Peter Wadhams: ‘Next year or the year after, the Arctic will be free of ice’

Scientist Peter Wadhams believes the summer ice cover at the north pole is about to disappear, triggering even more rapid global warming


Peter Wadhams in the Arctic in 2007: ‘We may able to raise the Thames barrier in Britain but in Bangladesh, people will be drowned.’

by Robin McKie, The Guardian, August 21, 2016

Peter Wadhams has spent his career in the Arctic, making more than 50 trips there, some in submarines under the polar ice. He is credited with being one of the first scientists to show that the thick icecap that once covered the Arctic ocean was beginning to thin and shrink. He was director of the Scott Polar Institute in Cambridge from 1987 to 1992 and professor of ocean physics at Cambridge from 2001 to 2015. His book, A Farewell to Ice, tells the story of his unravelling of this alarming trend and describes what the consequences for our planet will be if Arctic ice continues to disappear at its current rate.

You have said on several occasions that summer Arctic sea ice would disappear by the middle of this decade. It hasn’t. Are you being alarmist?
No. There is a clear trend down to zero for summer cover. However, each year chance events can give a boost to ice cover or take some away. The overall trend is a very strong downward one, however. Most people expect this year will see a record low in the Arctic’s summer sea-ice cover. Next year or the year after that, I think it will be free of ice in summer and by that I mean the central Arctic will be ice-free. You will be able to cross over the North Pole by ship. There will still be about a million square kilometres of ice in the Arctic in summer, but it will be packed into various nooks and crannies along the Northwest Passage and along bits of the Canadian coastline. Ice-free means the central basin of the Arctic will be ice-free, and I think that that is going to happen in summer 2017 or 2018.

Why should we be concerned about an Arctic that is free of ice in summer?
People tend to think of an ice-free Arctic in summer in terms of it merely being a symbol of global change. Things happen, they say. In fact, the impact will be profound and will effect the whole planet and its population. One key effect will be albedo feedback. Sea ice reflects about 50% of the solar radiation it receives back into space. By contrast, water reflects less than 10%. So if you replace ice with water, which is darker, much more solar heat will be absorbed by the ocean, and the planet will heat up even more rapidly than it is doing at present.

Sea ice also acts as an air-conditioning system. Winds coming over the sea to land masses such as Siberia and Greenland will no longer be cooled as they pass over ice, and these places will be heated even further. These effects could add 50% to the impact of global warming that is produced by rising carbon emissions.

What will be the effects of this accelerating increase in temperatures?
The air over Greenland will get warmer, and more and more of its ice will melt. It is already losing about 300 cubic kilometres of ice a year. Antarctica is adding to the melt as well. Sea-level rises will accelerate as a result. The most recent prediction of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that seas will rise by 60 to 90 centimetres this century. I think a rise of one to two metres is far more likely. Indeed, it is probably the best we can hope for.

That may not sound a lot, but it is really very serious. It will increase enormously the frequency of storm surges all over the world. We may be able to raise the Thames barrier in Britain, but in Bangladesh, it just means more and more people will be drowned.

Global warming is generally associated with increased fossil-fuel burning and consequent rises in levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. But is that the only climate problem we face?
No, it is not. We also have the issue of methane. Russian scientists who have investigated waters off their coast have detected more and more plumes of methane bubbling up from the seabed. The reason this is happening is closely connected with the warming of the planet and the shrinking of the Arctic icecaps.

Until around 2005, even in summer, you still had sea ice near the coast. Then it started to disappear, so that for three or four months a year warm water reached the shallow waters around the shores where there had been permafrost ground since the last ice age. It has started to melt with dangerous consequences. Underneath the permafrost there are sediments full of methane hydrates. When the permafrost goes, you release the pressure on top of these hydrates and the methane comes out of solution.

Can we monitor this methane just as we can monitor carbon dioxide?
Yes, we can measure methane over large areas using satellites. These have shown that methane levels that had been fairly flat for most of the last century have started to rise and are accelerating, often with little outliers on the graph. There is a scientist called Jason Box who works in Denmark for the Greenland Survey, and he calls these outliers dragon’s breath. They are not some sort of measurement caused by dodgy instruments. They are real pulses of methane coming from offshore flumes.

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An image from the NOAA/Nasa Suomi NPP satellite taken on May 30, 2016, highlights the Arctic ice retreat off the north-west coast of Alaska. The average Arctic sea ice extent for May 2016 set a new record low since satellite observations began. Photograph: Suomi NPP/NASA/NOAA

How intense is methane as a heater of the atmosphere compared with carbon dioxide?
It is 23 times more powerful. However, methane dissipates much more quickly than carbon dioxide. It gets oxidised so that it only lingers in the atmosphere for about 7 or 8 years. By contrast, carbon dioxide hangs around in the climate system for about 100 years before it ends up in the sea and is absorbed by creatures that die and litter the seabed. At least that is what scientists thought. Today, there are quite a number of researchers who think carbon dioxide could last 1,000 years in the atmosphere.

So in the long run carbon dioxide is still going to be worse than methane in terms of heating the planet because a single methane pulse will have a disastrous effect, but if there is nothing to follow it on then it will go away. But with carbon dioxide there is a ratchet effect. All the carbon dioxide we release by burning fossil fuels just builds up in the atmosphere. We are having to live with last century’s carbon dioxide. What that says is simple: there is no such thing as a safe emission rate of carbon dioxide. That is why I am despondent about us ever being able to cut carbon emissions.

If we cannot halt the emissions of carbon dioxide, what can we do?
In the end, the only hope we have is to find a way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere once it has got there. Even the IPCC has admitted that we will have to find a way to extract carbon dioxide from the air. The trouble is that they just don’t know how we can do that. The most favoured scheme is known as BECCS: bio-energy with carbon capture and storage. Essentially, you plant trees and bushes over vast swaths of ground. These grow, absorbing carbon dioxide in the process. Then you burn the wood to run power plants while trapping, liquefying and storing the carbon dioxide that is released.

It sounds straightforward. Will it work?
I am a bit suspicious of this technology. BECCS will need so much land to be effective. Calculations suggest it would need 40% to 50% of the arable land of the planet to make it work on the scale we will need and that would not leave enough land to grow crops to feed the world or to provide homes for a viable population of wild animals and plants. Other techniques, such as crushing and spreading olivine rocks, which absorb carbon dioxide, on beaches, will simply not scale up. They won’t work, so we will have to find some other way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere directly.

As far as I can see, it will have to take the form of some sort of device into which you pump air at one end and you get air without carbon dioxide coming out the other end. It can be done, I am sure, but at the moment we do not have such a device. However, without something like that, I cannot see how we are going to deal with the carbon dioxide that is getting into the atmosphere. We are going to have to rely on a technology that has not yet been developed. That is a measure of the troubles that lie ahead for us. I think humanity can do it, but I would feel much better if I saw governments investing in such technology.

Farewell to Ice is published by Allen Lane (£20) on 1 September. Click here to order a copy for £16.40

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/21/arctic-will-be-ice-free-in-summer-next-year

"A Farewell to Ice" by Arctic sea ice expert Peter Wadhams: review – climate change writ large

The warning this book gives us about the consequences of the loss of the planet’s ice is emphatic, urgent and convincing


An Adélie penguin, east Antarctica. The loss of our sea ice will have dire consequences across the planet, not just at the poles, says Peter Wadhams. Photograph: Staff/Reuters.

by Horatio Clare, The Guardian, August 21, 2016

Becoming a world authority on sea ice has taken Peter Wadhams to the polar zones more than 50 times, travelling on foot and by plane, ship, snowmobile and several nuclear-powered submarines of the Royal Navy.

Nonscientists who read his astonishing and hair-raising A Farewell to Ice will agree that the interludes of autobiography it contains are engrossing, entertaining and, when one submarine suffers an onboard explosion and fire while under the ice, harrowing.

Any reader should find the science of sea-ice creation and the implications for us all of its loss – explored and explained here with clarity and style – beautiful, compelling and terrifying.

Wadhams thanks Ernest Hemingway for his title. Climate change, a cause and an effect of ice loss, brings conflict that would have interested the great author. Persecuted by trolls and climate-change deniers, Wadhams made news last year when three of his peers met premature deaths. One fell down stairs. One died in wilderness, possibly struck by lightning. A third, out cycling, was crushed by a lorry. Claiming that he had been targeted by a lorry while cycling, Wadhams speculated that oil companies or governments had it in for him and his ilk because of the conclusions to which their work has led them. But his book is more extraordinary than any conspiracy.

A Farewell to Ice proceeds methodically. Ice cores, tubes of compacted polar snow, record the last million years of atmospheric change, during which the Earth has oscillated between ice ages and warm periods. Now the pattern is breaking.

“Our planet has changed colour. Today, from space, the top of the world in the northern summer looks blue instead of white. We have created an ocean where there was once an ice sheet. It is Man’s first major achievement in reshaping the face of his planet,” Wadhams writes.

Polar ice is thinning and retreating with unprecedented speed. All our ingenuity cannot, at present, change that. Because ice only grows in winter but can melt year-round, its growth rate is limited, while melt rate is unlimited.

Ice is extraordinary stuff. A “puckered honeycomb” of oxygen and hydrogen atoms, it is highly mutable in different states because the length of the hydrogen bonds in its molecules varies. Ice [can] exist near absolute zero, the lowest temperature theoretically possible. Recent research suggests it may have entirely covered the Earth three times, making “snowball Earths.” Ice coats space dust, giving stars their twinkle. Life may have originated in that shining dust, according to the astronomer Fred Hoyle. Polar ice functions as Earth’s air- and water-conditioning system, and our thermostat.

Wadhams outlines how CO2 emissions are smashing the system, spinning the thermostat to hot. Without the albedo effect of ice – by which it reflects solar radiation up to 10 times more effectively than open water – we have entered a negative feedback loop.

Wadhams puts this plainly. “There is no period in Earth’s history where the rate of rise of atmospheric CO2 is as great as it is today.” The asteroid that finished the dinosaurs blasted 4.5 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, “yet the CO2 rate rise [in the aftermath] was still an order of magnitude lower than the current rate.”

The ice he worries about most covers Arctic seabeds – [made of] permafrost from the last ice age. Losing this will release huge methane plumes. Methane is 23 times more effective in raising global temperature than is CO2. Wadhams and colleagues have modelled the consequences using different dates for methane release.

A business-as-usual approach by humanity makes 2035 a plausible moment for the permafrost to melt and methane to escape. The worst floods, fires, droughts, and storms we have seen will be as nothing to what Africa, Asia, and the Americas experience in this scenario. Millions die. Low-lying areas are inundated. Survivors live in a patchy post-apocalypse. Europe’s current refugee crisis would be dwarfed.

We still have time, A Farewell to Ice concludes, for drastic action, despite long procrastination. The fall of Margaret Thatcher was bad for the ice: she was a fan of Wadhams’s work, quoting him extensively in her efforts to set up a body to understand and mitigate the loss of sea ice. Subsequent prime ministers did little or worse than nothing, suppressing facts that lobbyists in business and industry (some of them former Thatcherite ministers like Lord Lawson and Peter Lilley) did not like.

Last year’s Paris agreement, when global leaders resolved to prevent a temperature rise of 2C (with an aspiration of 1.5C), gives Wadhams hope. He believes there is now a common will across the world to confront and avert the nightmare. Solutions include wind, wave, solar, tidal, and nuclear energy (not the perilous water-cooled reactor type David Cameron wanted for Hinkley Point, which have a terrible record, but the “pebble bed” type, apparently) and, above all, direct air capture (DAC) [of CO2], which has yet to be invented.

You pump air through a system that removes the CO2 and “either liquefies it or turns it chemically into something useful,” Wadhams says. Salvation requires “a [DAC] research program on the scale of the Manhattan Project” and voluntary change by all: home insulation, no more SUVs or budget flights. We act, decisively and immediately, or our grandchildren pay full price, with our children impotent to help them, if you believe this book. I am afraid I do.

A Farewell to Ice is published by Allen Lane (£20). Click here to buy it for £16.40

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/21/farewell-to-ice-peter-wadhams-review-climate-change

SHOW THIS TO EVERYONE: NYT's INCREDIBLE ARTICLE ON THE DISINTEGRATION OF GREENLAND'S ICE SHEET

Dear Readers,

I don't know if the link will open for you if you are not a subscriber, but I suspect it will.

As shocking and dramatic as this report on Greenland's rapidly melting and disintegrating ice sheet is, everyone should see it and show it to all their friends and contacts.

I have never seen anything that shows what is going on in Greenland like this report.

At the very end, there is another video.  Near the end, you can see in the lower right hand corner where the surface has even collapsed due to a sub surface channel.  I had already heard of some much larger collapses due to the draining of subsurface lakes within the ice.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/27/world/greenland-is-melting-away.html?_r=0

Jason Box: Earth's Ice Is Melting Much Faster Than Forecast. Here's Why That's Worrying

by Jason Box, Professor of Glaciology, Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Huffington Post, September 4, 2015

COPENHAGEN -- For me it was only after 8 years of studying Greenland -- installing and maintaining a network of on-ice climate stations and examining how much snow evaporates from the island -- that I suddenly realized glaciology textbooks needed a major revision. This was in 2002. Prior to the epiphany, conventional knowledge held that the ice sheet was frozen at its bed, and so the reaction time of the ice sheet to climate warming was measured in tens of thousands of years. A heck of a long time.

Climate warming had just infiltrated Greenland glaciology in earnest. Summer melt water, it turned out, drains down quickly to the bed, lubricating the glacier's flow. Suddenly we realized an expanding melt season meant the ice sheet would be sliding faster, longer. It was not to be the only time our philosophy got hit with a major surprise that connected the ice sheet with climate change and the threat of abrupt sea level rise.

The next one came in 2006.

Somehow all marine-terminating glaciers across the southern half of Greenland doubled in speed simultaneously between 2000 and 2005. [Readers, this news is what caused me to begin this blog -- I had the one and only epiphany in my life when I read about this.] We didn't yet know why.

In the meantime, scientists tried defining a plausible upper limit for the contribution to sea level rise from Greenland's ice. That was at a time when surging glacier speeds -- ice flow -- was thought to be the dominant conveyer of ice loss, and would be for the foreseeable future. Well, surprise! It became clear that for six years in a row, starting in 2007, ice loss from surface meltwater runoff took over the lead position in the competition for biggest loser.  [This was something I thought privately at the time -- that this must occur eventually, but I did not imagine that it would occur so soon. I never bought into the idea that the topography was a limit on glacial outflow and thus would restrain Greenland's contribution to sea level rise.] From 2007 to 2012, nearly each summer set higher and higher melt records, owing to persistent and unforeseen weather that by 2012 would become a signature of climate change.

The competition between how much ice is lost through glacier flows into fjords versus meltwater runoff is intimately synergistic with meltwater interacting with ice flow all along the way. Increasing melt sends more water down through the ice sheet, softening the ice so it flows faster. Once at the bed the water lubricates flow. Squirting out the front of glaciers into the sea, the meltwater drives a heat exchange that undercuts glaciers, promoting calving, loss of flow resistance and faster flow. Put it this way: in Washington, DC, to know what's happening, you follow the money; in Greenland you follow the meltwater.

Put it this way: in Washington, DC, to know what's happening, you follow the money; in Greenland you follow the meltwater.

Glaciologists became oceanographers when they realized, in 2008, the trigger effect for galloping glaciers was warm pulses of subtropical waters that undermine glaciers at great depth in the sea, at the grounding lines where this warm water can invade.

Indeed, ocean warming is arguably the climate change story. The planetary energy imbalance due to the enhanced greenhouse effect is loading far more heat into the oceans than the atmosphere or land. The world is 70% ocean-covered. after all. While there were signs of a warming hiatus in air temperatures from 1998 to 2012, the ocean continued to heat up, an equivalent of four Hiroshima bombs, per second, all day, every day. The increase is continuing as we load the atmosphere with CO2.

The fundamental climate heating issue is a problem of too much of a good thing. The natural greenhouse effect -- a good thing -- keeps temperatures tolerable at night. But it has been enhanced by more than a century of people externalizing the environmental costs of stupendous economic growth, loading the atmosphere now with 42% more carbon dioxide, 240% more methane, 20% more nitrous oxide, 42% more tropospheric ozone, etc. We have far too much gaseous carbon compounds now in our atmosphere, people. The carbon pollution is, by the way, making our oceans too acidic, threatening the base of the marine food chain. Would someone step forward and deny the changing ocean chemistry? Do I digress?

We have far too much gaseous carbon compounds now in our atmosphere, people.

The key question, as I see it, is how to project what the sea level will soon be due to ice sheet melting. But this is confounded by us not really knowing what to expect. We keep being surprised by nature being more sensitive and complex. As the science develops, we see more interconnection, where multiplying feedbacks produce surprisingly fast responses.

Will there be some saving self-regulation of human-induced climate warming and its melting land ice consequences? The enormous increase of heat in our oceans, from past decades of enhanced greenhouse effect, negates any hope that negative feedbacks or even solar output will prevent a much warmer world. The few negative feedbacks we have found for ice -- like more snow as a result of a warming climate, more reflective frost, more efficient sub-glacial water transmission -- are clearly being outdone. And at the global scale, despite some negative feedbacks like more clouds, clearly we are not seeing net cooling. Feedbacks, whether positive or negative, only do their thing after the initial effect. Negative feedbacks don't reverse the perturbation.

Seemingly the biggest issue with abrupt sea level rise comes from the now-unstoppable loss of key sectors of West Antarctic ice and the discovery of more marine instability than we thought elsewhere. Like glaciers thinning rapidly in East Antarctica. Or in Greenland, where improved bedrock maps reveal a marine connection an average of 40 kilometers further inland than previously thought. Or like how new fjord underwater mapping reveals greater fjord depths, increasing the odds that deep warm ocean water can communicate with more Greenland glaciers than previously thought. Surprise, surprise, surprise.

I'd say we are in for more surprises.

If the past decade of scientific inquiry is any indication, I'd say we are in for more surprises. That notion is further supported by the fact that the climate models used for projecting future temperatures lack key processes that likely reinforce warming or the effects of warming, not regulate it.

Despite decades of progress by many clever scientists engaged with climate modeling, climate models used to inform policymakers don't yet encode key pieces of physics that have ice melting so fast. They don't incorporate thermal collapse -- ice softening due to increasing meltwater infiltration.

Climate models also don't yet incorporate increasing forced ocean convection at the ocean fronts of glaciers that forces a heat exchange between warming water and ice at the grounding lines.

Climate models don't yet include ice algae growth that darkens the bare ice surface.

Climate models don't yet prescribe background dark bare ice from outcropping dust on Greenland from the dusty last ice age.

Climate models don't include increasing wildfire delivering more light-trapping dark particles to bright snow-covered areas, yielding earlier melt onset and more intense summer melting.

As a result of some of these factors and probably some as yet unknown others, climate models have under-predicted the loss rate of snow on land by a factor of four and the loss of sea ice by a factor of two.

Climate models also don't yet sufficiently resolve extended periods of lazy north-south extended jet streams that produce the kind of sunny summers over Greenland (2007-2012 and 2015) that resulted in melting that our models didn't foresee happening until 2100.

While individual climate models come close to observations on this or that piece of the complex big picture, what ends up in global assessment reports intended to help guide policy decisions and national discussions of climate change are very conservative averages of dozens of models that don't include the latest, higher sensitivity physics.

So, alas, when it comes to ice, how fast it can go and how fast the sea will rise, if I were a betting man, I'd put my money on it going faster than forecast.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-e-box/ice-melt-fast_b_7927186.html

Arctic sea ice in noticeably precarious state with 2 more months in the melt season to go

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_bm_conc.png

Greenland ice sheet albedo down 15% in many areas

http://polarportal.dk/fileadmin/polarportal/surface/Alb_LA_EN_20150723.png

Contribution of light-absorbing impurities in snow to Greenland’s darkening since 2009; doi:10.1038/ngeo2180

Nature Geoscience 7,  509–512 (2014); doi:10.1038/ngeo2180

Contribution of light-absorbing impurities in snow to Greenland’s darkening since 2009

• M. Dumont,
• E. Brun,
• G. Picard,
• M. Michou,
• Q. Libois,
• J-R. Petit,
• M. Geyer,
• S. Morin and
•  B. Josse

Received 12 March 2014; Accepted 2 May 2014; Published online 8 June 2014

Article tools

The surface energy balance and mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet depends on the albedo of snow, which governs the amount of solar energy that is absorbed. The observed decline of Greenland’s albedo over the past decade^1, 2, 3 has been attributed to an enhanced growth of snow grains as a result of atmospheric warming^1, 2. Satellite observations show that, since 2009, albedo values even in springtime at high elevations have been lower than the 2003–2008 average. Here we show, using a numerical snow model, that the decrease in albedo cannot be attributed solely to grain growth enhancement. Instead, our analysis of remote sensing data indicates that the springtime darkening since 2009 stems from a widespread increase in the amount of light-absorbing impurities in snow, as well as in the atmosphere. We suggest that the transport of dust from snow-free areas in the Arctic that are experiencing earlier melting of seasonal snow cover⁴ as the climate warms may be a contributing source of impurities. In our snow model simulations, a decrease in the albedo of fresh snow by 0.01 leads to a surface mass loss of 27 Gt yr⁻¹, which could induce an acceleration of Greenland’s mass loss twice as large as over the past two decades⁵. Future trends in light-absorbing impurities should therefore be considered in projections of Greenland mass loss.

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http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v7/n7/full/ngeo2180.html

Eric Holthaus: Greenland's "Dark Snow" Should Worry You

When dust and soot turn Arctic ice and snow black, everything melts even faster.

by Eric Holthaus, Mother Jones, September 19, 2014

Isn't ice supposed to be white? Jason Box
 

This story originally appeared in Slate and is republished here as part of our Climate Desk collaboration.

Jason Box knows ice. That's why what's happened this year concerns him so much.

Box just returned from a trip to Greenland. Right now, the ice there is…black:

Dark ice is helping Greenland's glaciers retreat. Jason Box

Crevasses criss-cross the Greenland ice sheet, allowing melt water to descend deep beneath the ice. Jason Box

This year, Greenland's ice was the darkest it's ever been. Jason Box

Box and his team are trying to discover what made this year's melt season so unusual. Jason Box

Box marks his study sites, appropriately, with black flags. Jason Box

Box's 'Dark Snow' project is the first scientific expedition to Greenland to be crowdfunded. Jason Box

The ice in Greenland this year isn't just a little dark—it's record-setting dark. Box says he's never seen anything like it. I spoke to Box by phone earlier this month, just days after he returned from his summer field research campaign.

"I was just stunned, really," Box told me.

The photos he took this summer in Greenland are frightening. But their implications are even more so. Just like black cars are hotter to the touch than white ones on sunny summer days, dark ice melts much more quickly.

As a member of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Box travels to Greenland from his home in Copenhagen to track down the source of the soot that's speeding up the glaciers' disappearance. He aptly calls his crowdfunded scientific survey Dark Snow.

This year was another above-average melt season in Greenland. National Snow and Ice Data Center

There are several potential explanations for what's going on here. The most likely is that some combination of increasingly infrequent summer snowstorms, wind-blown dust, microbial activity, and forest fire soot led to this year's exceptionally dark ice. A more ominous possibility is that what we're seeing is the start of a cascading feedback loop tied to global warming. Box mentions this summer's mysterious Siberian holes and offshore methane bubbles as evidence that the Arctic can quickly change in unpredictable ways.

This year, Greenland's ice sheet was the darkest Box (or anyone else) has ever measured. Box gives the stunning stats: "In 2014 the ice sheet is precisely 5.6 percent darker, producing an additional absorption of energy equivalent with roughly twice the US annual electricity consumption."

Perhaps coincidentally, 2014 will also be the year with the highest number of forest fires ever measured in Arctic.

Box ran these numbers exclusively for Slate, and what he found shocked him. Since comprehensive satellite measurements began in 2000, never before have Arctic wildfires been as powerful as this year. In fact, over the last two or three years, Box calculated that Arctic fires have been burning at a rate that's double that of just a decade ago. Box felt this finding was so important that he didn't want to wait for peer review, and instead decided to publish first on Slate. He's planning on submitting these and other recent findings to a formal scientific journal later this year.

Arctic and sub-Arctic fires were more powerful in 2014 than ever recorded before. Jason Box/NASA

Box's findings are in line with recent research that shows the Arctic is in the midst of dramatic change.

In total, more than 3.3 million hectares burned in Canada's Northwest Territories alone this year—nearly 9 times the long term average—resulting in a charred area bigger than the states of Connecticut and Massachusetts combined. That figure includes the massive Birch Creek Complex, which could end up being the biggest wildfire in modern Canadian history. In July, it spread a smoke plume all the way to Portugal.

In an interview with Canada's National Post earlier this year, NASA scientist Douglas Morton said, "It's a major event in the life of the earth system to have a huge set of fires like what you are seeing in Western Canada."

Box says the real challenge is to rank what fraction of the soot he finds on the Greenland ice is from forest fires, and what is from other sources, like factories. Box says the decline of snow cover in other parts of the Arctic (like Canada) is also exposing more dirt to the air, which can then be more easily transported by the wind. Regardless of their ultimate darkening effect on Greenland, this year's vast Arctic fires have become a major new source of greenhouse gas emissions from the thawing Arctic. Last year, NASA scientists found "amazing" levels of carbon dioxide and methane emanating from Alaskan permafrost.

Earlier this year, Box made headlines for a strongly worded statement along these lines:

Jason Box @climate_ice

Follow

If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd.

10:43 AM - 29 Jul 2014

That tweet landed Box in a bit of hot water with his department, which he said now has to approve his media appearances. Still, Box's sentiment is inspiring millions. His "f'd" quote is serving as the centerpiece of a massive petition (with nearly 2 million signatures at last count) that the activist organization Avaaz will deliver to "national, local, and international leaders" at this month's global warming rally in New York City on September 21, 2014.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/09/why-greenland-dark-snow-should-worry-you