At Europe's melting glaciers, signs of climate peril are everywhere Europe's glaciers are shrinking faster than anywhere else on Earth, leaving behind unstable landscapes. MORTERATSCH, Switzerland — Almost 7,000 feet above sea level, the trail leading up to Morteratsch Glacier gets a little longer every year. Leo Hösli has made the climb many times. Each step sends shards of stone clattering downhill, debris once sealed beneath glacial ice. Several months ago, Hösli, who is doing doctoral research on Morteratsch, drilled seven stakes into the ice caves at the base of the glacier. By early August, he couldn’t get close enough to take measurements. The summer melt was so fierce that the caves had become too unstable to enter. Setting up a zoom lens, he found only one stake still in place. “They’ve melted out or collapsed under these parts of the ice cave that have fallen down,” Hösli said. “It’s just too warm for the glacier to exist at this state right now.” Europe’s glaciers are shrinking faster, in every dimension, than anywhere else on Earth. A landmark study published in the journal Nature, the largest of its kind, using field measurements and satellite data from 35 research teams, found glaciers in the Alps and Pyrenees have lost about 40% of their mass since 2000. 2022 and 2023 set records for percentage loss, coinciding with peak global temperatures. Morteratsch Glacier retreat in the Swiss Alps The Swiss glacier has cumulatively lost more than 9,400 feet since observations began in 1881, according to data from a group that’s tracking the glacier’s terminus position. Morteratsch is one of the most studied glaciers in the world, thanks to its accessibility and its dramatic retreat, more than 2 miles in the last 165 years, driven by human-induced climate change. During our hike up the glacier, Hösli pointed to artifacts that showed just how far the glacier has retreated. “I think walking up here and seeing the signposts, seeing where the glacier used to be a hundred years ago, 50 years ago has more of an effect than just seeing it in a picture,” he said But the soundtrack is just as striking as the view: rocks clattering down the valley walls, the constant roar of meltwater. Glaciers are the planet’s most visible climate indicators, but because they’re remote, their loss can feel abstract. In Europe, glaciers support several important industries, like agriculture and tourism. Communities depend on meltwater for drinking and farming, as well as on the ice and snow for winter tourism. Downstream, it feeds rivers that eventually result in rising sea levels worldwide. The retreat of glaciers has also left behind unstable landscapes that are rapidly shifting, causing destructive landslides that threaten Alpine villages. Across the border in Austria, Andrea Fischer, the vice-director of the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountain Research, said these kinds of mass alpine movements are becoming stronger and more frequent. “One-third of Austria’s glaciers will vanish in the next five years,” Fischer said, standing on what remains of the Stubai Glacier, about 72 miles northeast of Morteratsch. At the top of one of Austria’s most popular ski resorts, Stubai is projected to disappear entirely by 2033. “The end of the Alpine glaciers is really coming very, very close. And we see it. It’s not modeling in the computer. It’s a real fact,” Fischer added as she navigated down a muddy track to the edge of the ice. Global temperatures keep climbing as international efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions falter. Last year was the hottest on record, according to NASA. The U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement significantly undermined global climate efforts, making the already difficult goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (about 3 degrees Fahrenheit) close to impossible. Europe is the fastest-warming continent on Earth and Austria’s temperature has risen 3.1 degrees Celsius since 1900, more than twice the global average. Studying glaciers, Fischer said, is critical to understanding where the climate is headed. “Glaciers are climate archives,” she said. Glaciers preserve records of precipitation and atmospheric circulation stretching back centuries, data that exists nowhere else. “I’m really hunting for every piece of cold ice containing this archive information,” she said, before it’s all gone. For decades, Fischer experimented with ways to slow glacier loss: snowmaking, pumping water into snowpack, “wrapping” ice in reflective white sheets she calls “glacier plasters,” referring to bandages. Twenty years ago, she hoped these sheets could work on a large scale. Today, she knows they can’t. “There is no possibility to save glaciers without saving the climate,” she added. Living in the Alps has always been risky, Fischer said, but today the risks are amplified by global warming At the base of the Stubai valley, last month, a massive landslide barreled through the village of Neustift, ripping through farmland and damaging a bridge. No one was injured. But Fischer ties it directly to climate change. Melting permafrost can weaken peaks. Heavier rains trigger slides on slopes left destabilized by retreating glaciers. Back in Switzerland, the village of Blatten was obliterated by a glacial slide in May. Villagers were evacuated, but the costly rebuilding will take years. “The next 20 to 50 years will bring extreme changes for us living in the mountains, for all people living on the whole globe,” she said. “And we have to think about the consequences.” And the solutions are within our control, she said. She and Hösli agree that it’s not too late. There’s still a lot worth saving. “There’s still huge amounts of ice here,” Hösli said, scanning the top of Morteratsch. “It’s not a completely lost cause for me. There still is hope and there’s still something we can do,” Hösli said. “It’s too early to give up.
Haven't watched the vid yet, but I've got a real good idea what it's about. It's been theoretically thrown around for the past couple of decades, but in the not-too-far-off future the "Water Wars" will be the next major global conflict.
Somewhat related. A fiber optic cable spied on Greenland’s glaciers. It found an alarming problem. One of the buzziest technologies in modern science may be running right under your feet. Fiber optic cables bring you the internet as data-rich pulses of light, but they also detect signals from the surrounding environment: Researchers can analyze the light that’s scattered when a volcanic eruption or tsunami jostles the wiring. Known as distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS, the technique is so sensitive that it can track your footsteps as you walk over a cable, and may one day even warn you of an impending earthquake. Now, researchers have laid a fiber optic cable on the seafloor near a glacier in Greenland, revealing in unprecedented detail what happens during a calving event, when chunks of ice drop into the ocean. That, in turn, could help solve a long-standing conundrum and better understand the hidden processes driving the rapid deterioration of the island’s ice sheet, which would add 23 feet to sea levels if it disappeared. Even before humans started changing the climate, Greenland’s glaciers were calving naturally. The island is covered in glaciers that slowly flow toward the ocean, breaking into icebergs that float out to sea. When temperatures were lower, the ice sheet was also readily regenerating as snow fell. As temperatures have climbed, though, more melting is creating more meltwater, which flows underneath glaciers, lifting and lubricating them. “It can actually affect how fast the ice flows,” said Michalea King, a senior research scientist at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “So not only do you have the loss of mass from the melt directly at the surface, but then you’re also impacting how rapidly these big conveyor belts of ice — these big outlet glaciers — are flowing.” Accordingly, Greenland now sheds much more ice than it regenerates. “It’s like you’re spending more out of your checking account, and so your account balance has been going down for a couple decades,” said Paul Bierman, a geoscientist at the University of Vermont and author of When the Ice Is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth’s Tumultuous History and Perilous Future. (Bierman wasn’t involved in the new research.) “This paper is a big advance in that it gives us some of the process details in places where we really haven’t had it before.” The challenge is that models majorly underestimate the amount of ice melting where Greenland’s glaciers touch the sea, suggesting that they’re not accounting for a process that is amplifying that net loss. That’s not due to a lack of effort from glaciologists — it’s just extremely dangerous to get up close to massive chunks of falling ice to collect data. Taking a different tack in a fjord in south Greenland, researchers strung 6 miles of cable parallel to a glacier’s “calving front.” Whenever the glacier fractured, or dropped ice into the water, it “plucked” the cable, like a guitarist plucking a string. These vibrations scattered light in the fiber optics back to two “interrogator” devices, powered by solar panels and batteries, on land. One of these handled the DAS data, or the acoustics propagating through the water, while the other determined temperature changes in the fjord. “If you fracture wood, you see the fracture propagating, but you also hear it,” said Dominik Gräff, an environmental scientist at University of Washington and lead author of a new paper describing the work in the journal Nature. “That’s exactly what DAS does.” These glacial fractures look distinct in the DAS data from a more catastrophic loss of ice into the fjord, the calving from the ice front. “These ice blocks can be as big as a stadium,” Gräff said. “When they plunge, they excite these waves.” If you’ve seen video of a calving event, you know how dramatic that excitation can be, as a wall of water rushes away from the ice. (That’s technically classified as a tsunami, though a much smaller one than those that move across whole oceans after earthquakes.) But the DAS system also picked up a hidden movement of water beneath the surface, as waves — some as tall as skyscrapers — pulsed across the seafloor cable, raising and lowering the interface between cold surface waters and warm deep waters. Typically, warmer, saltier water sinks to the bottom because it is denser, while colder, fresher water from glacial melt sits at the surface. The latter also forms a sort of insulating layer at the edge of the glacier, preventing more melting. But the fiber optic cable showed that as an iceberg dropped into the fjord, it stirred those warmer waters to the surface and disturbed the insulating layer, thus encouraging more melting of the glacier. And as the iceberg drifted away from the glacier, it stirred still more water, like a boat creating its own wake, but invisible under the surface. This could be the missing piece of that scientific puzzle, as models aren’t representing this widescale stirring, which could be encouraging more calving, which produces more stirring, which encourages more calving. “Maybe this study is the key to why, in practice, in real life, we have much higher melt rates than what we would expect,” said Mathieu Morlighem, a glaciologist at Dartmouth College who wasn’t involved in the research. “They are able to capture a lot of the physics that we didn’t even know was happening.” In contrast to scientists boating around a calving front, fiber optic cables cheaply, safely, and passively collect reams of data. These researchers were only able to operate their cable for three weeks, but they plan to do further studies that use readings from much longer timescales, monitoring how calving changes throughout the year. If they’re able to deploy more cables near Greenland’s coastal cities, they might even be able to design an early-warning system for ice-induced tsunamis, like other scientists are trying to do with DAS for earthquakes. Now it’s a race against time to better understand Greenland’s ice as it falls into deeper peril, as calving begets more calving. “That’s the kind of thing that scares geoscientists like me,” Bierman said. “That if you have these reinforcing feedback loops, and you start down a path of losing ice from Greenland, that could accelerate the rate of that loss.”
I agree and the research in Seawater Desalination needs to be really stepped up. My parents had a water well to around 120' deep. The water was for household use and for their cattle. About four miles South of them was a Grass Farm that used quite a bit of water for irrigation and we had no idea how deep their well was. Regulations for water rights and usage are lagging and it probably isn't going to end well.
"all I know about is Texas, and out here you're on your own." The ship sailed years ago for Texas doing responsible things with regard to ground and/or surface water. Your grandkids or whatever generation that is will be living in the Chihuahuan Desert. The coastal people will have been forced to move 50 miles inland.
This is in Idaho. Court accepts settlement in Bingham water rights case, but $21K civil penalties still loom BLACKFOOT — A Bingham County judge on Thursday accepted a settlement agreement between the Idaho Department of Water Resources and a farming couple who continued irrigating despite state curtailment orders, However, the agreement doesn't shield Blackfoot area farmers Jerry and Valerie Bingham from $21,000 in civil penalties the state agency still plans to pursue. 6th District Judge Darren B. Simpson approved a stipulated agreement between the IDWR and the Binghams, represented by Pocatello attorney Reed Larsen, after the state agency sought injunctive relief claiming the couple had refused to shut off wells on 70 acres of their approximately 1,100-acre farm following a July curtailment order affecting all groundwater rights with priority dates after 1900. “(This) is a ruling that helps protect the water rights of hundreds of farmers across the Snake River Plain from their water being illegally taken,” the IDWR said in a Friday statement. Under the settlement terms, the Binghams agreed to end their 2025 irrigation season and cease pumping. The previous temporary restraining order against them will be dissolved and each party will pay their own attorney fees. The lawsuit was dismissed without prejudice, meaning it could potentially be renewed in the future. The IDWR will still seek civil penalties of $300 per acre against the Binghams through a separate administrative process — a development that Larsen wasn’t expecting considering the state agency has agreed to consider the farming couple’s submission of a mitigation plan in spite of it being filed nine days past the Aug. 10 deadline. "My reaction is it surprises me, given where we are on this, and it disappoints me that they would try to do this given the seniority of water rights," Larsen told the Idaho State Journal during a Friday phone call. "That will be our next fight." The civil penalty stems from IDWR's allegation that the Binghams illegally diverted water after receiving the curtailment order because they “have not joined an approved mitigation plan with an existing groundwater district to receive safe harbor,” the statement said. “They had until Aug. 10, 2025, to enroll in an approved mitigation plan.” Rather than pursuing the $21,000 through the now-dismissed court case, the department plans to issue a notice of violation — an administrative action that doesn't require court proceedings, IDWR spokesperson Steve Stuebner told the Journal on Friday. Stuebner said the regulatory body for Idaho’s finite water supply can issue a notice of violation at $300 per acre, noting that the judge approved a stipulation saying the water diversion was not legal since the Binghams hold junior rights. Jerry Bingham disputes the penalty, arguing he holds valid water rights dating to the 1950s and that due process wasn't followed. Bingham told the Journal it was unfair that he was not treated the same as those who continued to water last year before junior and senior water rights holders reached agreement on curtailment procedures late last year. " I was told that $300 an acre can only be applied to me if I was irrigating something that didn't have water right for," Bingham said. "I have water rights. That penalty does not apply to me for what they're saying I have to pay." Bingham added that the penalty has not yet been adjudicated and predicted the IDWR would not be successful in its effort to seek punitive damages for his continued watering of 70 acres this summer. The settlement caps a months-long dispute that has highlighted tensions in Idaho's water management system. The Binghams' case began when they refused to join approved mitigation plans that would have provided protection from curtailment orders affecting junior water rights. Bingham has consistently framed his resistance as a constitutional battle against what he calls socialism in water management, arguing that if cutbacks are mandated, they should apply statewide rather than only to certain areas. "If we're gonna go like they have done here in the Eastern Idaho Snake Plain over this aquifer, and force this into a socialism type bureaucracy, then you do it through the whole state," Bingham said. "We all share in the cutbacks. We don't just do it for this area." Bingham argues the current system abandons Idaho's "first in time, first in right" doctrine, demanding honesty about the true nature of the water management approach. "I'm willing to go either way, but don't lie to me that we're following first in time, first in right when we're actually not," he said. "Let's just be honest with what's happening here." Bingham has been particularly critical of the Idaho Ground Water Appropriators, or IGWA, arguing the organization lacks legal authority despite wielding significant influence over water management decisions. He contends IGWA failed to consider the seniority of groundwater users when implementing the collective districts and the associated mitigation plans that he has not yet agreed to. "IGWA is not your friend," Bingham said. "For Bingham County groundwater users, we discovered and started drilling all the wells, so we have the majority of the older wells in Bingham County groundwater system. He argues that IGWA's mitigation plan violated first-in-time, first-in-right principles by not properly accounting for the seniority of existing wells when requiring cutbacks. Larsen echoed these concerns, stating that "IDWR is more concerned about irrigation districts than senior water rights." IGWA attorney TJ Budge disagrees, describing Bingham’s opinion of Idaho water law as lacking a full and thorough understanding “This is the state enforcing Idaho water law against Jerry Bingham, who has a water right that's junior in priority to the Surface Water Coalition,” Budge said. “Jerry has a very myopic view of the prior appropriation doctrine that ignores much of the law surrounding how the doctrine has been applied in practice. He assumes that if you shut off everybody junior to him, that the seniors would never be short of water. That's not what the modeling shows. The problem is that on a dry year like this, he's still junior, and arguing that other juniors should be cut off does not avoid the fact that he's junior that and his pumping is impacting the supplies of the Surface Water Coalition.
Budge said IGWA is the friend of those who are participating in approved mitigation plans. “But Jerry decided to exit his district and go alone,” Budge said. “He knew that by doing that he would occasionally face curtailment, and now he's lying in the bed he made for himself. I don’t have anything against Jerry personally, I just think he doesn't understand the full extent of the doctrine, and he's putting his farm at risk because of that lack of understanding.” The Binghams’ recent dispute began when IDWR Director Mathew Weaver issued escalating curtailment orders during this year’s severe drought conditions. A July 25 order curtailed groundwater rights with priority dates after Oct. 11, 1900, to protect senior water rights holders facing shortages. The Binghams' water rights from the 1950s fell within the curtailment zone, making them subject to shutdown unless they joined an approved mitigation plan. The IDWR filed a civil suit against the farming pair despite them regularly pumping below their legal allowance and not irrigating on Sundays, said Larsen, adding that the restrictions resulted in a 14 percent reduction in water usage. When they continued irrigating after receiving notice, IDWR filed the lawsuit seeking a permanent injunction and civil penalties. State water officials arrived at the property with a restraining order, prompting the Binghams to voluntarily shut off their wells to avoid contempt of court charges. As part of the settlement, IDWR agreed to process the Binghams' own mitigation plan, which was submitted. The department confirmed it has begun the review process and published notice of the proposed plan under conjunctive management rules. The Binghams' mitigation plan centers on their belief that junior water rights holders should be curtailed before those with more senior rights face restrictions. Larsen explained that their position is rooted in the constitutional principle that going from 1955 priority dates to 1900 was too dramatic a reduction at once. "We need to have people who have junior rights shut off before them," Larsen said. The Binghams had already harvested their wheat crop for the season, making the immediate impact of shutting off irrigation less severe. However, the family faces uncertainty about future farming operations depending on the outcome of their mitigation plan review and the pending civil penalties. The case represents a broader challenge to Idaho's water management system, which relies heavily on mitigation plans and water districts to balance competing demands during drought conditions. Bingham said he’s determined to plant his feet in the mud and take his argument to the Idaho Supreme Court if need be. Ultimately, the outcome could influence how other water rights holders respond to future curtailment orders and whether the state's current approach can withstand constitutional challenges.
Polar Researchers Fear an Ecological Collapse in the Arctic The research ship Polarstern spent two months in the ice of the Arctic this summer. What they found could be evidence of an ecological collapse. On the day the research station on Floe 1 was lost, the Polarstern was moored in the pack ice some 600 kilometers to the west. The team on the research ship says they were sitting together in the red salon and following along on the screen as the station’s GPS position kept drifting further and further to the east. That evening, the point on the screen crossed over the magic line, across which Russia’s territorial waters begin. The 150,000-euro device had drifted out of reach of the researchers – along with its valuable climate, current and weather data. A German research vessel is not permitted to cruise into Russian waters. And because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the German government in Berlin generally submits no requests to Moscow. Politics extends all the way up here – to 83 degrees north in the Arctic Ocean, several thousand kilometers from Moscow, Kyiv and Berlin. Which may very well have reminded the researchers onboard the Polarstern that the phenomena they were examining during this year’s summer expedition have their roots in politics and the economy. The team of more than 50 scientists had embarked on an expedition to study the forces and interactions in the Arctic that contribute to global warming. They wanted to take a closer look into the mechanisms driving the greenhouse effect at a site where the phenomenon can be studied particularly well: The so-called "Arctic amplification” is to blame for the fact that temperatures at the North Pole are rising two to three times faster than in the rest of the world. A Forest without Trees After spending two months on the ice, the team returned to Spitzbergen on September 1. During the expedition, the scientists had spent up to 10 hours each day drilling, filming, measuring and taking samples. They sent up weather balloons and drones, deployed submersible robots and suspended sediment traps beneath the ice. In the evenings, the team would gather in the salon for a beer and to discuss their experiences and findings from the day. Oceanographers, meteorologists, experts in sea ice physics and ecologists were all part of the team. Marine scientist Zoe Koenig measured currents and turbulence beneath the ice while Sandro Dahlke, the atmospheric physicist, probed clouds with microwaves. The findings produced by biologist Morten Iversen, meanwhile, were something of a riddle. He had joined the team to investigate how the algae growing beneath the sea ice is metabolized over the course of the summer: Which organisms feed on the algae and where the algae itself gets its nutrition. But Iversen found that there was actually no algae at all in the region between Greenland and Spitzbergen where the Polarstern was operating. In other years, the algae forms the backbone of the Arctic ecosystem. It was almost as though Iversen had come to a forest and realized there were no trees. In the Arctic, everything is connected to everything else. Perhaps data collected by the others could help explain Iversen’s discovery? Might the algae be missing because the ice melted particularly rapidly this year? Captain Stefan Schwarze had figured that he would be able to maneuver the Polarstern through the pack ice in August at a speed of around two to three knots. In actuality, though, he was able to travel twice that fast on some days. Fog hung low over the ice on some days during the expedition, it would rain, and the scientists would trudge through puddles of meltwater and slush. Oceanographer Gunnar Spreen from the University of Bremen complained about the "Bremen weather.” Atmospheric physicist Dahlke, by contrast, was "happy that we were able to see it with or own eyes and study it.” He brought home a data set showing that the rain makes the ice softer and, thus, darker. As such, the rain contributes to the ice-albedo effect, the feedback mechanism that intensifies the annual loss of sea ice during the Arctic summer. Year after year, the melting process speeds itself up: The more bright, reflective ice melts and the more dark water takes its place, the less heat is reflected and the more rapidly the remaining ice melts. One of the aims of "Contrasts” – as the expedition launched by the Bremerhaven-based Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven is called – was to study this effect as precisely as possible. The albedo effect is an important driver of the ongoing disappearance of sea ice in the Arctic. The polar ice cap in the north has been shrinking for decades as a result of climate change, and soon, the North Pole will be almost completely free of ice in the summer. But when will that future become reality? Forecasts vary and there is a significant lack of knowledge. In this key region, of all places – the location of some of the most important factors in the global climate – there is still a poor understanding of the interaction between sea ice, the ocean and the atmosphere. The concept behind the Contrasts expedition was to enable scientists to study the long-term processes in the Arctic ice in a single season. Traveling in a Triangle The Polarstern embarked from the Norwegian town of Tromsø on July 2, heading for three ice floes the team had previously identified on satellite images that were to be examined in detail. They stood for the Arctic’s future, its present and its past. Ice floe 1 was "seasonal,” as the researchers refer to it. It formed last fall and disappeared again before the fall of the next polar night. Floe 2 was biennial, consisting of ice that formed in fall 2023 off Siberia before being slowly pushed across the pole by the current and was now drifting through the Fram Strait between Greenland and Spitzbergen. Floe 3 was the oldest. It had spent years circulating in the Beaufort Gyre north of Alaska and Canada before being released toward the Fram Strait. The Polarstern spent seven weeks sailing in a triangle between the three floes, departing from the particularly stable Floe 3 for the last time on August 29. "We were able to moor at exactly the same spot each time,” says expedition leader Marcel Nicolaus. The weather there was less rainy as well. "Our favorite floe,” the researcher says. The loss of the station on Floe 1 was a setback, to be sure. For several days, the team could watch the station’s GPS position on the screen in the red salon as it bobbed in Russian waters. But the story had a happy ending. What was left of the ice sheet eventually drifted back into international waters, where the team was able to retrieve it. Only the weather tower had sunk and is now lying on the sea floor in Russian territory. Nicolaus watched closely as the three floes melted, shrunk and finally broke apart. "First, light blue pools of meltwater form on the ice,” he says. Those are frequently the sites where the ice sheet ultimately breaks apart. "It went quickly,” the expedition leader says. Within four weeks, he says, the floes lost between 30 to 40 centimeters in thickness, becoming darker and grayer with each visit. In late August, the researchers were surprised to note that even Floe 3, which had previously been so stable, had broken apart. For his own research project, Nicolaus had measured the radiative flux through the ice: How much light falls on the surface and how much penetrates into the ocean? Together with his team, he deployed a submersible robot through a hole in the ice. From a nearby shelter, the pilot was able to steer the submersible beneath the ice. Particularly spectacular are the structures up to 15 meters deep, which resemble upside-down reefs and bear witness to past collisions between ice floes.
The Changing Face of the Arctic The physics of ice is Thomas Krumpen’s specialty. He plays an animated video clip that compresses just over 30 fateful years in the Arctic into less than three minutes. It shows the sea ice growing year after year far into the North Atlantic every fall and winter before then receding in the spring. White and undulating, the old ice formed in the Beaufort Sea stands out from the gray-colored ice mass of the Arctic, circling there for years until it drifts toward Greenland and the Atlantic Ocean. But the amount of this old ice has decreased significantly, shrinking far faster than the total amount of ice, colored gray. In 1984, the video shows the Arctic mostly white, but 30 years later, the white areas had almost completely vanished. In 2007 and 2008, a particularly large piece broke out of the Beaufort Gyre. In a single event, the Arctic lost almost half of its perennial ice. "Such export events have likely always occurred,” says Krumpen. "But in the past, the lost ice would have regenerated in the ensuing years.” This self-healing ability, however, he says, has been lost in an Arctic altered by climate change. The total amount of sea ice shrank quickly after 2007. In September 2012, when strong southerly winds pushed the remaining ice together at the pole, only 3.48 million square kilometers of the ocean were covered by ice, still a record low. "It looks as though a process is taking place in steps,” says Krumpen. "We are waiting for the next great export.” And nobody, he says, can predict when that might come. But the scientist believes it will mark the Arctic’s next great step towards an ice-free summer. Because the type of ice is changing, says Krumpen, the entire Arctic is taking on a different character. Old ice is rough and variegated. It is marked by "pressure ridges,” scars left over the years by collisions of large ice floes. These ridges, two to three meters in height, generate swirling air currents above the ice and intensify the turbulence of the water below it. More than anything, though, the cracks and crevices provide habitat for small organisms. In January, Krumpen and his team described the changes linked to the loss of such pressure ridges in the journal Nature Climate Change. At the time the article was written, Krumpen wasn’t yet aware of just how far the change has likely advanced. During this year’s expedition, he had plenty of opportunity to discuss the phenomenon with Iversen, the biologist who was also part of the Contrasts project. The two of them shared a cabin on the Polarstern. Iversen had brought a new kind of camera system on board. Supported by artificial intelligence, he can use it to count how many algae are present in a certain sample. The marine biologist was hoping the technique would show the development of the ice algae population during the summer in real time. His first great surprise came on Floe 1: "Zero” was the algae count he received. Iversen thought it was an outlier, perhaps the result of the ice beginning to melt particularly early this year. Maybe the algae had already separated from the ice, he thought. But he found the same result on Floe 2 and Floe 3. In other years, the ice algae had grown like thick grass on the underside of the floes, even coloring the ice entirely in some areas. But this year, Iversen found nothing. He was also unable to find any algae floating in water where it should have been present. Typically, they form small gas bubbles that keep them afloat for a long time after separating from the ice. Drastic Reduction in Ice Algae The ice algae is essential for the Arctic ecosystem, as analyses performed by AWI scientists have shown. In the fall, when the seawater freezes, the algae is frozen into the ice off the Siberian coast. Only when light begins penetrating the ice after the polar night comes to an end does the algae bloom, forming long filaments stretching for up to several meters with which they can filter the scarce nutrients from the water. These algae mats provide nourishment to sea butterflies, amphipods, copepods and other miniscule creatures, with their footprint found throughout the food chain, even into the depths of the ocean. AWI research has found that much of the carbon in the Arctic Ocean is funneled into the ecosystem through the ice algae. They are the organisms that keep the life cycle in the ice-locked sea going. Once the North Pole becomes ice free, as ecologists have long been saying, the ice algae underneath the ice will also disappear. And the ecosystem will collapse. But might it be that this future scenario has already become reality? A former Polarstern expedition already gathered evidence two years ago of a dramatic reduction in the amount of ice algae. Now, Contrasts appears to have confirmed this finding. Iversen is still hesitant about speaking of an ecosystem collapse. He first wants to examine the sediment samples he took from the ocean floor 4,000 meters below the surface. He wants to know if he might find evidence there of freshly sunken algae. But Iversen does think it possible that the ice-free future may already have begun for the Arctic environment. And he has already taken a look at how this future might look. In sediment traps suspended beneath the ice, large quantities of tiny fecal pellets have accumulated. They come from pteropods, small marine animals that filter bacteria from seawater while encased in a gelatinous coating. They seem to be the big winners of the ongoing ecological transformation. Iversen sees them as a reassuring message. "Nature,” he says, "always finds a way.”
