NASA Sees High Temperatures, Wildfires, and Annual Sea Ice Minimum Extent in Warming Arctic

Narration: Rachel Tilling and Liz Hoy

Transcript:

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On Sept. 15, 2019, Arctic sea ice reached its second-lowest minimum extent on record.

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The Arctic is one of the most rapidly changing regions on the planet,

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and it's warming about two to three times faster

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than the rest of the globe.

There is a lot going on in the Arctic.

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There are some really significant wildfires happening right now -- many of them

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in Siberia -- and we're seeing tremendous amount of carbon emissions in the region.

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Each year, essentially, we keep seeing new record high temperatures being set

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and new record low sea ice extents. There's been this kind of long-term

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decline in the sea ice extent over the last four decades. Sea ice is

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this really dynamic type of ice, it's the ice that forms and

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melts in the Arctic Ocean, so you get new ice forming and melting

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each year.

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we've been able to actually use satellites to look at the area of

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the ice on the Arctic Ocean, and one of the things we're noticing from that is

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when we get to the summer each year, you get this minimum

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of sea ice. So it covers the least area of the Arctic Ocean.

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What we're seeing is that that minimum is getting increasingly

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less over the last four decades, and we are losing a large amount

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of sea ice every year, if you look at the trends.

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And what we saw this year, there's kind of been a

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heatwave essentially in the Arctic. So

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temperatures at the North Pole were about 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit

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higher than

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for that time of year.

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Something that I kind of think about every year now whenever the sea ice minimum happens is that the 13 lowest

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sea ice extents on record have occurred in the past 13 years since 2007.

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Sea ice is kind of this big protective blanket of bright ice that sits on the

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Arctic Ocean, and it reflects the Sun's heat. It insulates the

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cool atmosphere from the warmer ocean, and if you

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start melting away that sea ice, you're going to warm the atmosphere more, and it's

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going to affect temperature, winds, and weather, not just in the Arctic, but globally as well.

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The way I kind of think about it is if you're taking

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away this big protective blanket from the Arctic, you're essentially doing

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a massive science experiment almost on the planet,

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and it's not necessarily an experiment that I would want to

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see the results of.

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We are seeing more melt in the Arctic, we

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are seeing earlier melt and later freeze up,

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we're combining those with the models that can predict what's going to happen in the future,

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and seeing that perhaps the Arctic is going to become sea ice-free sooner than we

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initially thought.

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There's a lot of talk for example about the kind of the temperatures in

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Siberia around permafrost melting and fires in Siberia,

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and that's really unusual and that's because it was so much warmer

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this year than it has been in on average the last 40 years.

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Temperatures in the Arctic are increasing three times as much as elsewhere in the world,

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so temperature definitely can play a role in the

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wildfires that we're seeing there. This year especially has been significant

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for Siberia in the Russian Arctic, where

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there's a town up there that's gone over 100 degrees Fahrenheit,

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and which they never see happen, and also that's the same region where

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there's there have been some really significant wildfires. And the smoke from

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those wildfires can be seen for many miles. But the problem that we're

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starting to see is that these fires are happening more frequently, and

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they're more severe than they have been in past decades. We're getting

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warmer temperatures, drier fuels, and more lightning, which is causing more

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fires generally in the Arctic, year-by-year.

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Arctic wildfires happen in these regions that have

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really thick organic soils, and you say 'Wait soil burns? What?'

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Well, it's it's soil, but it's organic material, too. It's like old leaves and

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old moss, and it kind of gets compacted, and it can really burn.

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But it's taken tens of thousands years to develop that

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soil, and so when it burns, you're releasing a huge amount of carbon

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into the atmosphere all at once. As a scientist, when I look at these trends,

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I am concerned. Where are we gonna go from here?

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That is why we keep studying this. So NASA has a number of field campaigns

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that are trying to understand Arctic processes, and I think

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that it's really important that we keep up the study and try to better

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understand what is happening and what does that mean for people

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50-100 years down the road.

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EXPLORE EARTH

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NASA