+ 1. Ice-free shipping lanes
Probably the only positive outcome on this list - at least for the short term - is the boost to shipping when an ice-free Arctic finally occurs. With the Northern sea routes available all year, costs for transporting goods will go down significantly, leading to more economic activity. For journeys between Europe and Asia, the Northern Sea Route can already be two to three weeks faster than the Suez Canal. And it is not just the shipping route along Russia’s north coast that has sat at the center of discussions on Arctic development for the better part of two decades now. The shrinking and thinning of sea ice is happening so fast, people are talking about a trans-Arctic passage cutting straight across the North Pole.
According to the Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment, if Arctic sea ice disappears even for just one summer this would spell “the disappearance of multi-year sea ice in the central Arctic Ocean. Such an occurrence would have significant implications for design, construction and operational standards of all future Arctic marine activities.” In the absence of thick multi-year ice, which can be up to five meters deep, any water that refreezes would take the form of much thinner, more navigable seasonable ice. Good news for boats, bad news for polar bears.
Especially the transpolar sea crossing has a great benefit for ships: they would not have size restrictions. The Central Arctic Ocean’s bathymetry isn’t as limiting as the Northern Sea Route or Northwest Passage, which is only 50 meters deep or so in many places. Once out of the Arctic Ocean, cargo could be transshipped from places like Dutch Harbor to ports along the North Pacific, or, on the other side, from a place like Iceland to ports along the North Atlantic.
Fast shipping isn’t everything, of course. Besides time, shipowners also consider risks and costs, and polar shipping still is a more dangerous and pricier undertaking due to more advanced types of ships required, insurance costs, and icebreaker escort fees. These icebreakers would not be needed much longer however.
Within the next few decades, at least in summer, sailing across the top of the Earth will occur even if insurance companies and the Polar Code still mandate polar-class, ice-resistant ships. Like the zeppelin and the Concorde before it, icebreakers will become a futuristic technology lost to history. Their early demise won’t be due to technological or financial failures, however, but rather because humankind made the surfaces it traversed obsolete.
+ 2. The Earth will absorb more heat
As long as there is ice in a body of water, any surrounding heat energy is carried towards the ice to make it melt. But the energy needed to make it change state (or phase) from solid to liquid is the same amount of energy that would heat a similar body of water all the way up to 79 degrees Celsius. In other words, the Arctic can store a lot more energy and heat when there is no more ice coverage. Once all the ice is gone, the water gets much warmer much quicker.
This effect is explained clearly in this article by Discover Magazine. Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, explains that “the main factor is ocean heat.” In September 2020, sea surface temperatures in the Laptev Sea off Siberia climbed higher than 5 degrees Celsius. "That’s insanely warm for the Arctic Ocean, especially in that region, far away from any warmer inflow from the Atlantic or Pacific," he says. Meier notes that winds and waves have mixed some of that heat down into the water column. For ice to form on the surface, heat needs to be lost to the atmosphere. "So that’s where we are now," he says. "The ocean still has heat, so ice is not yet forming. And that heat is going into the atmosphere."
Trapped heat can cause a tipping point after which things start to snowball. No pun intended. The heat that goes into the water while the ice was missing will make it extremely likely that the ice will remain missing forever after. Once multi-year ice is gone it is extremely hard to get it back. Arctic sea ice will never have a birthday again as it will not survive the summers. #Sad.
+ 3. Greenland will melt faster
Once all the ice goes, you no longer have a nice white sheet of ice that bounces much of the energy of the Sun back into space. In fact, the solar energy is absorbed far more easily by the liquid water, which means even more energy will be stored into the Arctic region. This could lead to yet another negative feedback loop that could wreak havoc on the Arctic, drastically increasing the melting of not just sea ice but also Greenland's ice-sheets.
Even though the Greenland ice sheet is on land, it is connected with the Arctic sea ice. The rapid warming of a content-sized body of water right next to you will have an impact. For Greenland, it means that ambient air in the region will also be getting warmed up. That warmer air will flow over Greenland, which will accelerate the melting of the Greenland ice-sheet.
+ 4. More frequent and heavier storms
With Arctic sea ice gone and accelerated melting of the Greenland ice-sheet, you can rest assured that water vapor in our atmosphere will increase. Coupled with an increase in temperature, this effect will be even stronger. Physics tells us that for every 1 degree Celsius of warming, our atmosphere can hold about seven percent more moisture. This leads to - you guessed it - yet another feedback loop.
As water vapor itself is a potent greenhouse gas, more water vapor in the atmosphere means accelerated global warming. And it will not only be regional. Because of the interconnectedness of our global climate system, this effect will be felt everywhere around the world. Simply put, the additional energy will lead to there being more energy available for storms and hurricanes globally, drastically increasing the amount and severity of deadly storms.
We are already feeling the effects of this. As a sort of reminder that this was already the year from hell, 2020 has seen the most storms in the shortest amount of time in recorded history and we 'ran out of hurricane names'. The amount and intensity of storms is only expected to increase.
+ 5. Sea level rising (not because of melting sea ice)
Naturally the ice which is ‘floating’ in the Arctic will not directly impact sea levels when it melts. It is due to another physical aspect of matter: water will expand when heated. Combine this with the ever-increasing rate of melting of the Greenland ice-sheet, which will flow down into the sea, heat up and expand in itself. These two things will cause the sea levels to rise. Not just in the Arctic, but all around the globe.
Coastal areas, especially those below sea level already, are expected to be mostly effected. Rising sea levels is nothing new of course, but after the Arctic is gone we will stop talking about tenths of millimeters a year and we will talk about tens of centimeters per decade or so. It can take decades before we might feel this effect, but when this happens it will cost us dearly. As someone coming from the Netherlands, this is something I feel we should be taking more seriously.
We Dutch are well-known for fighting the sea, but I feel we have taken our current safety for granted. The Netherlands' history is built on floods. After the flooding of 1953, the most recent in history in which 1835 people drowned and 9% of Dutch farmland was flooded, it took the Dutch more than 40 years to built the Delta Works. These are a series of protective dams, sluices, locks, dykes and storm surge barriers located mostly in the coastal areas of the Netherlands. The Dutch now feel safe behind this ‘impervious’ wall to keep out the sea. The thing is: the Delta Works have not been designed for a 2-meter rise of sea levels, a scenario the Dutch Royal Meteorological Service claims is not only likely by the end of this century, but will certainly break the defenses during a regular storm. We are sitting on board a Titanic, having a glass of champagne in first class and feeling perfectly safe while the ice-berg is right ahead.
+ 6. Regional cooling due to jetstream disruption
The average temperature of the Northern most parts of the world has already risen by 2 degrees Celsius in the last 30 years, much faster than the rest of the planet. That means the differences in air temperature between the Northern regions and the lower-latitude regions decreases as well. This causes the polar vortex to slow down and meander about much more than usual.
In laymen terms, this means that relatively (very) cold air from the Arctic will be blown more easily towards lower regions such as Europe and the U.S. This leads to things like the Beast from the East in Europe in 2018, where large parts of Europe were completely frozen to a standstill causing over a billion euros in damage. Paradoxically enough, a very hot Arctic will lead to some very cold weather down south.
On the upside, could such an event be our last chance for one final elfstedentocht in the Netherlands?
+ 7. Methane. Lot’s of Methane.
Some of you might already be aware of the ticking time bomb called methane. This ‘active ingredient’ in natural gas is up to 28 to 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. In 2008, scientists found that a giant amount of methane (about 50 gigatons) is trapped in the form of permafrost in Arctic regions. With the melting of permafrost in these regions, the methane will be released into the atmosphere, triggering yet another ‘positive’ feedback loop to further accelerate Arctic melt.
Instead of it being released gradually in the coming decades however, it could be released suddenly and almost all at once. This happened before during Earth’s history. In two extinction events, the Permian Mass Extinction and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, methane was almost certainly one of the drivers of climate extremes so severe they killed off most life. So how would humanity fair under these conditions?
+ 9. Global (temporary) food shortage and climate refugees
It is not hard to imagine that with such significant changes to the atmosphere and climate in many places, the food and supply chains we currently have in place to feed ourselves will be wrecked. Several vital food-growing regions in the world will experience such severe temperatures that existing crops will be significantly impacted, yield reduced or simply destroyed completely. These areas include the U.S. mid-west, parts of China, India and South-East Asia, Africa and South America.
What’s worse: we are reliant on a very slender threat of genetic diversity. According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), more than 50% of all human calories come from just three plants: rice, maize and wheat. The impact of even a small climate shift in one of the main bread, rice or popcorn baskets of the world could therefore be catastrophic. On the upside however, it will also mean that entirely new areas will become available for agriculture. Enormous swaths of land in the same places so drastically effected - Siberia, Canada, Greenland - might just become hospitable for these important plants to grow. One could argue that potentially even larger areas become available for agriculture than those we had before. There remains one large caveat; all farmlands and the entire supply chain has to be made first, which could take the work of at least a generation. Consequently, there is no escaping global food shortages in the short run.
These food shortages, reminiscent of medieval times, will trigger another humanitarian disaster: climate refugees. Some have actually argued that the political instability throughout much of the middle East over the last decade and the refugee problem Europe is already facing, might be a harbinger of things to come. Mass movement of hundreds of millions of people worldwide will inextricably cause economic and social upheaval that we have not seen since the second world war. Which leads us to the last (and perhaps final?) outcome of an ice-free Arctic: global conflict.
+ 10. Global conflict and geo-political upheaval
It is but a small step to go from global food shortage and refugee crises, to global conflict. As history all too kindly shows us, these types of crises have the tendency to lead to all-out war and civil unrest. Since Roman times, mass movement of people and famine have triggered the fall of civilizations. Most of us feel protected and have never felt how it is to not eat for days, or having no foreseeable outcome of food. With whole continents slowly starving and cut off from fresh water supplies, it is but a matter of time before societies start collapsing. Talk about some genuine positivism here, jeez.
