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“It’s basically unzipped the whole ice cover...from Cape Lisburne ... to the Canadian high Arctic"
It started with an unusual storm that passed over the North Pole on Feb. 8. The National Snow and Ice Data Center says it caused the sea ice to crack, and the cracks to spread in a curving pattern, from the tip of Alaska to Canada. Similar patterns have appeared in the past, though not of this scale.
What usually happens is the leads freeze back up, but Assistant Professor Andy Mahoney of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute just got back from several days of helicopter overflights out of Barrow.
“This year it’s been pretty persistent, and I think that’s really what marks this year as being different from the other examples that we’ve seen,” Mahoney said.
Geologist Richard Glenn of the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium has been watching the sea ice phenomenon closely.
“It’s basically unzipped the whole ice cover along the coast from Cape Lisburne all the way to the Canadian high Arctic, and we saw it here,” Glenn said. “It was impossible to miss of course.”
http://www.alaskapublic.org/2013/04/11/scientists-study-peculiar-arctic-sea-ice-cracking-pattern/
What usually happens is the leads freeze back up, but Assistant Professor Andy Mahoney of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute just got back from several days of helicopter overflights out of Barrow.
“This year it’s been pretty persistent, and I think that’s really what marks this year as being different from the other examples that we’ve seen,” Mahoney said.
Geologist Richard Glenn of the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium has been watching the sea ice phenomenon closely.
“It’s basically unzipped the whole ice cover along the coast from Cape Lisburne all the way to the Canadian high Arctic, and we saw it here,” Glenn said. “It was impossible to miss of course.”
http://www.alaskapublic.org/2013/04/11/scientists-study-peculiar-arctic-sea-ice-cracking-pattern/
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There has been a trend of sea ice freezing up later and breaking up earlier for decades, but the ice has also been getting thinner. And in recent years, the remaining thicker ice, formed over a period of several years, has been breaking up and flushing out. Mahoney says this winter, their intensive helicopter search found none at all.
“We went looking for multi-year ice, we were hoping to find maybe some small isolated floes that the satellites hadn’t picked up, and we didn’t see any sign of multi-year ice,” Mahoney said. “So we do believe that the Beaufort at the moment is pretty much devoid of multi-year ice.”
“We went looking for multi-year ice, we were hoping to find maybe some small isolated floes that the satellites hadn’t picked up, and we didn’t see any sign of multi-year ice,” Mahoney said. “So we do believe that the Beaufort at the moment is pretty much devoid of multi-year ice.”
