Arctic Ocean could experience ‘ice-free’ summer days within the next decade, says study

The Arctic might witness ice-free summer days as early as the next couple of years, a study revealed.

According to the study published in the journalNature Reviews Earth & Environment, the Arctic could see summer days without sea ice in the next 10 years, which is earlier than the previous projections.

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By 2050, the Arctic might see an entire month without floating ice during September. It is a time of the year when the region's sea ice coverage is the least. However, by the end of the century, the ice-free period could last up to many months in a year, based on future emission scenarios.

Researchers do not mean zero ice in the water when they say ice-free Arctic. They use the term when the ocean has less than a million square kilometres (386,000 square miles) of ice.

In recent years, the Arctic Ocean has had around 3.3 million square kilometres of sea ice at its minimum in September.

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Alexandra Jahn, an associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and fellow at CU Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, analysed the previous studies on sea ice projections and sea ice coverage data from computational climate models. Using this data, they figured out how, in the future, the Arctic might change regularly.

The team projected that under all emission scenarios, the Arctic Ocean could go ice-free for the first time in August or September between the 2020s and 2030s.

"When it comes to communicating what scientists expect to happen in the Arctic, it is important to predict when we might observe the first ice-free conditions in the Arctic, which will show up in the daily satellite data," Jahn said.

According to Jahn, the main contributor to sea ice depletion is greenhouse emissions. When the ice cover decreases, the amount of heat from sunlight absorbed by the sea increases, worsening the ice melt and warming the Arctic. However, future emission levels will decide how often the ice-free condition occurs, she added.

However, the bright side is that the Arctic Ocean is resilient and can recover swiftly when the atmosphere cools down. "Unlike the ice sheet in Greenland that took thousands of years to build, even if we melt all the Arctic sea ice, if we can then figure out how to take CO2 back out of the atmosphere in the future to reverse warming, sea ice will come back within a decade," Jahn said.

(With inputs from agencies)