Arctic Sea Ice Collapse

(Alex’s projected path brings it just off Greenland by Saturday. A winter subtropical cyclone aiming its heat-engine fury directly at the Arctic. You couldn’t write science fiction that was more bizzarre. Image source: NOAA.)

Like a cold-seeking missile of atmospheric heat, Alex is predicted to aim itself directly at the Arctic. A summer-time storm forming in Winter and projected to deliver its heat energy to the environment of the far North Atlantic just south of Greenland by this weekend. The storm is predicted to retain subtropical characteristics even as it approaches Greenland by late Friday. Another extraordinary projection of tropical heat and moisture into the Northern Latitudes during a Winter in which the season seems to be anything but.

Instead, we seem to have this strange hybrid of winter, spring and summer. In which hurricanes form during January in the Northern Hemisphere. In which the North Pole sees above freezing temperatures. And in which many regions keep flashing between warm and cold conditions even as the threat for extreme storms abounds. As Hansen warned nearly a decade ago — we are tipping into more and more catastrophic conditions. And we should listen to Hansen and put every policy in place possible to “to move now toward the era beyond fossil fuels.”

- Even before the ban on production and use of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) aerosols under the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the concentration of these substances was insufficient to destroy the Arctic ozone layer. It is therefore improbable that CFCs could destroy the Arctic ozone in 2011 after decades of environmental regulation.

- On the other hand, decay products of uranium and plutonium, including radioactive isotopes of iodine and xenon, have an enormous capability of destroying ozone. Vast quantities of these ozone-destroyers reached the Arctic region within four days of the 311 meltdowns and for months thereafter, possibly to the present day.

As for the ice melt over Greenland and the Arctic:

- The ice sheets have been thinning over the past decade due to several proposed factors: warming global temperatures, heat-trapping black soot on the ice surface, and a cyclical pattern in the Arctic climate. None of these factors, however, can account for the sudden melt of 2012, the second year of the Fukushima crisis.

- A relatively small amount of radioactive isotopes can have the effect of raising water temperatures, which was confirmed by current Italian studies of the Fukushima meltdown, as reported by NHK World on April 30. An efficient fuel-to-heat ratio is the basis for the use of boiling-water and pressurized-steam nuclear reactors. A tiny quantity of nuclear fuel can generate vast amounts of heat.

- Tritium, radioactive heavy water, is produced inside nuclear reactors in especially high concentration with the use of plutonium-rich mixed-oxide fuel (MOX). Tritium, which has two neutrons in addition to a proton, has similar physical properties as normal H20, including evaporation to form clouds and precipitation in rain. The one major difference is their freezing-melting points. Normal water turns to ice at 0 Celsius. The freezing-melting point of tritium is -252 C. The presence of minute quantities of tritium can therefore destabilize the crystalline structure of ice and prevent normal water from freezing even in the coldest winter temperatures on Earth. (One observation along the Fukushima coast by this writer was that tritium tends to vaporize in a dense fog, providing a clue to spotting tritium in a body of water or slab of ice.)

Arctic sea ice area at record low for time of year