Record winter temperatures in Antarctica

 

On King George Island the landscape has changed from mostly white to brown, grey and green. Photograph: Luis Muñoz

From The Guardian

Temperatures in the Antarctic climbed above 15C this month, shattering the previous winter heat record for the usually frozen region and raising concerns about the speed of climate breakdown.  [Reminder: since this is the Southern Hemisphere, it is mid-winter now, the equivalent of December in the N.H.]

The new winter peak temperature was logged by the Argentinian Esperanza base on the Trinity peninsula on 6 June amid a protracted heatwave, when the maximum daily temperature exceeded zero degrees for three consecutive weeks.

Scientists said the high of 15.4C broke the previous record set at the same station in 1998 by 2C. “This is absolutely crazy,” said Raúl Cordero, an Ecuadorian climate professor at the University of Groningen. “It is also about 20C above normal for this time of the year. That is a huge anomaly.”

Unusually strong warm winds from the north blew across much of the Antarctic peninsula. One Chilean weather station, Boonen Rivera, registered temperatures of close to 13C, Cordero said.

On King George Island, 100 miles (160km) from Esperanza, researchers said the landscape had changed from mostly white to brown, grey and green after temperatures hit 4.6C on 6 June.

“Last weekend was very strange. The temperatures here went very high so everything outside melted,” said Luis Muñoz, a Chilean glaciologist. “Usually there is 20cm of snow and a lot of ice on the ground at this time.”

Muñoz said he and a colleague, Natalia Mestre, climbed to the 500-metre peak of the nearby Collins glacier last Wednesday and were surprised to find rain melting the ice. “There was a direct impact on the glacier, which should be receiving snow now. It should not be suffering ablation at this time of the year. This is obviously not good for the glacier.”

The Antarctic region is coming under increasing human pressure, directly in the form of resource exploration and tourism and indirectly through the burning of fossil fuels, which is heating the planet.

Scientists warn that some of the region’s biggest glaciers, such as Thwaites and Pine Island, are approaching or may even have passed a tipping point that could push up global sea levels by four metres. Antarctic ice melt has also been found to slow global ocean circulation.

Cordero said a single winter of heatwaves, no matter how amazing, would not by itself make a huge difference to sea levels, but it signified more alarming long-term trends. “This heatwave happened because of extremely strong westerlies,” he said. “This has been happening with increasing frequency since the 1980s, and that is known to be related to climate change.”

 We are doing too little to slash emissions.  We need to do it as soon as possible, not in 10 or 20 years' time.   In almost every country around the world, the combination of wind, solar and batteries is as cheap as or cheaper than coal and much cheaper than gas.  EVs, outside the US and Europe, are as cheap as petrol/diesel cars, and obviously much cheaper to run as well.  It's a marriage made in heaven: clean electricity to drive your vehicle fleet, and a huge mobile battery resource which helps stabilise the grid.  Let's just do it, instead of phaffing around.

Simultaneous global cascading catastrophes

 From Prof Eliot Jacobson

A quick reminder that we are witnessing the beginning of simultaneous cascading global catastrophes.

Global sea temperatures accelerating

 From Prof Eliot Jacobson

In case you had any doubt, the near perfect fit of the quadratic trendline makes it clear: global sea surface temperatures are accelerating.

The current rate of warming is about 0.32°C/decade, which comes out to somewhere around 275 million Hiroshima bombs worth of ocean heating in 2025.

 

 What can governments do to reverse this trend?

1.  Ban the sale of new pure petrol/diesel/gasoline cars immediately.   There are plenty of hybrids and EVs in production right now.  For example, in Oz, Toyota has already stopped selling the petrol-only Corolla.
2. Give electricity utilities 5 years to get to a minimum of 60% renewables and 10 to get to 90%.  
3. Remove all oil subsidies
4. Tax carbon emissions, and return the tax via a monthly cheque to all residents.

What can you do?

1. Give up meat.  This will cut your personal emissions by 1/3.
2. Buy your electricity from a 100% green supplier (In Australia) or Green Power Options (in the US)
3. If you can afford it, put solar panels on your roof.  
4. If you can, replace gas or oil heating with heat pumps.  The newest heat pumps work even in sub-zero temperatures.
5. Replace your car with an EV when your current car gives up the ghost.  Failing that, a plug-in hybrid (PHEV).  Use public transport as much as you can; fly as little as you can.

This will cut your personal emissions by 60 to 80%.

We face catastrophe.  We must act now, individually and collectively.  Before it is too late.

Global sea ice plunging to record lows

 From a post by Peter Dynes

Global Sea Ice taking a nose dive to record lows. We are losing over 25,000 tonnes of Ice from the Arctic per second. That’s a lot of Ice. Earth's heating rate will accelerate the more sea ice we lose. The general public is totally unaware of this danger.

Sea ice near record lows for the current date

 From a toot by Zack Labe

Both poles are now observing unusually low sea ice conditions, and therefore global sea ice extent is yet again near record low levels for the current date...

More sea ice graphics available at ZackLabe.comhttps://ten

Air, ocean and ice climate records tumbled in 2023

From Weatherzone

The World Meteorological Organization has confirmed that 2023 was an astonishing year for our planet’s climate, with records obliterated in the atmosphere, hydrosphere and cryosphere.

 

Atmosphere

Global air temperatures frequently made headlines around the world in 2023 as records fell month after month.

Every calendar month from June to December set a new global average near-surface air temperature record for that time of year.

This string of exceptional warmth in the second half of 2023 pushed the annual global mean air temperature to 1.45°C (±?0.12?°C) above the 1850 to 1900 pre-industrial baseline. According to the WMO, this was the highest annual mean temperature on record, beating the previous record from 2016 by 0.16ºC.

Oceans

The record warmth in Earth’s atmosphere last year was also mirrored in the oceans, with global sea surface temperatures reaching record-breaking levels from March onwards.

Every month from April to December set a new respective monthly record in 2023, while a new daily sea surface temperature record was observed in August (note that this has since been exceeded in 2024).

 

Image: Daily global sea surface temperatures between 1979 and 2024 to date, based on the ERA5 dataset. Source: Copernicus Climate Change Service

The global mean sea level also reached a new record height in 2023, driven by abnormal ocean warmth and increased melting of glaciers and ice sheets.

According to the WMO, “the rate of global mean sea level rise in the past ten years (2014–2023) is more than twice the rate of sea level rise in the first decade of the satellite record (1993–2002).”

Ice

Parts of the cryosphere – the frozen portions of our planet – also broke records in 2023.

Antarctic sea-ice extent reached record lows for the seasonal minimum extent in February and maximum extent in September.

Glacier melt was also pushed to new levels in 2023. According to the WMO, “preliminary data from the global set of reference glaciers for the hydrological year 2022-2023 show they experienced the largest loss of ice on record.”

What made 2023 so warm?

Climate change and El Niño were both contributing factors to the record-breaking warmth in 2023. However, these drivers alone aren’t enough to account for the magnitude of last year’s abnormal warmth.

According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, other influences that may have contributed to the exceptional state of the climate in 2023 are:

• Enhanced stratospheric water vapour due to the eruption in January 2022 of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai volcano
• Reduced aerosols due to lower sulphur dioxide emissions by shipping
• The approach of the current solar cycle to its peak.

These influences are still an active topic of research and may continue to influence Earth’s global climate system in 2024. Monitoring Earth’s global climate system is an essential part of understanding how the climate is changing and what steps need to be taken, now and in the future, to mitigate its effects.

2023 hottest year by a huge margin

 From The Guardian

2023 “smashed” the record for the hottest year by a huge margin, providing “dramatic testimony” of how much warmer and more dangerous today’s climate is from the cooler one in which human civilisation developed.

The planet was 1.48C hotter in 2023 compared with the period before the mass burning of fossil fuels ignited the climate crisis. The figure is very close to the 1.5C temperature target set by countries in Paris in 2015, although the global temperature would need to be consistently above 1.5C for the target to be considered broken.

Scientists at the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS) said it was likely the 1.5C mark will be passed for the first time in the next 12 months. The average temperature in 2023 was 0.17C higher than in 2016, the previous record year, marking a very large increase in climate terms. The primary cause of this increased global heating was continued record emissions of carbon dioxide, assisted by the return of the natural climate phenomenon El Niño.

The high temperatures drove heatwaves, floods and wildfires, damaging lives and livelihoods across the world. Analysis showed some extreme weather, such as heatwaves in Europe and the US, would have been virtually impossible without human-caused global heating.

The CCCS data also showed that 2023 was the first year on record when every day was at least 1C warmer than the 1850-1900 pre-industrial record. Almost half the days were 1.5C hotter and, for the first time, two days were more than 2C hotter. The higher temperatures increased from June, with September’s heat so far above previous averages that one scientist called it “gobsmackingly bananas”.

Samantha Burgess, the CCCS deputy director, said: “2023 was an exceptional year, with climate records tumbling like dominoes. Temperatures during 2023 likely exceed those of any period in at least the last 100,000 years.”

Prof Bill Collins, at the University of Reading, UK, said: “It is a shock that 2023 unarguably smashed the global temperature record. More global warming is expected to cause even wetter winters in the UK and yet more flooding.”

Hundreds of scientific studies have shown the climate crisis is causing more extreme and more frequent extreme weather. While 2023 was perceived by many as a year in which global heating accelerated, scientists said the higher temperatures were in line with the predicted result of increased carbon emissions. However, the speed and intensity of severe weather impacts alarmed many experts.

A separate analysis by Japan’s Meteorological Agency produced very similar results as Copernicus, with 2023 a record 1.43C above pre-industrial levels and beating the previous record by 0.14C.

Prof Andrew Dessler, at Texas A&M University in the US, said the record set in 2023 was not surprising: “Every year for the rest of your life will be one of the hottest [on] record. This in turn means that 2023 will end up being one of the coldest years of this century. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

Rising seas to cause $440 bln damage in Victoria

From Melbourne's The Age newspaper.

More than 16,000 properties in Melbourne’s Southbank are at high risk of damage from sea-level rises and storm surges within 17 years as climate change exacts an alarming toll on Victoria, new research shows.

Melbourne’s west, Geelong and South Gippsland are also among the regions highly vulnerable to sea-level rises, according to the forecast, while Victoria faces property damages reaching $337 billion in present value by 2100.

The losses to wetlands would reach a further $105 billion over the same period, bringing the total to $442 billion.

The report, commissioned by the Victorian Marine and Coastal Council, includes research from Melbourne University and consulting firm Climate Risk, which shows rising sea levels and more dramatic storm surges and flooding will batter bays and coastal areas, causing extensive damage to residential and commercial properties as well as roads and environmental and agricultural assets.

The University of Melbourne research found more than 80,000 currently existing residential, commercial and industrial properties would be impacted by sea-level rise and storm surges by 2100.

It says a host of adaptation measures will be necessary, ranging from natural and human-made barriers on coastlines to “basic retreat” of homes and buildings from near the coast.

Tom Kompas, University of Melbourne environmental economics professor and lead researcher, said both his team and Climate Risk reached similar conclusions, despite using different models.

“I was alarmed, especially in terms of the losses of environmental assets,” he said.

He hoped the research would help guide authorities in determining where properties should be built in future.

“If you build a house now in the wrong area you’re going to have trouble,” he said. “There are people on the coast who already have erosion problems.”

The report used two sea-level rise models.

The University of Melbourne modelled the impact of a sea-level rise of 20 centimetres, 47 centimetres and 82 centimetres for the years 2040, 2070 and 2100, respectively. Climate Risk used a sea-level rise of 1.5 metres by 2100.

Victorian Marine and Coastal Council chair Anthony Boxshall said the research was groundbreaking because it assessed the economic impact of sea-level rise and storm surges on the environment, not just property.

He said it was important to act now because delaying would result in higher future costs.

“Ultimately, some pretty stark choices need to be made,” he said.

Boxshall said sea-level rise would threaten iconic infrastructure, including the Great Ocean Road and other suburban bayside roads.

“We need to have that conversation about do we need to move elements of the Great Ocean Road or any other roads on the coast,” he said. “What do we do with Beach Road?”

Source: The Age
Locals Dave Sutton (left) and Phillip Heath on the remaining strip separating the surf beach from the road at Inverloch, where erosion has caused major problems.CREDIT:JUSTIN MCMANUS
[A rock sea wall has since been built here.]

 

Greenland melt punching off the charts

 From a tweet by Professor Jason Box

Greenland melt punching off the charts

Yet still we subsidise fossil fuels.  Still we do too little to slash emissions.  Still the Right are wall-to-wall denialists.  

Another terrifying record heat anomaly in the N Atlantic

 From a tweet by Daniel Bleakley

Imagine knowing this is happening right now and still approving new coal mines.

Not that this is against the average from 1982-2023
Against the 1900-2000 average it would be much higher.

Bleakley's comment is about the latest approval of a new coal mine by Australia's supposedly green Labor government.

Antarctic ice sheet melting 20 times faster than we thought

From a toot by Bread & Circuses

We do NOT want the Antarctic Ice Sheet to melt any faster than it already is. The risks of so much fresh water pouring into the ocean are massive — not only increased sea level rise, but also more greenhouse gas emissions going into the atmosphere, plus the potential for serious disruption to the global food chain. (See https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/110174993496613175)

And now we get this terrible news...
____________________________

"Antarctic ice can melt 20 times faster than we thought"

Melting ice sheets in Antarctica can retreat much faster than scientists previously thought. A study published in the journal Nature found that at the end of the last Ice Age, parts of the Eurasian Ice Sheet retreated up to 2,000 feet per day. This rate is 20 times faster than previous measurements. These changes far outpace even the fastest-moving glaciers studied in Antarctica, which are estimated to retreat as quickly as 160 feet per day.

“Our research provides a warning from the past about the speeds that ice sheets are physically capable of retreating at,” Christine Batchelor, study co-author and physical geographer from Newcastle University, said in a statement. “Our results show that pulses of rapid retreat can be far quicker than anything we’ve seen so far.”
____________________________

FULL STORY -- https://www.popsci.com/environment/antarcti

Before boosting this post from 10 April, I added the chart below showing current Antarctic sea ice extent anomalies, which are shocking in their departure from the norm. Although sea ice is different from ice sheets on land, they do interact — as sea ice declines and weakens, it allows for faster collapse of glaciers when they reach the ocean.

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #ClimateEmergency #Ocean

Record ocean temperatures

 From The Guardian

Temperatures in the world’s oceans have broken fresh records, testing new highs for more than a month in an “unprecedented” run that has led to scientists stating the Earth has reached “uncharted territory” in the climate crisis.

The rapid acceleration of ocean temperatures in the last month is an anomaly that scientists have yet to explain. Data collated by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), known as the Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature (OISST) series, gathered by satellites and buoys, has shown temperatures higher than in any previous year, in a series stretching back to 1981, continuously over the past 42 days.

The world is thought to be on the brink of an El Niño weather event this year – a cyclical weather system in the Pacific, that has a warming impact globally. But the El Niño system is yet to develop, so this oscillation cannot explain the recent rapid heating, at a time of year when ocean temperatures are normally declining from their annual March and April peaks.

Prof Mike Meredith of the British Antarctic Survey said: “This has got scientists scratching their heads. The fact that it is warming as much as it has been is a real surprise, and very concerning. It could be a short-lived extreme high, or it could be the start of something much more serious.”

Warming oceans are a concern for many reasons. Seawater takes up more space at higher temperatures, accelerating sea level rise, and warmer water at the poles accelerates the melting of the ice caps. Hotter temperatures can also be dire for marine ecosystems, as it can be difficult or impossible for species to adapt. Corals in particular can suffer devastating bleaching.

Some scientists fear that the rapid warming could be a sign of the climate crisis progressing at a faster rate than predicted. The oceans have acted as a kind of global buffer to the climate crisis over recent decades, both by absorbing vast amounts of the carbon dioxide that we have poured into the atmosphere, and by storing about 90% of the excess energy and heat this has created, dampening some of the impacts of global heating on land. Some scientists fear we could be reaching the limit of the oceans’ capacity to absorb these excesses.

Mark Maslin, professor of Earth system science at University College London, said the climate crisis was taking hold before our eyes. “Climate scientists were shocked by the extreme weather events in 2021,” he said. “Many hoped this was just an extreme year. But they continued into 2022 and now they are occurring in 2023. It seems we have moved to a warmer climate system with frequent extreme climate events and record-breaking temperatures that are the new normal. It is difficult to see how anyone can deny climate change is happening and having devastating effects around the world.”

Note that this is before the impact of El Niño, which is forecast to occur later this year.  

Accelerated melt of ice sheets now unmistakable

From The BBC

If you could shape an ice cube out of all the ice losses from Greenland and Antarctica over the past three decades, it would stand 20km high.

An international group of scientists who work with satellite data say the acceleration in the melting of Earth's ice sheets is now unmistakable.

They calculate the planet's frozen poles lost 7,560 billion tonnes in mass between 1992 and 2022.

Seven of the worst melting years have occurred in the past decade.

Mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica is now responsible for a quarter of all sea-level rise.

This contribution is five times what it was 30 years ago.

The latest assessment comes from the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise, or Imbie.

This project, which is supported by the US and European space agencies, issues regular reviews of the state of the planet's ice sheets.

This is the third such report, and like the previous studies, it has collated and reviewed all available satellite measurements.

It includes the observations from orbit of some 50 spacecraft missions from 1992. That particular year was when orbiting instruments best suited to studying the elevation and velocity of ice started overflying the poles routinely.

The 7,560 billion tonnes of ice lost from Greenland and Antarctica during the study period pushed up sea-levels by 21mm.

Almost two-thirds (13.5mm) of this was due to melting in Greenland; one-third (7.4mm) was the result of melting in Antarctica.

"All this has profound implications for coastal communities around the world and their risk of being exposed to flooding and erosion," said Dr Inès Otosaka from the UK's Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM), who led the latest assessment.

"It's really important that we have robust estimates for the future contribution to sea-level rise from the ice sheets so that we can go to these communities and say, 'Yes, we understand what is happening and we can now start to plan mitigations'," she told BBC News.

Warmer air is melting the top of the Greenland Ice Sheet (NASA/GODDARD/MARIA-JOSÉ VIÑAS)

Rebuilding eroding coastlines

From High Country News

David Cottrell stood on what used to be a 14-foot-high cliff at the crumbled end of Blue Pacific Drive. Just a few years ago, this was the fastest-eroding shoreline on the U.S. Pacific Coast; locals here in North Cove, Washington, dubbed it “Washaway Beach.” But as Cottrell walked toward the water on a sunny November morning, he stepped not off a cliff but onto soft, dry sand. Thigh-high dune grasses sprawled in all directions. The low tide lapped at a flock of sandpipers a few hundred feet away.

Cottrell, a cranberry farmer and local drainage commissioner, held up a laminated map, pointing to our location. During his childhood, this was part of a dense beachside neighborhood, but the tides have swept most of it away — a complex phenomenon related to dams and jetties that have changed the flow of sediments. “Where we’re standing right now, we were losing 50 to 100 feet a year,” he said. All told, North Cove has lost more than 4 square miles of land, plus a lighthouse, a cannery and 160 structures.

By 2015, many residents had given up on saving their town. Facing predictions of continued erosion, agencies had begun talk of moving Highway 105 away from the coast — a loss that could doom this isolated rural community. An essential transportation artery, 105 serves as the dike that protects 800 acres of historic bogs where Cottrell and other farmers grow more than half the state’s cranberries. Cottrell felt he had to try something. “We had absolutely nothing to lose,” he said.

So in 2016, Cottrell dropped $400 worth of rocks from the end of this road — “one load, right off the end, just to see what would happen.” He sought to mimic the cobble beaches and basalt slides that are common in the Pacific Northwest. That experiment has since grown into a more than 2-kilometer-long berm of rocks and stumps that shift with the waves and collect sand, rebuilding the beach.

As a result, much of this coastline has held, putting North Cove at the forefront of a global shift in how communities protect their coastlines as sea levels rise. Engineers — who have long depended on rigid sea walls — are now closely watching this softer approach. North Cove’s solution, which resembles the techniques many Indigenous communities use to cultivate shellfish, looks less like the conventional structures engineers know, and more like the dunes and berms that centuries of storms and tides build on their own.

Cottrell stood in the salty breeze, wearing his signature black Carhartt jacket. On the back, hand-painted letters read “Washaway No More.” Most days, he walks the beach, troubleshooting the remaining hotspots with landowners and explaining the still-evolving project to visitors. “The people that get this best are surfers and Buddhists,” Cottrell had told me earlier. “In a situation that’s in constant flux, what you want to do is position yourself to go with it.”

North Cove was built on land near the Columbia River outlet that has always been at the mercy of intense waves, El Niño-driven storms, tidal currents, flowing sediment and tangles of driftwood. Over millennia, these forces built a long sandy spit at the mouth of Willapa Bay. Storms swept sand away each winter, then currents replenished it each summer — until they didn’t, Cottrell said, for reasons scientists are only beginning to understand. Maps show that the trend had started by the early 1900s; researchers believe a series of jetties and the 1930s damming of the Columbia, which both changed sediment flow in the region, contributed to it. Over decades, the spit was whittled down to a nub. The rising tides and intensifying storms of climate change only hastened its undoing.

That collision of forces made Washaway Beach a terrible candidate for any protective efforts, Washington Department of Ecology coastal engineer George Kaminsky told me. But since Cottrell couldn’t make anything worse, he decided to try something unorthodox, setting the stage for an experiment whose results global experts, including Kaminsky, are now researching.

After Cottrell dropped that first load of rock, nature took over: When waves hit the pile, the water spread out instead of smashing against the steep, eroded bank. Stones migrated and settled. Sand collected in between.

This galvanized the community, and in 2016, a group led by Charlene Nelson, chairwoman of the nearby Shoalwater Bay Tribe, expanded the project. Using a $600,000 state grant, they made a scrappy version of what engineers call a dynamic revetment: a long cobble berm along the top of the beach. Using the cheapest unsorted rock they could find, they dumped piles along more than a mile of bank, letting the waves sort them into place. Then, lower down, near the highest average waterline, they spread the same jagged cobbles into a 3-foot-tall speed bump. Together, these structures build back the beach: As waves trip over the speed bump and slosh through the berm, they slow and drop sand. The first year both were in place, the beach near this road-end grew by about 50 feet. The next year, it kept growing.

As climate change progresses, coastal communities nearly everywhere are searching for solutions. Hard barriers like seawalls and riprap won’t cut it in many places; they do block water, but often cause further erosion. They’re also so expensive that few can afford them.

U.S. climate models show sea-level rise locked in at around a foot on average nationwide by 2050. In Washington alone, that is forecast to cause billions in damage. By 2100, the state expects catastrophic land loss, including 44% of tidal flats and 65% of estuarine beaches at key sites along the coast — places that myriad coastal species, including humans, rely on for food and protection. Coastal resilience experts believe building beaches back could be enough to prevent some of this.

Kaminsky’s research on the berm has already influenced projects nearby and in California, Europe and Guam. Together, these experiments promise to transform the tools that agencies and communities can apply elsewhere. To create any protective structure, engineers need design standards. The data to establish them didn’t exist until communities like North Cove started trying.

“IF YOU’VE NOT BEEN out here, it’s hard to wrap your brain around what’s really going on,” Lauren Bauernschmidt, a state Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist, said, standing on loose cobble. After working with Cottrell for five years, she was due to issue him a new maintenance permit, and needed her boss’s signoff. She and Cottrell were also trying to drum up more funding and buy-in from the many agencies involved, so they had assembled a cadre of colleagues to bring them up to speed.

On this breezy, blue-sky morning near the road-end, the once-threatening waterline was hundreds of feet out. The speed bump, Cottrell told the group, was buried under three feet of sand. Clam beds long absent have returned, along with grasses and shorebird habitat. And even when winter storms pull sand away — the way of things, here — the cobble remains to restart the beach-building process. Now that this section of shore seems stable, Cottrell said, “My hope is that this is hands-off forever.” But down the beach, trouble spots remain.

Farther south, the beach narrowed until it reached a prominent finger of land — a single home atop it — that has so far defied the tides. Surrounded by a seawall of giant boulders, it has become a landmark at the center of this project. Even that day’s gentle waves deflected off the wall toward the banks beside it. Stronger ones have carved deeply into the adjacent shoreline, threatening to turn the point into an island: A reminder of the pitfalls of bulwark structures in a naturally ephemeral environment.

The worst erosion was on the southern side. There, a vertical cliff-edge flanked a narrow curve of beach. Over the previous year, seven spruce trees on that neighboring property had lost their footing, toppling into the surf. An eighth leaned ominously. This vulnerable strip of land, owned by Ed Borden, has become a linchpin for North Cove. “From here to the highway is about 400 feet,” Cottrell said. “That could go in one or two nights in a big storm.” With it would go the roadway, homes and cranberry
bogs behind it.

Cottrell hopes to drop more cobble around the wall to re-establish a beach, which would slow the waves or even prevent them from reaching the seawall.

At the edge of his land, Borden stacked hay bales with a mini excavator, hoping they, too, might slow the ocean’s inland creep. Throughout the year, Borden and Cottrell had dumped thousands of tons of cobble along this bank, but the wash off the seawall was too strong. Despite — maybe because of — its impact here, that wall remained a seductive solution. Borden eyed the fortress, which stood deceptively steady. He wasn’t sure yet about the small cobbles; he had yet to see whether they worked as planned.

“I need a bigger excavator, bigger rock,” he started to explain.

“Or we could get you your sand beach back,” Cottrell countered, glancing to the surf. “Nothing dissipates wave energy like a good beach.”



Sarah Trent is an editorial intern for High Country News based in southwest Washington. Email her at sarah.trent@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

Source:  Washaway Beach, by Erika Langley

Antarctic sea ice reaches record low

From The Guardian

For 44 years, satellites have helped scientists track how much ice is floating on the ocean around Antarctica’s 18,000km coastline.

The continent’s fringing waters witness a massive shift each year, with sea ice peaking at about 18m sq km each September before dropping to just above 2m sq km by February.

But across those four decades of satellite observations, there has never been less ice around the continent than there was last week.

“By the end of January we could tell it was only a matter of time. It wasn’t even a close run thing,” says Dr Will Hobbs, an Antarctic sea ice expert at the University of Tasmania with the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership.

“We are seeing less ice everywhere. It’s a circumpolar event.”

In the southern hemisphere summer of 2022, the amount of sea ice dropped to 1.92m sq km on 25 February – an all-time low based on satellite observations that started in 1979.

But by 12 February this year, the 2022 record had already been broken. The ice kept melting, reaching a new record low of 1.79m sq km on 25 February and beating the previous record by 136,000 sq km – an area double the size of Tasmania.

In the southern hemisphere’s spring, strong winds over western Antarctica buffeted the ice. At the same time, Hobbs says large areas in the west of the continent had barely recovered from the previous year’s losses.

“Because sea ice is so reflective, it’s hard to melt from sunlight. But if you get open water behind it, that can melt the ice from underneath,” says Hobbs.

Hobbs and other scientists said the new record – the third time it’s been broken in six years – has started a scramble for answers among polar scientists.

The fate of Antarctica – especially the ice on land – is important because the continent holds enough ice to raise sea levels by many metres if it was to melt.

While melting sea ice does not directly raise sea levels because it is already floating on water, several scientists told the Guardian of knock-on effects that can.

Sea ice helps to buffer the effect of storms on ice attached to the coast. If it starts to disappear for longer, the increased wave action can weaken those floating ice shelves that themselves stabilise the massive ice sheets and glaciers behind them on the land.

One major area of concern is a marked loss of ice around the Amundsen and Bellinghausen seas on the continent’s west.

Even as the average amount of sea ice around the continent grew up to 2014, these two neighbouring seas saw losses.

That’s important because the region is home to the vulnerable Thwaites glacier – known as the “doomsday glacier” because it holds enough water to raise sea levels by half a metre.

“We don’t want to lose sea ice where there are these vulnerable ice shelves and, behind them, the ice sheets,” Prof Matt England, an oceanographer and climate scientist at the University of New South Wales, says.

“We are probably starting to see signs of significant warming and retreat of sea ice [in Antarctica]. To see it getting to these levels is definitely a concern because we have these potentially amplifying feedbacks.”

Data provided by scientists Dr Rob Massom, of the Australian Antarctic Division, and Dr Phil Reid, of the Bureau of Meteorology, shows two-thirds of the continent’s coastline was exposed to open water last month – well above the long-term average of about 50%.

“It’s not just the extent of the ice, but also the duration of the coverage,” Massom says. “If the sea ice is removed, you expose floating ice margins to waves that can flex them and increase the probability of those ice shelves calving. That then allows more grounded ice into the ocean.”

Massom and Reid published a study last year that found that, since 1979, the Amundsen Sea region was seeing longer periods without ice and more of the coastline was being exposed to open ocean conditions.

Dr Ted Scambos is a sea ice expert at the University of Colorado Boulder who also works on Antarctic sea ice at the university’s National Snow and Ice Data Center – a world centre for monitoring ice at the poles.

He said the downturn in sea ice in Antarctica “is causing the scientific community to wonder if there’s a process that’s related to global climate change”.

Antarctica is hard to study not just because of its remoteness, but in the challenges of gathering data around a continent exposed to huge variations in wind and storms from all sides.

Scambos said: “Since 2016 there has been a fairly sharp downturn [in sea ice] and especially with these back-to-back record years as well as many months being at near record lows, it’s causing the scientific community to wonder if there’s a process related to global climate change.”

He said while the most recent record could be related partly to a La Niña climate system that tends to deliver warmer winds to the continent’s peninsular, that didn’t explain the losses in other areas.

“We’re still trying to get to grips with what’s different now,” he says. “But it’s clear that reduced sea ice will have an impact. It’s going to have an impact on the continental ice because so much of the coast will be exposed.”

For many years Antarctica had seemingly been confounding some climate models as sea ice had – on average – slightly increased until a crash in 2016.

Dr Ariaan Purich, a climate scientist at Monash University, looked at why the sea ice didn’t behave as some expected.

She said it was likely caused by changing winds and, counterintuitively, meltwater from the land entering the ocean that made it easier for ice to form.

One study suggested that a warming ocean had also contributed to the sudden 2016 drop in sea ice.

“All the models project that as the climate warms, we expect to see [Antarctic sea ice] decline,” she says. “There’s widespread consensus on that. So this low sea ice is consistent with what the climate models show.”

Antarctic scientists are now scrambling to work out what’s happening. Are the drops in sea ice and the back-to-back record lows just a natural phenomenon in a continent notoriously difficult to study? Or are these records another clear sign the climate crisis is beating down on the frozen continent?

“Antarctica might seem remote but changes around there can affect the global climate and the melting ice sheets affect coastal communities around the world,” says Purich.

“Everyone should be concerned about what’s happening in Antarctica.”

Map of Antarctica showing the duration in days of sea ice around the continent between February 2022 and February 2023 compared with the long-term average between 1981/82 and 2010/11. Red shows areas where ice was absent for longer than usual, and blue shows were ice was present for longer. Photograph: Dr Phil Reid, Bureau of Meteorology, Hobart: Data: Nasa

Greenland warmer now than in the last 1000 years

An aerial view of meltwater on the Russell Glacier in Greenland on Aug. 16, 2022. Photo: Lukasz Larsson Warzecha/Getty Images

From Axios


Northern and central Greenland were warmer in the early 21st century compared to any period in at least the past 1,000 years, a new study found.

The new research offers the first conclusive evidence of human-induced long-term warming and increased meltwater runoff in the northern and central parts of Greenland, typically the coldest parts of the ice sheet.How much and how fast the ice sheet melts will help determine the fate of coastal residents worldwide, given its contribution to sea level rise.


The study, published in the journal Nature, finds that the warming during 2000-2011 exceeded the peak from swings in temperatures during pre-industrial times “with virtual certainty," and is about 1.5°C warmer than it was during the twentieth century.The likelihood that such temperatures would occur during the period from 1000-1800 is “close to zero,” the paper states.

The researchers worked to overcome a large amount of natural climate variability in the region by obtaining as many high quality ice core and other climate records as possible.

“Global warming is now detectable in one of the most remote regions of the world,” the study states.The reconstructed history of meltwater flowing off the ice sheet shows a spike during the 2000-2011 period that is unprecedented for the past millennium, a trend it predicts will continue, though with less certainty than the temperature conclusions.

“I hope this is a reminder for everyone that we should be worried, very worried about the Greenland ice sheet melting away,” Eric Rignot of UC Irvine and a senior researcher at NASA, who was not involved in the study, told Axios via email.

Ian Joughin, a climate scientist at the University of Washington, who also not involved in the new work, said the study offers valuable new data. “Greenland is warming with a clear linear trend, which likely will steepen with time,” he said.

Joughin cautioned that natural variability in the region means future decades could see lower amounts of warming and melting, at least temporarily.

Greenland's glaciers melting 100 times faster than we thought

In this aerial view, icebergs and meltwater are seen in front of the retreating Russell Glacier on Sept. 8, 2021 near Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. (Image credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images)

From LiveScience

Scientists are getting a better handle on how fast Greenland's ice is flowing out to sea. Old models that used Antarctica as a baseline were way off the mark.

Greenland's glaciers are melting 100 times faster than previously calculated, according to a new model that takes into account the unique interaction between ice and water at the island’s fjords.

The new mathematical representation of glacial melt factors in the latest observations of how ice gets eaten away from the stark vertical faces at the ends of glaciers in GGreenland. Previously, scientists used models developed in Antarctica, where glacial tongues float on top of seawater — a very different arrangement.

"For years, people took the melt rate model for Antarctic floating glaciers and applied it to Greenland's vertical glacier fronts," lead author Kirstin Schulz, a research associate in the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement. "But there is more and more evidence that the traditional approach produces too low melt rates at Greenland's vertical glacier fronts."

The researchers published their findings in September in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Researchers already knew their Antarctica-based understanding of Arctic glaciers was not a perfect match. But it's hard to get close to the edges of Greenland's glaciers, because they're situated at the ends of fjords — long, narrow inlets of seawater flanked by high cliffs — where warm water undercuts the ice. This leads to dramatic calving events where chunks of ice the size of buildings crumble into the water with little warning, creating mini-tsunamis, according to the researchers.

Researchers led by physical oceanographer Rebecca Jackson of Rutgers University have been using robotic boats to get close to these dangerous ice cliffs and take measurements. They've done this at Alaska's LeConte Glacier as well as Greenland's Kangerlussuup Sermia. (An upcoming mission led by scientists at the University of Texas at Austin will send robotic subs to the faces of three west Greenland glaciers.) Jackon's measurements suggest that the Antarctica-based models massively underestimate Arctic glacial melt. LeConte, for example, is disappearing 100 times faster than models predicted.

The mixture of cold fresh water from the glaciers and warmer seawater drives ocean circulation near the glaciers and farther out in the ocean, meaning the melt has far-reaching implications. The Greenland ice sheet is also important for sea-level rise; Greenland ice holds enough water to raise sea levels by 20 feet (6 meters).

The new model uses the latest data from near-glacial missions along with a more realistic understanding of how the steep, cliff-like faces of the glaciers impact ice loss. The results are consistent with Jackson's findings, showing 100 times more melt than the old models predicted.

"Ocean climate model results are highly relevant for humankind to predict trends associated with climate change, so you really want to get them right," Schulz said. "This was a very important step for making climate models better."