Studying at the fastest warming place on earth
Why the Arctic refrigerator is breaking down and how it affects us all
In part 1, I described what it’s like to study at the northernmost University Center of Svalbard. Now it’s time to talk about what is happening at the fastest warming place on earth.
Procrastinating during my exams, I was watching the final season of Game of Thrones. After the Night King was suddenly killed, my mom entered my room as abruptly, asking passive aggressively: “next time, could you please close the refrigerator, darling?”. Apparently after making my hummus sandwich I forgot to close the refrigerator. Studying in the Arctic made me realize my mom was right:
Closing the refrigerator matters.
The Arctic refrigerator
The Arctic acts as a global refrigerator by drawing warm ocean water from the south, cooling it, and ultimately sinking it toward the ocean bottom.
This movement of warmer ocean waters to the north has a major influence on the climate worldwide; it accounts for northern Europe’s relatively mild climate compared with that of Canadian provinces at the same latitude, and it keeps the tropics cooler than they would be otherwise.
Nonetheless, someone left the refrigerator wide open:
The Arctic has been warming more than twice as rapidly as the world as a whole for the past 50 years.
Since 1971, temperatures on Svalbard have risen on average 4°C and in winter 7°C, which is five times faster than the global average. The Climate in Svalbard 2100 report projects a further warming of 7 degrees Celsius on a ‘medium’ emission scenario by 2100.
This makes Longyearbyen the fastest warming town on earth.
What happens in the Arctic…
The Arctic’s climate is extremely complicated, involving complex processes like the Polar Vortex, which plays a major role in the worldwide climate.
A growing body of research has proposed ways in which rapid Arctic warming can lead to an increase in unusual and extreme weather across North America, Europe and Asia.
Harsh winters, summer heatwaves and floods and droughts across the mid-latitudes could be become a lot more frequent.
The Arctic’s climate isn’t a closed system, it’s interconnected to the entire world. What happens in the Arctic, doesn’t stay in the Arctic.
And just like my dog, the Arctic change won’t stay well-behaved at the same spot.
The runaway climate
The projected responses of the ocean and cryosphere to past and current human-induced greenhouse gas emissions and ongoing global warming include climate feedbacks, changes over decades to millennia that cannot be avoided, thresholds of abrupt change, and irreversibility.
— Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, IPCC 2019
The warming in the Arctic is reinforced by numerous feedbacks, the so called ‘Arctic amplification’. Meaning: the warmer it gets, the warmer it gets.
An example is the ice-albedo feedback. Once this feedback loop crosses a critical threshold it will gather an irresistible momentum, and all the ice in the polar regions will melt even if humans stop burning coal, oil and gas.
Another feedback is the lesser-known soil-carbon feedback, which involves permafrost: permanently frozen soil. The mountainous permafrost of Svalbard can be up to 500m deep and 700.000 years old.
Its name presumes permanence — perma — a condition that is no longer true: increasing ground temperatures cause it to thaw.
Permafrost releases greenhouse gasses when it thaws, resulting in another reinforcing climate feedback. This is problematic when you realize that permafrost stores more carbon than the earth’s atmosphere and trees combined, as is shown below.
Researchers now suspect that for every one degree Celsius rise in Earth’s average temperature, permafrost may release the equivalent of four to six years’ worth of coal, oil, and natural gas emissions.
Within a few decades, permafrost could be as big a source of greenhouse gases as China, which is the world’s largest emitter today.
A banquet of consequences
Losing the Arctic refrigerator already has profound implications for people, resources, infrastructure, ecosystems, sea level rise and the climate worldwide, summarized in the picture below.
In the Canadian High Arctic, polar bears are now mating with grizzly bears because their habitat is melting away, and the increased rainfall on snow creates an impenetrable ice layer over the food of grazers like the reindeer.
Even the ‘Doomsday vault’ isn’t prepared for the abrupt changes. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is built into a mountainside in Longyearbyen, designed to safeguard almost 1 million varieties of seeds from around the world for future generations.
Nonetheless, due to permafrost thaw, the entrance of the ‘failsafe’ vault was flooded.
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In the end, money talks, they say. A recent economic analysis of the global costs of Arctic change estimated the cumulative cost at USD $7–90 trillion over the period 2010–2100.
To put it plainly, we’ll probably loose ‘a shit ton of money’ and the people who are most vulnerable will bear most of the consequences and its costs.
Takeaways
- The Arctic refrigerator is breaking down faster and faster because of Arctic amplification
- What happens in the Arctic, doesn’t stay in the Arctic
- The Arctic changes have profound consequences for the climate, resources, ecosystems and people worldwide
Shifting the Arctic into a new state is like conducting an open-ended experiment on billions of human guinea pigs. How can we prevent this experiment from happening?
Find out in the final, part 3. COMING SOON
