Will Shattered Ice Cap Shatter Ice Melt Record This Year?

Image of massive Arctic sea ice cracks showing temperature of the ice and the cracks between floes. Via Arctic Sea Ice blog.

By Neven Acropolis

The sea ice cap on top of the Arctic Ocean is often imagined to be a monolithic, continuous sheet of ice floating on water. A closer look quickly shows it is rather a collection of larger and smaller pieces of sea ice. Of course, we have all seen the images of ice floes separated by open water during summer, but even during winter the ice pack gets fractured, leading to leads that quickly freeze over again.

This explains how from the 1950′s onwards submarines were able to emerge at the North Pole (the image on top is showing the USS Connecticut as it surfaces in the Arctic Circle on March 19th 2011; copyright: Kevin S. O’Brien, U.S. Navy). The subs couldn’t break through the thick ice and had to look for a lead where the ice was thinner.

Strangely enough those who deny the reality and potential consequences of AGW still like to abuse this event and claim it somehow proves that nothing unusual is happening up North. It doesn’t prove or disprove anything, as cracks and leads have always been a normal feature of the Arctic sea ice pack. But ‘normal’ is a word that has become less and less applicable to the Arctic in recent times. The 2012 melting season was the latest climax in a series of record years, that showed conclusively that the ice is thinner than it has been for a very long time.

We don’t even have to await the coming melting season to see this re-confirmed. We can see it right now, at the end of the freezing season. Like I just said, cracks are a regular feature of the Arctic, but this video below, made by NOAA’s Visualization Lab, shows a cracking event that is very rare, if not unique:

Ice, however thin, doesn’t fracture by itself. It needs wind to pull the ice pack apart. This wind was provided by a big, intense and stubborn high pressure area that started about a month ago and kicked the Beaufort Gyre into action, which is an ocean circulation pattern that transports the ice in a clockwise fashion from the North American coast towards Siberia.

This short animation of ASCAT radar images shows the movement in 10 day intervals from January 1st onwards, compared to the previous three winters. The black dot represents the North Pole, the white mass below it is the northern part of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the brighter colours represent thicker multi-year ice that survived last year’s melting season:

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This week Bloomberg caught an announcement from Apple that all of their data centers are now run on 100 percent renewable energy. Apple is at 75 percent for their corporate facilities worldwide — a remarkable increase from 35 percent in 2010.

Apple was targeted by Greenpeace last year, in a report that ranked the Silicon Valley giant 12th our of 14 large computer companies for use of clean energy to power data centers and cloud computing services. Apple received a “D” grade for energy transparency, efficiency, and renewables advocacy, and an “F” for infrastructure siting.

Apparently, that dismal assessment got the company’s attention:

We’ve already achieved 100 percent renewable energy at all of our data centers, at our facilities in Austin, Elk Grove, Cork, and Munich, and at our Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino. And for all of Apple’s corporate facilities worldwide, we’re at 75 percent, and we expect that number to grow as the amount of renewable energy available to us increases. We won’t stop working until we achieve 100 percent throughout Apple.

“Apple’s increased level of disclosure about its energy sources helps customers know that their iCloud will be powered by clean energy sources, not coal,” Gary Cook, an analyst at Greenpeace, wrote in a statement. According to Apple’s numbers, the company reduced its carbon emissions per dollar of revenue by 21.5 percent between 2008 and 2012 — though their overall carbon footprint still went up due to increased sales.

You can dig into Apple’s environmental self-reporting a bit more here.

Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer, said that a 100-acre solar array set up next to its largest data center, located in Maiden, North Carolina, came online this past December. The company says it’s generating 60 percent of the center’s power on site — through a combination of solar power and fuel cells that convert biogases to energy — and that the rest of the electricity is drawn from renewable sources. Another data center under construction in Prineville, Oregon, will run on a combination of wind, hydro, solar and geothermal power.

Opine away!