thousands of years. They range from Canada to Mexico and are found at elevations from sea level to 11,000 feet. The effects of pine beetles are especially evident in recent years on Colorado’s Western Slope, including Rocky Mountain National Park, with a particularly severe epidemic occurring in Grand and Routt counties.

Chapman said the most recent mountain pine beetle outbreak began in the 1990s, primarily in scattered groups of lodgepole pine trees living at low elevations in areas of lower annual precipitation.  Following the 2001-02 drought, the outbreak was “uncoupled” from the initial weather and landscape conditions, triggering a rise in beetle populations on the Western Slope and propelling the insects over the Continental Divide into the northern Front Range to infect ponderosa pine, Chapman said.

The current pine beetle epidemic in the southern Rocky Mountains was influenced in part by extensive forest fires that ravaged Colorado’s Western Slope from roughly 1850 to 1890, said Chapman. Lodgepole pine stands completely burned off by the fires were succeeded by huge swaths of seedling lodgepoles that eventually grew side by side into dense mature stands, making them easier targets for the pine beetles.

“The widespread burning associated with dry years in the 19th century set the stage for the current outbreak by creating vast areas of trees in the size classes most susceptible to beetle attack,” said Chapman.

Veblen said a 1980s outbreak of the pine beetle centered in Colorado’s Grand County ended when extremely low minimum temperatures were reached in the winters of 1983 and 1984, killing the beetle larvae. But during the current outbreak, minimum temperatures during all seasons have been persistently high since 1996, well above the levels of extreme cold shown to kill beetle larvae in laboratory experiments.

“This implies that under continued warming trends, future outbreaks will not be terminated until they exhaust their food supply -- the pine tree hosts,” said Veblen.

Chapman said there has been a massive and unprecedented beetle epidemic in British Columbia, which also began in the early 1990s and has now has affected nearly 70,000 square miles. “It is hard to tell if this current beetle epidemic in the Southern Rockies is unprecedented,” she said.  “While warm periods in the 16th century may have triggered a large beetle epidemic, any evidence would have been wiped out by the massive fires in the latter part of the 19th century.”

Veblen said while the rate of spread of the mountain pine beetle in lodgepole pine forests has declined in the southern Rocky Mountains during the past two years because of a depletion of host pine population, U.S. Forest Service surveys indicate the rate of beetle spread in ponderosa pine forests on the Front Range has increased sharply over the past three years. “The current study suggests that under the continued warmer climate, the spread of the beetle in ponderosa pines is likely to grow until that food source also is depleted,” Veblen said.

“Our results emphasize the importance of considering different patterns in the population dynamics of mountain pine beetles for different host species, even under similar regional-scale weather variations,” said Chapman.  “Given the current outbreak of mountain pine beetles on the Front Range, their impact on ponderosa pines is certainly something that needs further study.”

A 2012 study by CU-Boulder Professor Jeffry Mitton and graduate student Scott Ferrenberg showed some Colorado pine beetles, which had been known to produce only one generation of tree-killing offspring annually, are producing two generations per year due to rising temperatures and a longer annual warm season. Because of the extra annual generation of beetles, there could be up to 60 times as many beetles attacking trees in any given year, according to the study.

In addition, a 2011 study led by CU-Boulder graduate student Evan Pugh indicated the infestation of trees by mountain pine beetles in the high country across the West could potentially trigger earlier snowmelt and increase water yields from snowpack that accumulates beneath affected trees.

Contact:
Teresa Chapman, 303-492-4785


Teresa.Chapman@colorado.edu


Thomas Veblen, 303-492-8528


Thomas.Veblen@colorado.edu
 

While a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder shows the risk of human conflict in East Africa increases somewhat with hotter temperatures and drops a bit with higher precipitation, it concludes that socioeconomic, political and geographic factors play a much more substantial role than climate change.

According to CU-Boulder geography Professor John O’Loughlin, the new CU-Boulder study undertaken with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder is an attempt to clarify the often-contradictory debate on whether climate change is affecting armed conflicts in Africa.  “We wanted to get beyond the specific idea and hype of climate wars,” he said. “The idea was to bring together a team perspective to see if changes in rainfall and temperature led to more conflict in vulnerable areas of East Africa.”

The research team examined extensive climate datasets from nine countries in East Africa, including the Horn of Africa, between 1990 and 2009: Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Tanzania and Uganda. The team also used a dataset containing more than 16,000 violent conflicts in those countries during that time period, parsing out more specific information on conflict location and under what type of political, social, economic and geographic conditions each incident took place.

The study, which included changes in precipitation and temperature over continuous six-month periods from 1949 to 2009, also showed there was no climate effect on East African conflicts during normal and drier precipitation periods or during periods of average and cooler temperatures, said O’Loughlin.

Moderate increases in temperature reduced the risk of conflict slightly after controlling for the influence of social and political conditions, but very hot temperatures increased the risk of conflict, said O’Loughlin.  Unusually wet periods also reduced the risk of conflict, according to the new study.

“The relationship between climate change and conflict in East Africa is incredibly complex and varies hugely by country and time period,” he said. “The simplistic arguments we hear on both sides are not accurate, especially those by pessimists who talk about ‘climate wars’.  Compared to social, economic and political factors, climate factors adding to conflict risk are really quite modest.”

The results are being published online Oct. 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Co-authors on the study include CU-Boulder Research Associate Frank Witmer and graduate student Andrew Linke as well as three scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric research -- Arlene Laing, Andrew Gettelman and Jimy Dudhia. The National Science Foundation funded the study.

Much of the information on the 16,359 violent events in East Africa from 1990 to 2009 came from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset, or ACLED, directed by Clionadh Raleigh of Trinity College in Dublin.  The database covers individual conflicts from 1997 to 2009 in Africa, parts of Asia and Haiti – more than 60,000 violent incidents to date. Raleigh started the data collection while earning her doctorate at CU in 2007 under O’Loughlin.

In addition, more than a dozen CU-Boulder undergraduates spent thousands of hours combing online information sources like LexisNexis -- a corporation that pioneered the electronic accessibility of legal and newspaper documents -- in order to fill in details of individual violent conflicts by East African countries from 1990 to 1997. The student work was funded by the NSF’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program.

The CU students coded each conflict event with very specific data, including geographic location coordinates, dates, people and descriptive classifications. The event information was then aggregated into months and into 100-kilometer grid cells that serve as the units of analysis for quantitative modeling.

Each conflict grid also was coded by socioeconomic and political characteristics like ethnic leadership, distance to an international border, capital city, local population size, well-being as measured by infant mortality, the extent of political rights, presidential election activity, road network density, the health of vegetation and crop conditions.

“The effects of climate variability on conflict risk is different in different countries,” O’Loughlin said. “Typically conflicts are very local and quite confined. The effects of climate on conflict in Ethiopia, for example, are different than those in Tanzania or Somalia.  The idea that there is a general ‘African effect’ for conflict is wrong.”

The researchers used a variety of complex statistical calculations to assess the role of climate in violent conflict in East Africa, including regression models and a technique to uncover nonlinear influences and decrease “noise,” said O’Loughlin, also a faculty member at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Behavioral Science.

One component of the methods used by the team extracts predictions of individual instances of conflict from the statistical model and systematically compared them  with the actual observations of conflict in the data, “a rigorous validity check,” he said.

Catastrophic conflicts like those in the “Great Lakes region” -- Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo -- since the 1990s and the war with the Lord’s Resistance Army led by terrorist Joseph Kony that has been running since the late 1980s in northern Uganda and neighboring regions are marked with large red swaths on the maps.

Legacies of violence are extremely important for understanding and explaining unrest, he said.  “Violence nearby and prior violence in the locality, especially for heavily populated areas, are the strongest predictors of conflict.”

Ongoing work is extending the study to all of sub-Saharan Africa since 1980 with a database of 63,000 violent events.  Preliminary results from the work confirm the East African climate effects of higher than normal temperatures are increasing conflict risk.

Contacts
John O’Loughlin, 303-492-1619


Johno@colorado.edu
 

Press release from The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), part of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. NSIDC scientists provide Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis content, with partial support from NASA.

October 2, 2012

This September, sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean fell to the lowest extent in the satellite record, which began in 1979. Satellite data analyzed by NSIDC scientists showed that the sea ice cover reached its lowest extent on September 16. Sea ice extent averaged for the month of September was also the lowest in the satellite record.

The near-record ice melt occurred without the unusual weather conditions that contributed to the extreme melt of 2007. In 2007, winds and weather patterns helped melt large expanses of ice. "Atmospheric and oceanic conditions were not as conducive to ice loss this year, but the melt still reached a new record low," said NSIDC scientist Walt Meier. "This probably reflects loss of multi-year ice in the Arctic, as well as other factors that are making the ice more vulnerable." Multi-year ice is ice that has survived more than one melt season and is thicker than first-year ice.

NSIDC Director Mark Serreze said, "It looks like the spring ice cover is so thin now that large areas melt out in summer, even without persistent extreme weather patterns." A storm that tracked through the Arctic in August helped break up the weakened ice pack.

Arctic sea ice extent reached its lowest point this year on September 16, 2012 when sea ice extent dropped to 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles). Averaged over the month of September, ice extent was 3.61 million square kilometers (1.39 million square miles). This places 2012 as the lowest ice extent both for the daily minimum extent and the monthly average. Ice extent was 3.29 million square kilometers (1.27 million square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average.

The Arctic ice cap grows each winter as the sun sets for several months and shrinks each summer as the sun rises higher in the northern sky. Each year the Arctic sea ice reaches its annual minimum extent in September. It hit its previous record low in 2007. This summer's low ice extent continued the downward trend seen over the last 33 years. Scientists attribute this trend in large part to warming temperatures caused by climate change. Since 1979, September Arctic sea ice extent has declined by 13 percent per decade. Summer sea ice extent is important because, among other things, it reflects sunlight, keeping the Arctic region cool and moderating global climate.

In addition to the decline in sea ice extent, a two-dimensional measure of the ice cover, the ice cover has grown thinner and less resistant to summer melt. Recent data on the age of sea ice, which scientists use to estimate the thickness of the ice cover, shows that the youngest, thinnest ice, which has survived only one or two melt seasons, now makes up the large majority of the ice cover.

Climate models have suggested that the Arctic could lose almost all of its summer ice cover by 2100, but in recent years, ice extent has declined faster than the models predicted. Serreze said, "The big summer ice loss in 2011 set us up for another big melt year in 2012. We may be looking at an Arctic Ocean essentially free of summer ice only a few decades from now." NSIDC scientist Julienne Stroeve recently spent three weeks in the Arctic Ocean on an icebreaker ship, and was surprised by how thin the ice was and how much open water existed between the individual ice floes. "According to the satellite data, I expected to be in nearly 90% ice cover, but instead the ice concentrations were typically below 50%," she said.

As the Arctic was experiencing a record low minimum extent, the Antarctic sea ice was reaching record high levels, culminating in a Southern Hemisphere winter maximum extent of 19.44 million square kilometers (7.51 million square miles) on September 26. The September 2012 monthly average was also a record high, at 19.39 million square kilometers (7.49 million square miles) slightly higher than the previous record in 2006. Temperatures over Antarctica were near average this austral winter. Scientists largely attribute the increase in Antarctic sea ice extent to stronger circumpolar winds, which blow the sea ice outward, increasing extent.

NSIDC scientist Ted Scambos said, "Antarctica's changes—in winter, in the sea ice—are due more to wind than to warmth, because the warming does not take much of the sea ice area above the freezing point during winter. Instead, the winds that blow around the continent, the "westerlies," have gotten stronger in response to a stubbornly cold continent, and the warming ocean and land to the north."
 
Information and graphics
For a full analysis of the summer melt season and additional images, please see Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis.


An NSIDC animation of the Arctic melt season is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AztEry44A9A&feature=youtu.be

An NSIDC animation of the Antarctic melt season is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBD8hWbiFMI&feature=youtu.be

For more information and visualizations of thinning sea ice, see the NOAA Climate Watch article, "Arctic Sea Ice Getting Thinner, Younger."
 
Contact:
Natasha Vizcarra


National Snow and Ice Data Center


University of Colorado Boulder


natasha.vizcarra@nsidc.org

The International Collective on Environment, Culture, and Politics ICE CaPs is hosting an event on October 12th called "Between God and Green: How Evangelicals are Cultivating a Middle Ground on Climate Change"  based on Katharine Wilkinson's Oxford University Press book (book information here)

Event Details:

Who: Dr. Katharine Wilkinson

When: Friday, October 12, 5:00 - 6:30 pm

Where: Old Main Chapel, CU-Boulder

Why: The first event for the emergent International Collective on Environment, Culture and Politics (ICE CaPs): ICE CaPs seeks to promote the development of workable and effective responses to complexenvironmental challenges from the local to the international, and to provoke public engagement with these issues. see www.icecaps.org for more information.

A new University of Colorado Boulder-led study that ties forest “greenness” in the western United States to fluctuating year-to-year snowpack indicates mid-elevation mountain ecosystems are most sensitive to rising temperatures and changes in precipitation and snowmelt.

Led by CU-Boulder researcher Ernesto Trujillo and Assistant Professor Noah Molotch, the study team used the data -- including satellite images and ground measurements -- to identify the threshold where mid-level forests sustained primarily by moisture change to higher-elevation forests sustained primarily by sunlight and temperature.  Being able to identify this “tipping point” is important because it is in the mid-level forests -- at altitudes from roughly 6,500 to 8,000 feet -- where many people live and play in the West and which are associated with increasing wildfires, beetle outbreaks and increased tree mortality, said Molotch.

“Our results provide the first direct observations of the snowpack-forest connections across broad spatial scales,” said Molotch, also a research scientist at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. “Finding the tipping point between water-limited forests and energy-limited forests defines for us the region of the greatest sensitivity to climate change -- the mid-elevation forests -- which is where we should focus future research.”

While the research by Molotch and his team took place in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California, it is applicable to other mountain ranges across the West, he said.  The implications are important, since climate studies indicate the snowpack in mid-elevation forests in the Western United States and other similar forests around the world has been decreasing in the past 50 years because of regional warming.

“We found that mid-elevation forests show a dramatic sensitivity to snow that fell the previous winter in terms of accumulation and subsequent melt,” said Molotch, also a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.  “If snowpack declines, forests become more stressed, which can lead to ecological changes that include alterations in the distribution and abundance of plant and animal species as well as vulnerability to perturbations like fire and beetle kill.”

A paper on the subject was published online Sept. 9 in Nature Geosciences.  Co-authors on the study include Ernesto Trujillo of INSTAAR and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, Michael Golden and Anne Kelly of the University of California, Irvine, and Roger Bales of the University of California, Merced. The National Science Foundation and NASA funded the study.

Molotch said the study team attributed about 50 percent of the greenness in mid-elevation forests by satellites to maximum snow accumulation from the previous winter, with the other 50 percent caused by conditions like soil depth, soil nutrients, temperature and sunlight.  “The strength of the relationship between forest greenness and snowpack from the previous year was quite surprising to us,” Molotch said.

The research team initially set out to identify the various components of drought that lead to vegetation stress, particularly in mountain snowpack, said Molotch. “We went after snowpack in the western U.S. because it provides about 60 to 80 percent of the water input in high elevation mountains.”

The team used 26 years of continuous data from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer, a space-borne sensor flying on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite, to measure the forest greenness. The researchers compared it to long-term data from 107 snow stations maintained by the California Cooperative Snow Survey, a consortium of state and federal agencies.

In addition, the researchers used information gathered from several “flux towers” in the southern Sierra Nevada mountain range, which measure the exchanges of carbon dioxide, water vapor and energy between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. Instruments on the towers, which are roughly 100 feet high, allowed them to measure the sensitivity of both mid-level and high-level mountainous regions in both wet and dry years -- data that matched up well with the satellite and ground data, he said.

“The implications of this study are profound when you think about the potential for ecological change in mountainous environments in the West in the not too distant future,” said Molotch, an assistant professor in the geography department. “If we take our study and project forward in time when climate models are calling for warming and drying conditions, the implication is that forests will be increasingly water-stressed in the future and thus more vulnerable to fires and insect outbreaks.

“When you put this into the context of recent losses in Colorado and elsewhere in the West to forest fire devastation, then it becomes something we really have to pay attention to,” he said.  “This tipping-point elevation is very likely to migrate up the mountainsides as the climate warms.”

Contact:


Noah Molotch, 303-492-6151


Noah.Molotch@colorado.edu
 

Warmer air temperatures since the 1980s may explain significant increases in zinc and other metal concentrations of ecological concern in a Rocky Mountain watershed, reports a new study led by the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Colorado Boulder.

Rising concentrations of zinc and other metals in the upper Snake River just west of the Continental Divide near Keystone, Colo., may be the result of falling water tables, melting permafrost and accelerating mineral weathering rates, all driven by warmer air temperatures in the watershed.  Researchers observed a fourfold increase in dissolved zinc over the last 30 years during the month of September.

Increases in metals were seen in other months as well, with lesser increases seen during the high-flow snowmelt period. During the study period, local mean annual and mean summer air temperatures increased at a rate of 0.5 to 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.

Generally, high concentrations of dissolved metals in the Snake River watershed are primarily the result of acid rock drainage, or ARD, formed by natural weathering of pyrite and other metal-rich sulfide minerals in the bedrock. Weathering of pyrite forms sulfuric acid through a series of chemical reactions, and pulls metals like zinc from minerals in the rock and carries these metals into streams.

Increased sulfate and calcium concentrations observed over the study period lend weight to the hypothesis that the increased zinc concentrations are due to acceleration of pyrite weathering. The potential for comparable increases in metals in similar Western watersheds is a concern because of impacts on water resources, fisheries and stream ecosystems. Trout populations in the lower Snake River, for example, appear to be limited by the metal concentrations in the water, said USGS research biologist Andrew Todd, lead researcher on the project.

“Acid rock drainage is a significant water quality problem facing much of the Western United States,” Todd said. “It is now clear that we need to better understand the relationship between climate and ARD as we consider the management of these watersheds moving forward.”

Warmer temperatures and earlier snowmelt runoff have been observed throughout mountainous areas of the western United States where ARD is common, but it is not known if these changes have triggered rising acidity and metal concentrations in other “mineralized” watersheds because of lack of comparable monitoring data, according to the research team.

CU-Boulder Professor Diane McKnight, a collaborator on the project, has generated much of the upper Snake River data through research projects conducted with her students since the mid-1990s. McKnight said students in her environmental engineering and environmental studies classes like Caitlin Crouch -- a study co-author who received her master’s degree under McKnight -- are highly motivated to understand ARD problems.

“Students can see that their research will have direct applications to addressing a critical issue for Colorado,” said McKnight, professor in the civil, environmental and architectural engineering department and a fellow in CU’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.

In cases where ARD is linked directly with past and present mining activities it is called acid mine drainage, or AMD. Another Snake River tributary, Peru Creek, is largely devoid of life due to AMD generated from the abandoned Pennsylvania Mine and smaller mines upstream and has become a target for potential remediation efforts.

The Colorado Division of Reclamation Mining and Safety, in conjunction with other local, state and federal partners, is conducting underground exploration work at the mine to investigate the sources of heavy metals-laden water draining from the mine entrance. The new study by Todd and colleagues has important implications in such mine cleanup efforts because it suggests that establishing attainable cleanup objectives could be difficult if natural background metal concentrations are a “moving target.”

A study on the subject was published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. Other collaborators include Andrew Manning and Philip Verplanck of USGS.  The data analyzed for the study came from INSTAAR, the USGS and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Contact:

Heidi Koontz, USGS, 303-202-4763
Hkoontz@usgs.gov

Diane McKnight, CU-Boulder, 303-492-4687


Diane.McKnight@colorado.edu