TUKTOYAKTUK, Northwest Territories — The Arctic Ocean has given up tens of thousands more square miles of ice this summer in a relentless summer of melt, with scientists watching satellite images for a possible record-low polar ice cap.
From the barren Arctic shore of this village in Canada’s far northwest, 1,500 miles north of Seattle, veteran observer Eddie Gruben has seen the summer ice retreating more each decade as the world has warmed. By this weekend, the ice edge lay about 80 miles at sea.
“Forty years ago, it was 40 miles out,” said Gruben, 89.
Global average temperatures rose 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past century, but Arctic temperatures rose twice as much or even faster, almost certainly in good part because of manmade greenhouse gases, researchers say.
In late July, the mercury soared to almost 86 degrees Fahrenheit in this settlement of 900 Inuvialuit, the name for western Arctic Eskimos.
“The water was really warm,” Gruben said. “The kids were swimming in the ocean.”
As of Thursday, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported, the polar ice cap extended over 2.61 million square miles after having shrunk an average 41,000 square miles a day in July — equivalent to one Indiana daily.
The rate of melt was similar to that of July 2007, the year when the ice cap dwindled to a record low minimum extent of 1.7 million square miles in September.
Scientists say the makeup of the frozen polar sea has shifted significantly the past few years, as thick multiyear ice has given way as the Arctic’s dominant form to thin ice that comes and goes with each winter and summer.
Environmentalists worry that the ice-dependent polar bear will struggle to survive.
At a global conference in March in Copenhagen, scientists declared that climate change is occurring faster than had been anticipated, citing the fast-dying Arctic cap as one example. A month later, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted Arctic summers could be almost ice-free within 30 years, not at the century’s end as earlier predicted.
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