Rain Comes to the Arctic, With a Cascade of Troubling Changes

[Brenda]

https://e360.yale.edu/features/arctic-rainfall-climate-change

(TLSR: Too Long Should Read)

In August of 2021, rain fell atop the 10,551-foot summit of the Greenland ice cap, triggering an epic meltdown and a more-than-2,000-foot retreat of the snowline. The unprecedented event reminded Joel Harper, a University of Montana glaciologist who works on the Greenland ice sheet, of a strange anomaly in his data, one that suggested that in 2008 it might have rained much later in the season — in the fall, when the region is typically in deep freeze and dark for almost 24 hours a day.

When Harper and his colleagues closely examined the measurements they’d collected from sensors on the ice sheet those many years ago, they were astonished. Not only had it rained, but it had rained for four days as the air temperature rose by 30 degrees C (54 degrees F), close to and above the freezing point. It had warmed the summit’s firn layer — snow that is in transition to becoming ice — by between 11 and 42 degrees F (6 and 23 degrees C). The rainwater and surface melt that followed penetrated the firn by as much as 20 feet before refreezing, creating a barrier that would alter the flow of meltwater the following year.

Such changes will have a profound impact on sea ice, glaciers, and Greenland’s ice cap — which are already melting at record rates, according to Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado. The precipitation will trigger more flooding; an acceleration in permafrost thaw; profound changes to water quality; more landslides and snow avalanches; more misery for Arctic animals, many of which are already in precipitous decline due to the shifting climate; and serious challenges for the Indigenous peoples who depend on those animals.

Rick Thoman, a climate scientist based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, says that rainfall at any time of year has increased 17 percent in the state over the past half century, triggering floods that have closed roads and landslides that, in one case, sent 180 million tons of rock into a narrow fjord, generating a tsunami that reached 633 feet high — one of the highest tsunamis ever recorded worldwide.

It was hunters who first reported, in 2003, that an estimated 20,000 muskoxen had starved to death on Banks Island, in Canada’s High Arctic, following an October rain-on-snow event. It happened again in the winters of 2013-2014 and in 2020-2021, when tens of thousands of reindeer died on Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula.

[Think. Again.]

1. I think what most folks don't understand is that...

...climate change will be bringing about changes in everyaspect of our ecological environment.

When one natural anomoly occurs, it has a cascading effect on multiple other parts of the collective natural world, and each of those effected parts in turn effect multiple other parts.

Any active system that is comprised of multiple interacting parts can only sustain so many changes in it's parts before the entire system simply collapses.

There's a reason so many scientists are now referring to what we have created as "climate chaos" rather than "climate change".

Thanks for posting this, Brenda.

[Brenda]

3. Absolutely.

Hi TA!

More people need to understand we are part of a food web not just a food chain. The web is global and eventually touches everyone.

[Think. Again.]

4. Well said!

[cachukis]

2. All we can do is prepare.

[Think. Again.]

5. Yes, unforunately we waited too long to try and stop it...

...and now all we can do is hunker down and hope we survive riding it out.

[cachukis]

6. I remember a conversation I had with a young

lady, when I was in Africa, who had recently been in Nigeria. She, an American, was struck not so much by the poverty, she has been around, but by the fact she had money and a credit card and would be able to buy food.
Our conversation was how the strata of wealth would be a determinant in the future. The poor, a strain today, will be amplified by our bad choices tomorrow.