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Continuously hotter summers and less sea ice are remaking the Arctic. Some researchers wonder what opportunities might appear, for plants, animals — and global commerce.
As record heat baked the Arctic for the third summer in a row, scientists say the region with the fastest-increasing temperature in the world could eventually be vastly greener and teem with new sea life.
The statistics on climate change in the polar region naturally focus on high temperatures and melting ice — and while that data fills many people with terror, certain ecosystems could thrive in the changing landscape.
Researchers from the Norwegian Arctic University, Eurac Research and the University of Cambridge published a study showing that Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic, is becoming increasingly greener.
Rising summer temperatures since 2000 have allowed plants to grow on the islands, satellite and daily temperature data from 11 meteorological stations reveal.
“Plant growth is closely linked to the summer temperature. There have been drastic changes in the other seasons in recent years on Svalbard, and now summer follows suit,” said senior researcher Stein Rune Karlsen of the research group.
“A rough estimate is that there is now in the order of 100,000 tonnes (110,000 tons) more dry weight of plants for the whole of Svalbard compared to the cold summer of 2008. The summer of 2008 was one of the last years where sea ice covered the sea areas east of Svalbard for most of the summer,” Karlsen said.
The extent of sea ice in August was 17% smaller than average for that month, the European Union’s climate monitor Copernicus Climate Change Service said last week.
The climate monitor said 2024 is likely to be the warmest year ever measured, after releasing data showing the summer has been the hottest on record globally.
Researchers once estimated the Arctic was decades away from a summer without sea ice. However, some scientists wrote in a June study that this scenario could become a reality in the 2030s.
Should the Arctic ice continue to melt, sea levels will rise. Higher temperatures in the Arctic could affect weather in parts of North America, Europe and Asia with extreme rainfall and heat waves.
Norway’s Meteorological Institute said about 60 weather monitoring stations set a new record for high monthly temperatures in August, with the majority of them in northern Norway and Svalbard, in a recent report.
The average temperature at Svalbard Airport in August was 9 degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal, helping push the islands to a third consecutive summer of record-breaking heat.
“We have checked the weather stations in Norway for a long time, and it seems that it’s never happened before that a new record was set three years in a row in past seasons,” said Jostein Mamen, a climate researcher at the Meteorological Institute. “It’s very unusual that so many stations have set temperature records by a large margin in northern Norway and on Svalbard.”
Ketil Isaksen, another climate researcher from Norway’s Meteorological Institute, told Norwegian broadcaster NRK the trend was unusual. “Perhaps the most extreme thing now is that we have had three years in a row with a record for the summer as a whole. You usually get a hot record summer, then a few successive cooler summers — not that you set a new record.”
Karl Michael Attard, a professor of marine sciences at the University of Southern Denmark told Courthouse News that land is not the only place where nature could thrive in the aftermath of the Arctic desert. He is researching what an ice-free Arctic Ocean could look like in future summers.
“We’re trying to understand how less ice in the Arctic is increasing the amount of sunlight entering the ocean, which is important for photosynthesis taking place at the bottom of the food chain,” said Attard. “More photosynthesis taking place in Arctic waters could support a more productive ecosystem that includes commercially relevant species of fish.”
Commercial opportunities are one positive result of the disappearing ice in the Arctic, as alternative shipping routes open up for global trade, especially in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Species from lower latitudes might expand into the Arctic and could take over in certain areas, potentially pushing other species out, Attard said.
He would like to see more interdisciplinary research on the rapidly changing landscape. He says public discussion should focus not only on vanishing ice, but also on what opportunities emerge and for whom, including the various Indigenous communities in the Arctic.
“As a scientist, I’m intrigued by how the Arctic is changing. What does it mean that there is less ice in the region? Personally, I find the nuances more interesting,” he said.
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