Last Week's Thaw At North Pole Is Least Of Our Arctic Worries

Arctic sea ice usually reaches its annual minimum in
September. Here's a graph from the NSIDC
showing the downward trend in Arctic sea ice
extent in Septembers since 1979 

Last week, all of us weather geeks got all wild and excited over a rare, very brief midwinter thaw right at the North Pole, the frigid, dark top of the world.

This was of course very odd, and perhaps a sign of global warming, perhaps not. I'll let the pundits and scientists and all that figure it out.

Whether or not the North Pole thaw was significant, there's still a lot going on up there, related to global warming, that we should probably be worried about.

Greenland is losing something like 287 tons of ice annual, mostly through melting and big chunks of ice falling off Greenland and floating away to melt, according to the Washington Post.

It could get worse, because something called "firn" on Greenland isn't doing as great as it once was.

Fern is porous snow that builds up on top of the ice most of the year. It slowly freezes into ice over time, which would add to Greenland's ice sheet if it weren't melting faster than it's freezing.

When it gets warmish in Greenland and melting starts, water trickles into the firn instead of running off into the ocean. Once the meltwater gets into the firn, it re-freezes, so the water doesn't run off the ice sheets of Greenland into the ocean.

Which is good, because all this excess water running off Greenland contributes to global sea level rises.

As the Washington Post reports, though, there's so much water trickling into the firn that it freezes everything up into hard dense ice. That means further melt water can't sink in and freeze into the firn, so it runs off into the oceans.

Even worse, the runoff can create channels in the ice surface of Greenland, creating slushy areas.

These slushy areas aren't as white as the ice and snow that already covers most of Greenland. You want things to be nice and white, because that reflects more sunlight off into space instead of heating the surface more.

If it's slushy and less white, more sunlight gets absorbed into Greenland's surface, and that accelerates the warming, which would make the Greenland melting go even faster.

Greenland in 2015. caught a break from the extreme melting of some previous years, most notably in 2012. The island in 2015 had its 11th most extensive summer melt in records dating back 37 years, says the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Bad, but not as bad as it could have been.

Arctic sea ice overall isn't doing so hot, either.

Back in December, NOAA released its annual report on how the Arctic is doing, and the answer was not so great.

Sea ice up there reaches its maximum extent in late winter, and reaches a minimum in late summer, which of course makes perfect sense.

We learned from this report the the minimum in September was the fourth lowest on record. The maximum extent in February was even worse - the lowest on record.

Land masses up there were on average two degrees above normal for the 12-month period ending in September, 2015.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, climate change is reducing the amount of ice up there in the Arctic, and that loss of sea ice is having another effect: It's increasing the amount of precipitation that falls in the Arctic.

That makes sense. Open water and thawed ground evaporate more moisture into the air than expanses of ice do. More moisture in the air generally means increased odds of more precipitation.

That added precipitation could bring on a feedback loop: More rain falling on the Arctic would mean even more melting, and more climate change.

If the added precipitation falls mostly as snow, on the other hand, that would be a good thing. More widespread and deeper snow cover would help reflect the sun's energy out to space, which would have a bit of a slowing effect on global warming, notes the Christian Science Monitor.

The next step for scientists is to try to figure out if the added precipitation in the Arctic is going to be mostly rain, or mostly snow, or something more even-Steven.

Here's a fascinating video from NOAA depicting how sea ice in the Arctic has been diminishing over the past 25 years:

December Thaw At North Pole Worrisome, And Has All The Weather Geeks Talking

The area of green you see curling up from the Atlantic
Ocean up to the North Pole indicate the rare
thaw this week at the top of the world.
The pinks and purples represent the more typical
minus 20 or so readings up that way 

This morning, it's was just a degree or two above freezing at the North Pole.

It gets above freezing there in the summer all the time, but in Dark December? Most observers have never seen such a thing.

Writing in Slate, Eric Holthaus quoted James Morison, the principal investigator of the Nortn Pole Environmenal Observatory, who said he never heard of temperatures above freezing in the wintertime there.

Its usually about 20 below at the top of the world this time of year. The North Pole is deep in winter darkness, so the sun surely can't heat things up.

After all, when we get our worst cold waves here in tropical Vermont and elsewhere in the good ole' USA, the air comes straight down from the North Pole.

So what the hell?

There's an incredibly strong storm in the North Atlantic, fed in large part by the massive storm that unleashed tornadoes and flooding in the United States in recent days. It's so strong that it flung a warm front all the way to the North Pole. Air from near Spain ended up there, and so it's warm.

It's one of the strongest storms on record in the North Atlantic, and is pummeling Iceland with hurricane force winds, and slamming flood-weary Britain with gales and more heavy rains. (The British Met Office names winter storms. For the record, this one is named Frank.)

Of course, scientist, climate change experts and plain old weather geeks like me want to know why this storm is so special, and why it made it so warm at the North Pole. It's warmer there than it is Oklahoma City this morning.

El Nino, that cyclical patch of warm water in the eastern Pacific Ocean, gets blamed for everything, including Donald Trump, so why not blame the North Pole heat wave on that?

The current El Nino is the strongest on record, and probably contributed to that epic storm in the United States. Since that big U.S. storm was a key ingredient in the giant storm in the Atlantic Ocean, the El Nino connection is plausible.

However, El Nino usually doesn't influence the weather in the North Atlantic and Europe as much as it does in the Americas, so the connection here is possibly iffy.

Environmental blogger Robert Scribbler worries the severe storm and the push of warm air far into the Arctic is a symptom of atmospheric changes wrought by global warming.

Ice melting off Greenland appears to be helping change ocean currents and creating a zone of colder than normal water in the North Atlantic. This, in turn, might be shifting atmospheric currents to create stronger storms in the North Atlantic, and sometimes causing those storms to fling warm air toward the high Arctic, goes the theory.

Additionally, some scientists think climate change is weakening the jet stream up north, allowing storms like this to punch through some warm air, or displacing the "polar vortex" southward on occasion, causing issues like the big New England arctic freeze and snow attack last winter.

This idea is still being tested and debated in the scientific community, but signs are pointing in this direction.

Of course, we have to be careful about blaming global warming on individual weather events. All kinds of forces drive individual storms and weather systems. This could well be a fluke, just a weird moment of Arctic heat driven by a strong storm and maybe El Nino.

However, there does seem to be a rising tide of more and more frequent weird weather events. This North Pole thaw certainly qualifies as weird. These trends could be pointing to global warming messing around with the already chaotic physics that is the world's weather.