Researching Arctic Ice

Research scientists have started to tag along on regular Coast Guard flights to get up close and personal with the arctic sheet ice. The researchers are hoping to get more detailed data on something the the Coast Guard has been noticing lately: The ice, while spectacular in this photo, is shrinking.

The following article, "The smaller picture:
Colorado scientist prepares to collect detailed data on Arctic ice" by Drew Herman, appeared in the Kodiak Daily Mirror (Alaska) on July 1:

From 1,000 feet up, the Arctic sheet ice looks like the top of a piña colada when you lose the race to drink it before the froth melts. In the 24-hour sunlight of late June, open water only appears as isolated patches connected by dark, narrow veins.

From his perch at an observation window in a Coast Guard C-130 airplane, Mark Tschudi estimated a thickness of about 3 feet for the largest of the flat, motionless ice islands. The smaller shards might be 1 foot thick, he said.

Tschudi, a remote sensing scientist from the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research at the University of Colorado in Boulder, hitched along for the June 19 Arctic Domain Awareness flight from Air Station Kodiak. ADA is a Coast Guard program aimed at familiarizing crews with operating in the far north — something they expect to do more and more as global warming shrinks polar ice and shipping lanes open across the top of the world.

“That’s how it’s been going,” Tschudi said. “Last year we hit an all-time minimum for coverage in the Arctic.”

Although the ice extended to every horizon, and usually reaches minimum coverage only in September, he did not expect to see it so thin and so close to shore as the summer solstice neared.

But Tschudi was not completely surprised, either.

“The ice in the Arctic has been shrinking every year,” he said.

For now, however, the extreme latitudes get little traffic, leaving scientists with few platforms for gathering data on an issue of global importance.

“Satellites are a big one,” Tschudi said. “That’s, of course, the big picture for the Arctic.”
For the smaller picture, researchers need to get closer to the surface.

In an important international study in 1998, a Canadian icebreaker was allowed to freeze into the Arctic ice and drift for months, giving scientists a close-up platform for their instruments.
Only two of the U.S. Coast Guard’s three Arctic icebreakers are operational.

Tschudi’s trip with ADA let him check the viability of mounting specialized instruments on a C-130.

“The Coast Guard is really cooperative with this stuff,” he said. “Since these guys fly every two weeks, it’s a great opportunity to get lots of photography that way.”

A row of downward-facing flare tubes at the rear of the aircraft’s cabin offer a promising mount. With technicians at the University of Colorado machine shop, Tschudi plans to develop a compact, fully automated instrument package with a laser profiler, a spectral radiometer and a high-speed camera.

“If that works out, we’ll be able to fly all three of those on every one of these flights,” he said. That would yield a regular stream of data, the foundation of reliable science. “It’s the old ‘picture’s worth a thousand words’ sort of thing.”

Tschudi’s specialty is pond coverage, the shallow pools of water on the surface of sea ice. Spectral analysis tells him what is on the ice.

“That helps the modelers predict how fast the ice is going to melt,” he said.

Some models predict an ice-free Arctic summer within the next six years. Several nations, including Russia, Canada and Denmark, have recently shown the flag in the region many expect to become more important for commerce and resources.

Coast Guard pilot Lt. Steve McKechnie and his crew have flown ADA missions since last summer. The day-long airborne patrols have already become as regular as weather permits, with missions planned for nine months per year.

The June 19 flight left Kodiak at 10 a.m., made a touch-and-go landing in Kotzebue, then skirted the coastline about 50 miles north of the shore to Barrow. After another touch-and-go at 3:25 p.m., the crew turned back to Kodiak, arriving in time for dinner.

The planes’ routes vary, with detours toward anything that looks like a boat, even if it turns out to be a chunk of ice casting a boat-shaped shadow. Sometimes they check on the oil pipeline, alert for environmental or security problems.

Aiding the scientific community is a bonus, adding to the list of Coast Guard functions.
For Tschudi and his colleagues, the Arctic flights add to the solid scientific ground under their feet even as the solid ice goes away. Tschudi said people often ask them if global warming is real and whether humans are responsible.

“There’s a lot of information being put out from various sources in the media,” he said. “The bottom line is yes, there is a man-made influence to the global warming that is occurring.”
How much of the warming comes from human activity is another question, but that people are speeding it up appears clear.

There may be more or less ice in the Arctic Ocean in any given year, Tschudi said, “but the trend is down, definitely.”

[Photo information: The shadow of a Coast Guard C-130, flying at about 1,000 feet, falls on offshore sheet ice west of Barrow during an Arctic Domain Awareness flight, June 19. Photo by Drew Herman.]