Ice Free Arctic Summers in Just 3 Years? (Spoiler: Probably)

Like pretty much everyone else, I’ve been following the graphs of Arctic Ice area to chart the decline in the size of the ice cap, especially in summer. However I’ve recently been pointed to the ice volume charts created by the University of Washington.

Their results are absolutely horrifying. If you thought the area graphs were depressing, these are an order of magnitude worse (not really surprising when you consider that they’re using 3 dimensions rather than 2!). As an experiment I plotted the annual data since 1979 for day 246 (September 2nd, since you ask). Here’s the result:

As you can see, the rate of decline of the ice is beginning to resemble what skiers call a black run!

How long until the Arctic is ice-free in summer?

As you can see, I did a quadratic curve fit on the data. This line reaches zero (ice-free summers) in 2017. However if you look at the data since 2000, most of the early points are above the line, whereas most of the later ones are below, indicating a different trend.

So doing a curve fit on just the data since since 2002 gives a much steeper line, that predicts the Arctic as completely ice-free by the summer of 2015.

Given that ice-free Arctic summers will absorb much more solar radiation, and allow the whole area to warm, this will inevitably increase the rate of loss of winter ice too.

Why is this important? Well, Arctic ice drives our weather patterns, and as I’ll cover in another post, this is very likely to significantly change our weather and damage food production.