2020 Arctic Report Card documents extreme environmental change
Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA for short, released its 15th annual Arctic Report Card, documenting the latest research and observations of a rapidly changing Arctic. The report shows another year of extremely warm temperatures, with especially significant warming and wildfires in northern Russia.
Rick Thoman, a climate specialist with the International Arctic Research at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, was a lead editor on the report this year, and said it illustrated “an Arctic region that continues along a path that is warmer, less frozen and biologically changed in ways that were scarcely imaginable even a generation ago.”
Average land surface temperatures above 60 degrees north latitude (roughly north of Anchorage) were the second warmest on record this fall, and summer sea ice extent was the second lowest on record, with only 2012 having larger anomalies.
Sea surface temperatures were between one and three degrees Celsius warmer than average, resulting in primary productivity – the amount of photosynthetic plankton in the water – that was two to six times higher than the average in some months.
The report also cites an increase in the rates of permafrost erosion, with some coastal sites along the Alaskan and Canadian Beaufort Sea eroding 80 to 160 percent faster than the average over the last two decades.
Thoman said that while the report card doesn’t reveal any new, unpublished research, it pulls together data from a wide range of fields that helps illustrate the severity of Arctic warming. “Seeing all that together, for me, was really quite stunning,” he said. He added that this year’s most alarming data came out of the Russian Arctic, specifically the Sakha region of Siberia. There, exceptionally warm spring air temperatures led to extremely rapid losses of snow and sea ice.
What followed were extreme wildfires across the Siberian Arctic, further speeding up the melting of permafrost and emitting air pollution that could be felt in some areas of North America.
“Yes, the regions of the Arctic that have the most unusual weather vary year to year, but at this point it seems like it’s always someplace that’s really extreme,” Thoman said. “Last year, Alaska was the big story in the Arctic report card with the record heat in 2019 and everything going on in the oceans. This year it was Siberia’s turn.”
In addition to updates on Arctic “vital signs” like temperature, snow cover and sea ice, the annual report also contains a number of more specific essays on other environmental issues and indicators that vary from year to year.
Thoman said the COVID-19 pandemic hindered some of that reporting – they had planned an essay about indigenous perspectives on climate change, for example, which had to be cancelled because of COVIDrelated travel restrictions. Some of the essays did make it to completion, though, highlighting the wide range of climate-related issues facing the region. Alison York, another scientist with UAF who specializes in wildfires, led an in-depth report on the Siberian fires that raged across Russia this summer.
She explained how Arctic fires can be driven by duff, plant material that accumulates in tundra soils and doesn’t decompose because of the region’s cold temperatures. Duff accounts for 30 to 40 percent of the world’s soil carbon, she said, and when it gets dry it can be extremely flammable.
In the Russian province of Sakha alone, 23 million acres burned in 2020. While those fires were fed by the unusually warm, dry air, some of them were started by the remnants of 2019 fires, which smoldered underground during the winter only to reemerge in the spring. Some in the media have started calling these multi-year fires “zombie fires.”
Across the Arctic, 2020 saw more fires than any previous year, shattering the previous record set in 2019. York added that some of this year’s widespread fires may continue to burn through the winter in the Siberian duff, potentially sparking another round of fires in 2021.
Craig George, a retired biologist for the North Slope Borough and resident of Utqiagvik, wrote a slightly more optimistic essay on bowhead whales, which are an important indicator species for Arctic marine health as well as a critical resource for indigenous communities. He said that the world’s bowheads are divided into four populations, or stocks, and that the Bering-Chukchi-Beaufort stock as well as the east Canada /west Greenland stock were doing quite well, growing to the same numbers as before European commercial whaling drove the species close to extinction.
He attributed the success to careful conservation efforts as well as partnerships with indigenous communities, which have allowed scientists to observe and measure the health of bowhead whales much more closely than they could on their own.
He added that the loss of sea ice and increase in plankton may be temporarily helping the whales as well, but warned that the critical species is
still threatened by fishing net entanglement, potential oil spills and other industrial disturbances.
The report also documents the previous year’s biggest Arctic research efforts. In 2020, the biggest headline was the completion of the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate Expedition, or MOSAiC, an ambitious yearlong journey into the ice pack of the high Arctic.
The MOSAiC team, made up of more than 300 people from 20 countries, sailed and drifted through the central Arctic Ocean for a full year, mostly following one specific piece of pack ice to better understand the complex dynamics of moving Arctic ice.
They collected an unprecedented number of observations of the atmosphere, sea ice, ocean and marine
ecosystem. Contributor Matthew Schupe, who also participated in the expedition, said he hoped the project could serve as a model for future international cooperation in Arctic research.
The report covers a range of additional topics and can be accessed by the public at arctic.noaa.gov/Report-Card. Thoman said the most important thing about the report is its accessibility, and the way it helps decipher dense scientific papers for the general public.
“It’s written to be accessible by anybody that’s interested, not written just for scientists. So it’s a really good resource if you want to see how things have changed,” Thoman said. “And there’s 15 years of it, so it’s really an easy reference if you want to get up to speed real quick.”