‘An area the size of Lake Superior’

Climate change researchers warn about the loss of Arctic ice

Tessa Vanderhart Staff

David Barber wants to make sure that sea ice in the Arctic gets the recognition it deserves.

Barber is a professor in the faculty of earth, environment and resources and a Canada research chair in Arctic system science — a system, Barber said, that is “all in a state of change.”

“You think about how large Lake Superior is — it’s the largest freshwater lake in the world, and it covers a very large area.

“Well, we lose that area of sea ice every year in the Arctic. And for the last 27 years, we’ve been losing that amount.”

With this rate of loss, Barber said that he expects summer ice to disappear from the Arctic as soon as 2020 or as late as 2050. There has been ice year-round in the Arctic for the last billion years.

The Arctic dictates heat exchange for the entire world, said Barber; if the temperature regulation between the atmosphere and water is affected, the rate of global climate change could be accelerated.

“Almost everything is connected to it: the sea ice forms a very thin layer between the ocean and the atmosphere; it decouples those two environments.”

Barber was speaking at a meeting of the Canadian Arctic Shelf Exchange Study (CASES), a collaboration of 120 scientists who all participated in a research study in the Arctic. For a year, beginning in August 2003, 42 scientists at a time collected data from the Amudsen, a research icebreaker. The ship was locked into Arctic ice throughout the winter.

The project, spearheaded by the U of M and Laval University, is the largest Arctic research program ever conducted, boasting 29,000 person-days at sea. Currently, Barber and CASES are working on a new project, called Arcticnet, aimed at integrating CASES with social sciences and medicine across the Arctic.

“These are problems that aren’t going to go away. One of the best things we can do about them is understand them, so that knowledge can inform change,” said Barber.

“The early and strongest impacts of global climate change are being felt in the Arctic now.”

Barber explained that everything in the Arctic is delicately balanced; sea ice levels dictate everything from ocean currents to the way viruses and bacteria move through the system, as well as the carbon cycle, algae growth and large animal life and patterns of human settlement.

Romain Lamos, a doctoral student in Oceanography at the Institut natural de la recherche scientifique (INRS), is tracing water movements in the Beaufort Sea. Small changes in the water masses mean different nutrients for organisms, and by extension, the entire ecosystem. The study of physics in northern waters can tell a lot about what’s under the surface.

“It’s like a base for the others,” he said. He compared the different levels of water in the sea to the layers of scientists studying the Arctic waters, noting that the physical study he does is far removed, but integral, to the work of Arctic biologists.

On the other side of this spectrum of disciplines is Lisa Losetto, a doctoral candidate in Zoology at the U of M. Losetto’s study analyses the relatively high mercury levels in Beaufort belugas. This is a result of diet, which is determined by where the belugas feed — and her research has been on the first year-long tracking of the whales, which she hopes will show the effect of the changing ecosystem most clearly.

“If the ice dictates where they’re feeding, and the ice is changing, what does that mean in terms of what they’re going to feed on next?” she said.