The New North Pole Ozone Hole

Spawned by strangely cold temperatures, "beautiful" clouds helped strip the Arctic atmosphere of most of its protective ozone this winter, new research shows.

The resulting zone of low-ozone air could drift as far south as New York, according to experts who warn of increased skin-cancer risk.

The stratosphere's global blanket of ozone—about 12 miles (20 kilometers) above Earth—blocks most of the sun's high-frequency ultraviolet (UV) rays from hitting Earth's surface, largely preventing sunburn and skin cancer.

 

But a continuing high-altitude freeze over the Arctic may have already reduced ozone to half its normal concentrations—and "an end is not in sight," said research leader Markus Rex, a physicist for the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany.

Preliminary data from 30 ozone-monitoring stations throughout the Arctic show the degree of ozone loss was larger this winter than ever before, Rex said.

Before spring is out, "we may even get the first Arctic ozone hole ... which would be a dramatic development—one which would make it into coming history books," he said.

"It's too early to call, but stay tuned."

Atmospheric chemist Simone Tilmes, who wasn't part of the study, agreed.

"We do not know at the moment how large the ozone hole in the Arctic will grow, because the thinning of the ozone layer is happening right now," said Tilmes, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.

Full confirmation may require computer simulations and satellite measurements, which study leader Rex said would "be very useful to provide an independent view of the ozone loss this year."

An ozone hole is an area of the ozone layer that is seasonally depleted of the protective gas—such as the well-known hole over Antarctica.

"Beautiful" Clouds Harbor Ozone-Fighting Chemicals

In the 1980s scientists realized chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other ozone-depleting chemicals—then widely used in aerosol hairsprays and refrigerants, for example—were degrading the ozone layer.

The 1987 Montreal Protocol initiated a global phase-out of CFCs, replacing them with alternatives that don't destroy ozone. However, CFCs can persist for decades in the stratosphere—the Antarctic ozone hole is still there, though it's expected to grow smaller in coming decades.

Once in the upper atmosphere, CFCs break down into chlorine atoms, which, when activated by sunlight, destroy ozone molecules.

Cold temperatures speed up this process through polar stratospheric clouds (see picture), "beautiful" and still little understood formations that occur once stratospheric temperatures drop to at least -108 degrees Fahrenheit (-78 degrees Celsius), Rex noted.

The clouds provide "reservoirs" for inactivated byproducts of chlorine. On the surface of the cloud, these byproducts react with each other and release "aggressive" chlorine atoms that attack ozone molecules.

The whole process stops as soon as it gets warmer and the so-called Arctic polar vortex breaks up, Tilmes said.

At about 6 million square miles (15 million square kilometers), or 40 times the size of Germany, the Arctic polar vortex is a frigid air mass that circles the North Pole in winter.

Warming Link to High-Altitude Cold Snap?

The cold snap is no coincidence, research leader Rex added.

"This is the continuation of a long-term tendency that the cold Arctic winters have become colder," Rex said.

And global warming may drive this trend, he added. As greenhouse gases trap heat in the lower levels of the atmosphere, the higher levels tend to cool, he said.

Of course, the "process is more complicated than this simple explanation"—there may be many ways in which greenhouse gases influence high-altitude temperatures, he added.

Low-Ozone Air to Fly South for Spring?

Any spike in UV radiation can impact both the Arctic ecosystem and human health, research leader Rex noted. For instance, more sunlight can slow the growth of certain species of ocean algae that provide food for larger organisms—and whose absence can have reverberations up the food chain.

More worrisome, Rex said, is that ozone-depleted air can catch a ride south to more highly populated areas with the Arctic polar vortex.

Low-ozone air is often pushed southward to 40 or 45 degrees latitude by natural atmospheric disturbances, Rex said.

A low-ozone air mass's southern "excursions" can take it as far as northern Italy in Europe or New York or San Francisco in the United States, he said.

The rapidly shifting vortex might last into April, when people are starting to spend more time outside, NCAR's Tilmes noted.

"A good message for people [is] to just be aware that this is a year where ozone will be likely thinner this spring.

"You should watch out for your skin and put on your sunscreen."

Rex noted that, however, that since the mass is constantly moving, low-ozone episodes would only last a few days in a given region.

Rex also said this winter's decline in ozone doesn't mean that the Montreal Protocol isn't doing its job.

"People could mistake that and say we have banned CFCs and [it] doesn't seem to work," he said.

"That's not the case. It's just the timescale—CFCs take so long to disappear from the atmosphere."

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Arctic Sea Ice Could Make Comeback Tour

The Arctic's summer ice coverage could hold its ground or even bounce back slightly, even as global average temperatures rise. But like a Guns 'n' Roses tour, the comeback will be short lived and eventually doomed to disappear. A computer climate model created by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) found that in some of the runs of the simulation, Arctic summer sea ice actually halted its retreat or even expanded for a decade or so. But in the long run, climate change won out and most of the summer ice melted away completely within 50 to 60 years.

“One of the results that surprised us all was the number of computer simulations that indicated a temporary halt to the loss of the ice,” said NCAR scientist Jennifer Kay, the lead author of the research, which was recently published in Geophysical Research Letters. The National Science Foundation funded the study.

“The computer simulations suggest that we could see a 10-year period of stable ice or even an increase in the extent of the ice. Even though the observed ice loss has accelerated over the last decade, the fate of sea ice over the next decade depends not only on human activity but also on climate variability that cannot be predicted,” said Kay.

The Earth's climate has always been a complex system influenced by many factors. The effects of human activities make the system even more complex and harder to predict. That is part of the reason why no computer simulation ever returns the same results for every run of the program.

“The changing Arctic climate is complicating matters,” Kay said. “We can’t measure natural variability now, because when temperatures warm and the ice thins, the ice variability changes and is not entirely natural.”

To look at the short and long term trends, the scientists used the recent version of the most powerful climate modeling software in the world, the Community Climate System Model.

Accuracy of future predictions was checked by running simulations of the late 20^th century. The Model replicated the events of the past well enough to suggest that its forecasts of possible futures are realistic.

The simulations may say a comeback is possible, but reality shows it won't be this year. July 2011 set a monthly record for minimum sea ice extent, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

“When you start looking at longer-term trends, 50 or 60 years, there’s no escaping the loss of ice in the summer,” Kay said.

IMAGE 1: Melt water collecting in ponds on the surface of Arctic ice. The darker coloration absorbs more heat and causes further melting. (NASA, July 12, 2011)

IMAGE 2: This map and graph show that Artic ice is melting for longer periods of time each year. (NASA, Wikimedia Commons)

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Top 10 Differences Between the North Pole and South Pole

We often say, especially about people, but also some very different facts and things that "are at opposite poles." Poles differ in concept in all aspects and marks the very idea of dissimilarity. However, we often wonder if geographically speaking Earth's North Pole and South Pole are in any way special.

           Moreover, even sometimes people have difficulty in discerning between the two versions, when given in proper names of Arctic and Antarctic. For this reason, it is interesting to see that the geographical poles of the Earth are not for nothing at opposite ends of the planet, but for even more justified reasons  than a few thousand miles that separates them.

               10. Metamorphosis 

           Arctic area from North Pole, has a natural cycle of melting which about half of  sea ice disappear during summer, only to return to original size, about the surface as the U.S. during winter. 

          However, an alarming new study has shown that thick layer of ice in Greenland melts 3.5 km with such rapidity that half of it could disappear completely by the end of the century. Other studies suggest that the entire Arctic could be completely ice-free in summer within a few decades.

 

             In contrast, Antarctica, the South Pole, do not have the same rigorous cycles of melting ice, but retains the utmost, constant shape and size throughout the year. However, in recent years, several studies have come to discover that Antarctica is losing ice, but not by natural cyclical processes, but especially under the influence of global warming.

            Had that one day, all from the South Pole ice to melt, it is estimated that the seas and the oceans would rise slightly to 60 meters. It is noted that the ice caps melting factor in the north and south of the Earth is influenced by the fact that the Arctic is under water, which makes heating, both from the core of the planet and through the ocean currents, and basically the Antarctics is a mass of rock, little or not affected by such processes. 

                    9. Ozone Affected 

           Above Antarctic a hole has formed in the ozone layer, which spans the gap increased over time to about three times the size of U.S. land area. And above the Arctic ozone layer thinning in these very moments, but regarding North Pole a hole is still yet to occure. Of course, you can not find a proper crack where it says that there is one in the ozone layer, but this means that in that place the chemical that surrounds the Earth to protect it from solar radiation was seriously thin, even disappearing.

            Loss of ozone in the northern hemisphere are small compared to the south because higher temperatures of Arctics limiting the formation of polar stratospheric clouds that can destroy the ozone. However, temperatures in the stratosphere above the North Pole has gradually decreased in recent years, resulting in significant loss of ozone. 

  

                          8. Cold and more cold

            South Pole is much colder than the North Pole. In fact, Antarctica is so cold that snow never melts not in many parts of the continent. Region's average annual temperature is -49 degrees Celsius, making this the coldest climate on Earth's entire surface. In contrast, average winter temperatures in the Arctic is about -34 degrees Celsius and summer increases.

             

               The lowest temperature ever recorded on our planet was -89.6 degrees Celsius and was measured on 21 July 1983, at Vostok Base, located in Antarctica, near the geomagnetic South Pole. Arctic sea ice is a fact that makes the North Pole to be more sensitive to climate change.

                       7. Polar bears and penguins are not neighbors anymore  

               It is generally accepted by people, probably due to the viewing of video advertising and postcards that polar bears and penguins share the same habitat glacial. Nothing is less true. Penguins live exclusively in the southern hemisphere, especially in Antarctica, and have no natural land predators, as would certainly be the huge carnivore. 

 

               It is probably why the penguins are non-flying birds, who have adapted their wings as fins in that they serve to achieve a suite of nautical maneuvers. Polar bears, on the other hand, the largest predators on land are endemic northern species of the world and "reign" over the northern areas of the frozen Arctic Ocean, feeding on seals, walruses, and occasionally, failed whales. 

                      6. The Black Gold

             According to estimates made by the U.S. Geological Survey, under the ice of the northern Arctic Circle is about a quarter of Earth's untapped oil reserves. For this reason, Russia made a bold approach to claim a monopoly on a large portion of the Arctic in the hope that it will exploit ore deposits in the Lomonosov Dorsal , an underwater bulge beneath the Arctic Ocean , stretched over a distance of 1,800 km and that would hide up to ten billion tons of oil.

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                               5. No man's land

                Despite the symbolic images of the various explorers who triumphantly planted flags in the ice at the South Pole, Antarctica continent is the only place on Earth that does not belong to anyone. There is no history of aboriginal peoples and is governed by the Antarctic Treaty, under which the territory itself and its resources will be used only for peaceful and scientific purposes.

 

            

              This is in stark contrast to a population of over four million people living within the Arctic Circle, in a few small settlements, and cities such as Barrow, Alaska, Tromso, Norway; Muramansk and Salekhaard, Russia . On Antarctic's territory are only occasionally stationed  people on missions of research and numerous scientific basis.

                        4. A lot of ice 

             The planet's southernmost continent has easily 90% of all Earth's ice, ice encompassing about three-quarters of the Earth's freshwater. This has fed for some idea to cut and move icebergs to extinguish the thirst of excessively dry areas. 

                  In fact, Prince Mohammed al Faisal of Saudi Arabia even took a moment to consider the plan to deploy an iceberg 100 million tonnes of Antarctica and transports in the Arabian Peninsula. By comparison, the north is characterized by a much less quantity of ice than the south pole. 

                          3. Continent vs. Ocean 

                 The Arctic is practically a frozen ocean surrounded by land. In contrast, Antarctica is a continent in itself, rock and soil types of relier as mountains, valleys and lakes, surrounded by ocean.

  

                  Ironically, socially and politically, the Arctic area, made ​​completely of ice only, intersecting influences and manifestations of territories such as Canada, Greenland (part of Denmark), Russia, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and the United States of America . As noted earlier, the South Pole, far removed from any continental mass, the territory is not governed by political entities, not colonized or not even inhabited by Eskimos. 

                           2. Polar vortex

                 Geographic poles of Earth are characterized by what is called "polar vortex", a major cyclone that occurs near the vertical limits of the planet. Polar vortices on Earth are located in medium and high levels of the troposphere and stratosphere. They surround the polar areas and are part of what is called "polar front" - the boundary between the polar and climate that follows, south, north, respectively, in both hemispheres. 

For the Antarctic polar vortex is more pronounced and more persistent than the Arctic.

                   This is because land masses concentrated at high latitudes of Northern Hemisphere, atmospheric Rossby waves give rise, contributing to calm the vortex. Meanwhile, the polar vortex of southern hemisphere is much less disturbed and therefore above the Antarctic was created the hole in the ozone layer, as described above. 

                            1. Magnetism and deposits 

                     Because it is a continental mass, beneath Antarctica you can find minerals like: nickel, gold, silver, platinum, iron. Obviously, nothing of this sort for the Arctics. Regarding Earth's magnetic poles one of them is about in the planet's north and the other one in the south. When we refer to the magnetic north pole, this reference relates to the homonymous geographical position, even if the north pole of Earth's magnetic field is actually in the south and south pole magnetic field is in north.

             The planet’s magnetic poles do not coincide with its geographic poles because the magnetic field of the Earth is changing. Unlike the geographic poles, the magnetic ones actually move, and this could be considered a common feature of the two poles. The difference is that the magnetic north pole (the south of the magnetic field) is no longer located right in the Arctic region but is moving towards the East at a rate of 55-60 km every year. The magnetic south pole (the north of the magnetic field) still overlaps Antarctica, but is also moving westwards at a rate of 10-15 km per year.

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Arctic Sea Ice Maximum Extent

Sea ice cover in the Arctic appears to have reached its maximum extent for the year, and according to scientists with the National Snow and Ice Data Center, that extent ties 2006 for the lowest on record.

          Watching a time-lapse movie of sea ice as it waxes and wanes over the course of a year is a little like watching a lung breathe in and breathe out. Over the fall and winter months, it steadily expands until it achieves its greatest extent - generally somewhere in March - and then it retreats until it reaches its lowest area, generally in September.

          As Arctic temperatures warm, particularly in summer, the minimum sea ice extent has decreased precipitously. It is presently declining by 11.5 percent per decade relative to the 1979-2000 average. That decline has in turn affected sea ice recovery in the winter, as the ice that reforms is now younger and thinner, and thus less likely to persist. However, because the Arctic remains an extremely cold environment in the winter months, winter sea ice decline is less than in summer: about 3 to 4 percent per decade since 1979, when satellite measurements began.

          Since the start of the satellite record, the maximum Arctic sea ice extent has occurred as early as February 18 and as late as March 31, with an average date of March 6. This year, it appears to have reached its maximum on March 7. At 14.64 million square kilometers (5.65 million square miles), the extent was 1.2 million square kilometers (471,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average of 15.86 million square kilometers (6.12 million square miles), and equal to 2006 for the lowest maximum extent in the satellite record.

           NSIDC will publish a full analysis of the 2010-11 winter season, and graphics comparing this season to the long-term record, in early April.

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Polar Bears On Thin Ice

                Off Svalbard a male eats a young polar bear, a behavior that leaner times could accentuate

The Arctic is warming so fast that by 2050 it may be largely ice free in summer. Without their frozen hunting platform, how will polar bears survive?

         

             In August 1881 the naturalist John Muir was sailing off Alaska aboard the steamer Thomas Corwin, searching for three vessels that had gone missing in the Arctic. Off Point Barrow he spotted three polar bears, "magnificent fellows, fat and hearty, rejoicing in their strength out here in the bosom of the icy wilderness."

             Were Muir to sail off Point Barrow in August today, any polar bears he'd see would not be living in a wilderness of ice but swimming through open water, burning precious fat reserves. That's because the bears' sea-ice habitat is disappearing. And it's going fast.

             Polar bears ply the Arctic niche where air, ice, and water intersect. Superbly adapted to this harsh environment, most spend their entire lives on the sea ice, hunting year-round, visiting land only to build maternal birthing dens. 

             They prey mainly on ringed and bearded seals (it's been said that they can smell a seal's breathing hole from  more than a mile away) but sometimes catch walruses and even beluga whales.

             Sea ice is the foundation of the Arctic marine environment. Vital organisms live underneath and within the ice itself, which is not solid but pierced with channels and tunnels large, small, and smaller. Trillions of diatoms, zooplankton, and crustaceans pepper the ice column. In spring, sunlight penetrates the ice, triggering algal blooms. The algae sink to the bottom, and in shallow continental shelf areas they sustain a food web that includes clams, sea stars, arctic cod, seals, walruses—and polar bears.

A polar bear rides a summer sea-ice raft off Norway's Svalbard archipelago. Sea ice provides crucial habitat for the Arctic's top predator, but warming temperatures are creating extended ice-free periods that tax bears.
 

             Experts estimate the world's polar bear numbers at 20,000 to 25,000, in 19 subpopulations. Bears in Svalbard (the Norwegian archipelago where Florian Schulz made most of these photographs), the Beaufort Sea, and Hudson Bay have been studied the longest. It was in western Hudson Bay, where ice melts in the summer and freezes back to shore in the fall, that the creatures' predicament first came to light.

            Ian Stirling, now retired from the Canadian Wildlife Service, has monitored polar bears there since the late 1970s. He found that they gorged on seals in the spring and early summer, before breakup, then retreated to land as the ice melted. In a good year, breakup found bears packing a thick layer of fat. Ashore, the bears entered a state known as walking hibernation, their metabolisms on idle to hoard their fat stores. "Until about the early 1990s at Hudson Bay," Stirling says, "bears were able to fast through the open-water season of summer and fall because hunting on the spring sea ice was so good."

            During subsequent years of bear-watching, Stirling and a colleague, Andrew Derocher, began to see an alarming pattern. They observed that although the bears' population held steady, the animals were getting thinner. The western Hudson Bay bears were missing vital weeks of peak seal hunting, and the later winter freeze-up was extending their fast. By 1999 the biologists had correlated a steady decline in most measures of polar bear health with a decline in sea ice. Bears didn't grow as large, and some came ashore notably skinnier. Females gave birth less often and had fewer cubs. Fewer cubs survived.

     Svalbard male (background) stalk a female with two cubs, alert to danger.

          When that same year Stirling and his colleagues published their findings, it was still possible to doubt that warming in the Arctic had already affected polar bears. In a 1999 interview Steven Amstrup, chief scientist at Polar Bears International, who had studied bears in the Beaufort Sea since 1980 for the U.S. Geological Survey, said he hadn't yet seen the kind of changes Stirling had. Or had he? "My aha! moment," Amstrup recalls, "was when I realized the difficult time I'd been having getting out onto the ice to conduct my autumn fieldwork was not just an odd year or two but a prolonged and worsening trend. Shortly thereafter we began to see the same biological changes in our bears as well."

          The world didn't know it yet, but during the summer in the Arctic Ocean, sea ice had been melting earlier and faster, and the winter freeze had been coming later. In the three decades since 1979 the extent of summer ice has declined by about 30 percent. The lengthening period of summer melt threatens to undermine the whole Arctic food web, atop of which stand polar bears.

          Data have since bolstered the early warning signs. Since Muir set out in the Corwin, greenhouse gases have contributed to an average warming of the Earth of about one degree Fahrenheit. This may seem negligible, but even one degree of warming can noticeably disrupt an environment of ice and snow. It's as if a giant hand has trained a magnifying glass over the Pole.

          The sea ice above the shallow continental shelves provides the richest sustenance for polar bears, but recently the ice has been retreating far from those areas, reducing the summer habitat bears need most to survive. Whether a polar bear lives in Hudson Bay or the Beaufort or Barents Seas, it faces the same problem. Sea ice on which to hunt is available for progressively shorter periods, forcing bears to fast for longer periods. And because thinner sea ice is more easily shifted by winds and currents, bears may be swept into strange territory, forcing them to make longer, more arduous swims in open water to find favorable sea ice or to get to land.

          Polar bears are strong swimmers, but swimming long distances in open water is draining and can be fatal. In 2008 a radio-collared bear with a yearling cub swam an astounding 427 miles to reach the ice off the northern Alaska coast. The cub didn't make it. Researchers counting bowhead whales in September 2004 spotted four dead polar bears afloat after a storm in the Beaufort Sea. Scientists estimated that as many as 27 bears may have drowned in that one storm.

     Impervious to a dive-bombing arctic tern, a hungry bear on the shore of Hudson Bay uses up energy prowling for tern eggs. Summers dry-dock bears around the bay, where biologist Ian Stirling has linked shrinking sea ice to skinnier bears and smaller litters.

          Females face especially hard times. Malnourished males may kill and eat cubs—and even their mothers—behavior scientists believe may become more common as food diminishes. Increasingly, getting to ancestral denning places on land can be an ordeal. On one island in Svalbard, when the sea has frozen late in the year, scientists have seen few, if any, dens the following spring. That's when they'd normally see 20 or more, Jon Aars, of the Norwegian Polar Institute, says. Whether females find other sites or skip a year of breeding, Aars can't say.

          From childhood we create a picture of our physical world: The sky is blue, the Arctic is white. But before this century ends—and perhaps much sooner—most of the Arctic is predicted to be blue water every summer.

    Ashore on Svalbard, a male polar bear investigates a whale's backbone. Fat reserves from hunting ringed and bearded seals, and sometimes walruses, must carry bears through lean summers.

         Can a blue Arctic support polar bears? Only in the short run, Amstrup and Stirling say.

Currents still cram drifting sea ice against the Canadian Arctic Islands and northern Greenland in summer, creating pockets that may retain enough ice to support polar bears through this century. 

         If we can reduce the warming of the atmosphere, Amstrup says, it will not be too late for polar bears, but "if the world keeps warming, ultimately even those last refuges will fail to sustain the icon of the Arctic."

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Canadian Arctic A Rushing River

 2011 — Withering in the warm temperatures, melting ice of the glaciers on thousands of Canadian Arctic islands off the coast of northwestern Greenland seems to be literally racing to the sea – contributing unexpectedly large volumes to global sea level rise. 

               A six-year study led by University of Michigan researcher Alex Gardner, just published in the journal Nature, estimates that between 2004 and 2009 the islands of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago shed enough water to fill Lake Erie three-quarters full and added a millimeter to the height of the world’s oceans. 

              Gardner says he was as surprised as anyone that the region was adding so much water to the sea. “Now we realize that outside of Antarctica and Greenland, it was the largest contributor for the years 2007 through 2009,” he said in a University of Michigan release. “This area is highly sensitive and if temperatures continue to increase, we will see much more melting.” 

             While six years is too short a period to establish a trend, Gardner noted, the pace of the melting accelerated dramatically during the study – at a time when temperatures rose just one degree. 

            In the first three years, from 2004 to 2006, the region lost seven cubic miles of water per year, on average. In the following three years, through 2009, when average air temperature was one degree Celsius warmer, the melt water volume jumped to 22 cubic miles of water per year. 

        

                “This is a big response to a small change in climate,” observes Gardner. “If the warming continues and we start to see similar responses in other glaciated regions, I would say it’s worrisome, but right now we just don’t know if it will continue.” 

                 The study was based on satellite-borne measures of changes in elevation and gravity field that detects mass loss as well as computer-based modeling techniques. 

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