This article from 2019 is yet one more example of dire warnings related to the human caused warming of our planet that have been occurring for decades. Deepest bow of respect and gratitude to Dahr Jamail! I'd been reading and following Dahr for many years when his articles and courageous voice of truth about the impacts of the climate crisis were no longer frequently appearing in the usual trusted independent media resources that I found him in... Tears...
There are so many courageous souls who have been bearing witness and bringing us the horrifying facts related to the devastating warming of our Earth Mother for literally decades. And these are the voices that mainstream corporate funded American media has refused again and again to bring out into the light of day. And we wonder why there are so many in our country who still believe that humans are not the root cause of the climate catastrophes that we are witness to and experiencing each and every day across our country and the world. It breaks my heart.
Our descendants are counting on us — as are all of the children of all of the species on Earth. And those who are not in any way taking responsibility for the climate emergency are failing them. Which is why I am so fiercely passionate about my research, seeking trusted resources of integrity and courage and facts, bearing witness, and being a relentless voice of truth in the midst of devastating denial, doubt, and disinformation. — Molly
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| A helicopter flies over a glacier on the Franz Josef Land Archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. The current sea ice coverage in the Arctic is the lowest ever recorded for mid-June. Lev Fedoseyev \ TASS via Getty Images |
June has set a record low of Arctic sea ice, while the extent of melting across the Greenland Ice Sheet this early in the summer has never been seen before.
Recently, temperatures in parts of Greenland soared to , while open water (not covered by sea ice) is already being observed in places north of Alaska where it has seldom, if ever, been observed.
The current sea ice coverage in the Arctic is the for mid-June.
Rick Thoman, a Fairbanks-based climatologist, that the loss of sea ice over the Chukchi and Beaufort seas of Alaska’s northern coast is now “unprecedented.”
Scientists have long been warning that what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. Some liken the situation to what happens when a refrigerator door is left open. The cold air that is usually contained within the Arctic region of the planet is now often being displaced by high-pressure zones in the Arctic, all of which is then being . This has resulted in lower-than-normal temperatures across much of the central and eastern United States in early June, while the Arctic was baking under abnormally high temperatures that have facilitated the unprecedented melting of ice across so much of the region.
“The jet stream this week was one of the craziest I’ve ever seen!” Jennifer Francis, a leading researcher who has published studies connecting mid-latitude weather to the dramatic changes across the Arctic, .
By mid-June, nearly half of the ice of the Greenland Ice Sheet was melting. One day alone saw a loss of two billion metric tons of ice. , which is not photo-shopped, is worth viewing. It displays a dogsled being used by scientists to retrieve their oceanographic moorings and a weather station in Northwest Greenland atop an ice sheet that is literally melting underneath their feet.
What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.
There are other indications of how severe the changes are in the northlands. Southeastern Alaska recorded its in May. In fact, the southernmost region of Alaska has already been in drought for .
“Officials say areas experiencing lesser ‘severe’ and ‘moderate’ droughts have also expanded and the region’s precipitation, while higher than other areas, is drastically less than normal,” the of the crisis.
On June 13, the that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was investigating “unusually large numbers” of dead ice seals along the Bering and Chukchi sea coasts. The seals are integral to the subsistence lifestyle of the Inuit people in the area.
“Harold Okitkun was maneuvering his skiff along the coastline near the Western Alaska village of Kotlik on Friday afternoon when he first saw the seal carcasses, he said,” reported the . “He counted 18 dead ice seals along about 11 miles of shore. In his 48 years in the village, he’d never seen anything like it, he said. It was overwhelming.”
NOAA received reports of at least 60 dead ice seals along the west coast of Alaska in just the last month. This was enough to cause the agency to launch an investigation into what are “unusually large numbers” of seal deaths.
“At this point, we don’t know what’s going on,” Julie Speegle, spokeswoman for NOAA Fisheries Alaska Region, told the . “We are mobilizing crews to go out and collect some samples and try to investigate what’s happening.”
Of course, the brutal impacts of climate disruption on the Arctic aren’t new this year. During an interview in Anchorage in 2016, Bruce Wright, a senior scientist with the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association (APIA), told Truthout of a warming event that occurred in Alaska in 2015: “This last summer, the gulf warmed up 15°C warmer than normal in some areas,” Wright told me. “Yes, you heard me right. 15°C. And it is now, overall, 5°C above normal in both the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea, and has been all winter long.”
Wright discussed how the climate-disruption-driven warming of the Northern Pacific and the Gulf of Alaska was driving toxic algal blooms. This, coupled with the warmer waters, had “broken” the food web in his region.
This, along with all the other catastrophic global impacts of human-caused climate disruption, caused Wright to issue a bleak prognosis for the future.
“We’re not going to stop this train wreck,” Wright told Truthout. “We are not even trying to slow down the production of CO2, and there is already enough CO2 in the atmosphere. We are going to see the consequences, and they will be significant.”
Recent data for the seventh year running, as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased by their second highest annual rise in the last six decades.
Please go here for the original article: https://truthout.org/articles/scientists-are-stunned-by-how-rapidly-ice-is-melting-in-the-arctic/
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Darh Jamail is a former mountaineer, guide, and rescue volunteer on Denali in Alaska, who went on to work for a decade as a war correspondent in the Middle East, then for another decade as a journalist covering the global environmental crisis. The author of five books, his most recent focused on Indigenous perspectives of the polycrisis. Dahr is a storyteller, and believes in the transformational properties of bearing witness to both the grief and pain arising from what is being done to our planet. He sees this work as integral to creating ethical impacts towards supporting future generations.
Dahr Jamail is also the author of The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption (The New Press, 2019), a finalist for the E.O. Wilson/PEN/E.O. Wilson Science Writing Award. Jamail is also the co-editor, with Stan Rushworth, of We Are The Middle Of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth (The New Press, 2022). Jamail has won numerous other awards including the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism and the Izzy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Independent Media. He is also the author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket, 2007).
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