Antarctic sea ice is “behaving strangely” and might have entered a “new regime”, the director of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) tells Carbon Brief.
Following an all-time low maximum in September 2023, Antarctic sea ice has been tracking at near-record-low extent for the past six months. Last month, it hit its 2024 minimum extent, tying with 2022 for the second-lowest Antarctic minimum in the 46-year satellite record.
Dr Mark Serreze, director of the NSIDC tells Carbon Brief that more warm ocean water is reaching the surface to melt ice and keep it from forming. He says that we “must wait and see” whether this is a “temporary effect” or whether the Antarctic has entered a “new regime”.
Meanwhile, Arctic sea ice has reached its maximum extent for the year, peaking at 15.01m square kilometres (km2) on 14 March. The provisional data from the NSIDC shows that this year’s Arctic winter peak, despite favourable winds that encouraged sea ice formation, was 640,000km2 smaller than the 1981-2010 average maximum.
This year’s maximum was the 14th lowest in the satellite record.
“Overall, the road remains downhill for Arctic sea ice, but it is quite bumpy along the way,” another scientist tells Carbon Brief. This relatively high winter peak is “notable and a good reminder that we have to communicate and account for this type of weather variability when we talk about Arctic climate change”, he says.
He adds that although the maximum is high compared to recent years, the ice is still “much thinner” than it was a few decades ago. The “wide coverage of this thinner ice” means total Arctic sea ice volume for the month of February was the third lowest on record.
Arctic winter peak
Arctic sea ice extent changes throughout the year. It grows each winter before reaching its peak for the year in February or March and then melts throughout the spring and summer towards its annual minimum, typically around September.
Using satellite data, scientists can track the growth and melt of sea ice, allowing them to determine the size of the ice sheet’s winter maximum and summer minimum extent. These are key metrics to monitor the “health” of the Arctic sea ice.
The NSIDC’s announcement says that this year’s Arctic winter peak of 15.01m is “below average”. Clocking in at 640,000km2 below the 1981-to-2010 average maximum extent, it ranks as the 14th lowest in the satellite record.
The NSIDC adds that the date of the maximum this year, 14 March, was two days later than the 1981-to-2010 average date of 12 March.
The plot below shows Arctic sea ice extent on 14 March, with the average sea ice extent for 1981-2010 shown by the orange line.
Arctic freeze
“The road remains downhill for Arctic sea ice, but it is quite bumpy along the way,” Dr Zack Labe – a postdoctoral researcher working at NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and the atmospheric and oceanic sciences programme at Princeton University – tells Carbon Brief. He adds:
“While this winter was yet again consistent with the long-term trend toward a warmer Arctic with less ice, regional weather patterns can still contribute to ice expansion and slower net declines, especially if the winds align from a north-to-south direction.”
Arctic sea ice reached its minimum extent for 2023 on 19 September.
With an extent of 4.23m km2, this was the sixth-lowest minimum on record and 1.99m km2 below the average minimum recorded over 1981-2010.
Following its annual minimum, Arctic sea ice growth was “slower than average”, leading to the fifth-lowest September on record, according to the NSIDC.
Labe tells Carbon Brief that the freeze season started with “widespread open water across the Pacific side of the Arctic, with massive areas of ice missing north of Alaska”, which contributed to “well-above-average temperatures” in the region.
Throughout October, however, sea ice extent increased by 119,800km2 per day – faster than the 1981-2010 average of 89,200km2 per day, according to the NSIDC.
The Arctic freeze up was “particularly rapid” in the seas around Siberia. By the end of October, the ice cover had reached the Siberian coast, although open water remained in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.
Air temperatures over the Arctic Ocean, around 2,500 feet above surface level, were mostly above average during October – particularly in and around the Canadian Archipelago, which saw temperatures of 4-5C above average.
Labe tells Carbon Brief that, overall, the Arctic winter can be characterised by “unusual warmth in the northern Arctic, but greater total ice extent”. This “counterintuitive” dynamic was caused by atmospheric circulation patterns, which led to “warmer, moist air blowing toward the north pole, while northerly winds contribute to expanding ice in the Greenland Sea and Sea of Okhotsk”, he says.
Throughout November, Arctic sea ice extent continued to increase faster than average. However, the NSIDC says the freeze up “temporarily stalled” for around five days from 22 November, as a series of three tropical cyclones brought warm, moist air into the north Atlantic.
The NSIDC says that a combination of low pressure to the north and west of Svalbard and a high-pressure centre to the south-east “created a strong, persistent flow from the south of relatively warm and moist air from the north Atlantic Ocean toward Svalbard”.
This flow of air can be seen as “an extension of an atmospheric river into the Arctic”, it says. It adds that the strong winds “helped to push the ice edge in the east Greenland and Barents seas northwards, limiting new ice formation”.
The NSIDC notes that pauses in Arctic sea ice freeze up have happened in November before, in 2013 and 2016, making such events “rare, but not unknown”.
Arctic sea ice extent continued to increase “markedly faster” than usual throughout December, the NSIDC says. It adds that “sea ice formation in Hudson Bay was unusually late, but the ice cover expanded quickly from west to east in mid-December”.
For December overall, 2023 saw the third-highest monthly gain on record, with 2.71m km2 of sea ice extent added throughout the month. Average Arctic sea ice extent over December 2023 was the ninth lowest in the satellite record, at 12m km2.
Arctic sea ice extent continued to move down the rankings as the new year rolled in, despite slower-than-average ice growth. In fact, the NSIDC says that Arctic sea ice extent actually declined for a few days at the end of the month, although it notes that this is “not unusual at this time of year” and says it is “caused by weather systems that temporarily halt ice growth or push the ice northwards”.
The average Arctic sea ice extent for January 2024 was 13.92m km2 – the 20th lowest on record.
This comparatively high sea ice extent is “notable and a good reminder that we have to communicate and account for this type of weather variability when we talk about Arctic climate change”, Labe tells Carbon Brief.
Arctic sea ice extent continued to grow throughout February, gaining 15.3m km2 of ice throughout the month. The February 2024 extent of 14.61m km2 was 690,000km2 below the 1981-2010 February average extent, and tied with 2022 as the 15th lowest on record, according to the NSIDC.
Temperatures are usually “well-below freezing” over the Arctic Ocean in February, but the NSIDC notes that in 2024, they were not as low as usual for the time of year. Over the central Arctic ocean, air temperatures at 2,500 feet above sea level were up to 10C warmer than average.
Labe notes that although sea ice extent was high compared to recent years, the ice is still “much thinner” than it was a few decades ago:
“Total Arctic sea-ice volume ended up as the third lowest on record for the month of February due to the wide coverage of this thinner ice.”
Variability and long-term decline of February #Arctic sea-ice thickness and sea-ice volume… (anomalously low for 2024)
+ Data information: https://t.co/PTJWaGkNua pic.twitter.com/a51VTWKFVA
— Zack Labe (@ZLabe) March 10, 2024
Antarctic ‘behaving strangely’
Meanwhile, at the Earth’s other pole, Antarctic sea ice hit its summer minimum sea ice extent on 20 February. With an extent of 1.99m km2, this year’s minimum ties with 2022 as the second-lowest on record, the NSIDC reports.
The plot below shows Antarctic sea ice extent on 20 February 2024, with the median sea ice extent for 1981-2010 shown by the orange line.
The Antarctic minimum was 850,000km2 smaller than the 1981-to-2010 average summer low of 2.84m km2, but 200,000km2 larger than the previous record low set on 21 February 2023.
This year marks the third consecutive minimum Antarctic sea ice extent below 2m km2. The table below shows the five years with the lowest minimum Antarctic sea ice extent on record, which includes 2022, 2023 and 2024 towards the top.
| Rank | Year | Minimum ice extent (m km2) | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2023 | 1.79 | 21 Feb |
| 2 | 2022 | 1.98 | 25 Feb |
| 2= | 2024 | 1.99 | 20 Feb |
| 4 | 2017 | 2.11 | 3 March |
| 5 | 2018 | 2.22 | 21 Feb |
“The Antarctic has been behaving strangely,” Dr Mark Serreze, director of the NSIDC, tells Carbon Brief. He continues:
“In the past few years, [southern hemisphere] summer extent has dropped to record lows. Before that, we saw record highs! What has changed?
“The answer seems to lie in the ocean – more warm water getting up the the surface to melt ice or keep it from forming. Is this a temporary effect, or, as many have argued, have we entered a ‘new regime’ in which the ocean will continue to strongly affect the sea ice? Again, we must wait and see.”
Record-breaking Antarctic extent
Antarctic sea ice has been tracking at or near record-low levels for months.
The Antarctic set a record-low maximum on 10 September 2023, with an extent of 16.96m km2. This was “the lowest sea ice maximum in the 1979 to 2023 sea ice record by a wide margin”, and one of the earliest, the NSIDC says.
Antarctic conditions over 2023 were “truly exceptional” and “completely outside the bounds of normality”, one expert told Carbon Brief.
As 2023 progressed, Antarctic sea ice melt was “slower than average”, the NSIDC says. The total decline in Antarctic sea ice extent through October was 903,000km2, while the October average was 985,000km2.
Nevertheless, Antarctic sea ice extent continued to track at a record low. On 31 October 2023, Antarctic sea ice extent was still tracking at a record-low of 15.79m km2. This is 750,000km2 below the previous 31 October record low.
The decline in Antarctic sea ice paused for a few days from 9 November, allowing sea ice extent to creep above the November 2016 value, the NSIDC says. This marked the first time that the daily 2023 Antarctic sea ice extent was not the lowest in the record since early May 2023. By the start of December, Antarctic sea ice extent was again at a record low, it notes.
The Antarctic saw in the new year with a sea ice extent of 6.37m km2, marking the sixth-lowest New Year’s Day Antarctic sea ice extent on record, the NSIDC says. Ice melted rapidly throughout the month, and by the end of January, daily Antarctic sea ice extent reached 2.58m km2 – tying with 2017 for second lowest on record.
The post Antarctic sea ice ‘behaving strangely’ as Arctic reaches ‘below-average’ winter peak appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Antarctic sea ice ‘behaving strangely’ as Arctic reaches ‘below-average’ winter peak
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Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.
As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.
The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.
With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.
Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile
On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.
At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia.
We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.
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Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.
Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.
Agroecology as an alternative
There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency.
In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.
In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.
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Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.
These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.
Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products
We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.
As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.
This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.
The post Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.
Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems
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