2014 Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Sixth Lowest on Record

Arctic sea ice hit its annual minimum on Sept. 17, 2014. 

The red line in this image shows the 1981-2010 average minimum extent. 

Data provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) GCOM-W1 satellite.

Image Credit: NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio

Arctic sea ice coverage continued its below-average trend this year as the ice declined to its annual minimum on Sept. 17, according to the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Over the 2014 summer, Arctic sea ice melted back from its maximum extent reached in March to a coverage area of 1.94 million square miles (5.02 million square kilometers), according to analysis from NASA and NSIDC scientists.

This year’s minimum extent is similar to last year’s and below the 1981-2010 average of 2.40 million square miles (6.22 million square km).

"Arctic sea ice coverage in 2014 is the sixth lowest recorded since 1978. The summer started off relatively cool, and lacked the big storms or persistent winds that can break up ice and increase melting," said Walter Meier, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“Even with a relatively cool year, the ice is so much thinner than it used to be,” Meier said. “It’s more susceptible to melting.”

This summer, the Northwest Passage above Canada and Alaska remained ice-bound.

A finger of open water stretched north of Siberia in the Laptev Sea, reaching beyond 85 degrees north, which is the farthest north open ocean has reached since the late 1970s, according to Meier.


An animation of daily Arctic sea ice extent from March 21 to Sept. 17, when the ice appeared to reach it’s minimum extent for the year. 

It’s the sixth lowest minimum sea ice extent in the satellite era. The data was provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) GCOM-W1 satellite.

Image Credit: NASA/GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio/T. Schindler

While summer sea ice has covered more of the Arctic in the last two years than in 2012’s record low summer, this is not an indication that the Arctic is returning to average conditions, Meier said.

This year’s minimum extent remains in line with a downward trend; the Arctic Ocean is losing about 13 percent of its sea ice per decade.

To measure sea ice extent, scientists include areas that are at least 15 percent ice-covered. The NASA-developed computer analysis, which is one of several methods scientists use to calculate extent, is based on data from NASA’s Nimbus 7 satellite, which operated from 1978 to 1987, and the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, which has provided information since 1987.

Due to global warming, larger and larger areas of sea ice melt in the summer and when sea ice freezes over in the winter it is thinner and more reduced. 

As the Arctic summers are getting warmer we may see an acceleration of global warming, because reduced sea ice in the Arctic will remove less CO2 from the atmosphere, according to Danish scientist Dorte Haubjerg Søgaard, PhD Fellow, Nordic Center for Earth Evolution, University of Southern Denmark and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, Nuuk..

In addition to monitoring sea ice from space, NASA is conducting airborne field campaigns to track changes in Arctic sea ice and its impact on climate.

Operation IceBridge flights have been measuring Arctic sea ice and ice sheets for the past several years during the spring.

A new field experiment, the Arctic Radiation – IceBridge Sea and Ice Experiment (ARISE) started this month to explore the relationship between retreating sea ice and the Arctic climate.

NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO)-2 will measure CO2 in the atmosphere

An artists rendition of NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2), which will launch on July 1 and measure atmospheric carbon dioxide 

NASA is preparing a July 1 launch for its first satellite dedicated to measuring atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that plays a key role in climate change.

CO2 levels have reached their highest point in at least 800,000 years, according to the US space agency.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) satellite is very similar to its predecessor, OCO-1, which was destroyed during its launch in February 2009.

The satellite will help provide a more complete and global picture of man-made and naturally occurring CO2 emissions as well as the effects of carbon "sinks," like oceans and forests, which absorb and trap the gas.

"Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere plays a critical role in our planet's energy balance and is a key factor in understanding how our climate is changing," said Michael Freilich, director of NASA's Earth Science Division.

"With the OCO-2 mission, NASA will be contributing an important new source of global observations to the scientific challenge of better understanding our Earth and its future," he added in a statement.

The OCO-2 satellite will be launched on a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, aiming for an orbit at 438 miles (705 kilometers) above the Earth's surface.

NASA Mars HiRise: Study of Aeolis Dorsa and Halcyon times

This NASA image obtained by the Mars HiRISE camera March 13, 2014 shows a sand dune field in a Southern highlands crater on Mars

Cold and dry today, Mars was previously warm and wet but possibly only at intervals, a study published on Sunday suggests.

Scientists have long puzzled over what happened to the water, the precious stuff of life, on the Red Planet.

Unmanned spacecraft have sent home tantalising images of gouged canyons, valleys and sedimentary deltas, while landers have found hydrous rocks, all suggesting Mars at one time hosted hundreds of kilometres (miles) of rivers and lakes.

Today, though, Mars is too cold and the pressure of its carbon-dioxide atmosphere way too low for liquid H2O to exist. If you tried to pour water on its surface, it would simultaneously freeze and vapourise.

So when did Mars host liquid water? And what happened to it?
In a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, planetary geologist Edwin Kite of the California Institute of Technology takes a new stab at the riddle.

Edwin Kite

Kite and his team measured craters, left on the Martian surface by asteroid collisions, to gain an idea of its past atmospheric pressure.

The principle behind their calculation is this: the thicker the atmosphere, the bigger the space rock has to be to survive the friction of contact with it.

Conversely, a thinner atmosphere means that smaller rocks are able to survive the descent and whack the surface.

Aeolis Dorsa

Kite's team looked at 319 craters in Aeolis Dorsa, a 3.6-billion-year-old region that shows evidence of past rivers to get an indication.

Mystery of flowing water They calculated that these craters were formed when Mars had atmospheric pressure of up to 0.9 bar.

This pressure is 150 times greater than that of today and intriguingly close to that of the water-rich Planet Earth at sea level.

The bad news, though, is that Mars is far more distant from the Sun than Earth and at that far-off time, our star was much less bright than now.

As a result, Mars would have required pressures of at least five bar for its surface to keep above the freezing point of water. It seems to have lacked a long-lasting thick atmosphere during its river period.

"If Mars did not have a stable multi-bar atmosphere at the time that the rivers were flowing—as suggested by our results—then a warm and wet CO2/H2O greenhouse is ruled out, and long-term average temperatures were most likely below freezing," said the study.

Sanjoy Som

This throws up other possible explanations for the water, said Sanjoy Som of NASA Ames Research Center in a commentary published in the same journal.

One is that the water was high in acidity and salt content, giving it a lower freezing point and enabling it survive as a liquid in lower air pressure.

Another is that greenhouse gases from volcanic eruptions helped Mars, for a while, to have a denser atmosphere that enabled the water to flow.

Another possibility is "transient intervals" of denser atmosphere caused by the planet's tilt, said Som.

Like a child's top that is slightly off centre, Mars tilts slowly around its axis of spin.

It takes 120,000 years to complete one axial revolution, a timescale that leads to major changes in the amount of sunlight reaching its poles, whose water either froze to form ice-sheets or warmed to "reinflate" the atmosphere and form rivers that flowed at kinder times.

More information: Nature paper: Low palaeopressure of the martian atmosphere estimated from the size distribution of ancient craters, www.nature.com

Solar Simulator: Reactor could make fuel from solar energy and CO2

(Image: Aldo Steinfield/Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)

Imagine filling up your car on an environmentally-friendly fuel produced from sunlight, water and carbon dioxide from the air.

That goal may now be a step closer following successful tests of a new solar-powered reactor.

Researchers around the world have recently been experimenting with different catalysts capable of producing hydrocarbon fuels from water and carbon dioxide when heated by concentrated sunlight.

Such a fuel would not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but could be used with little change to our existing cars and infrastructure.

Now William Chueh at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and colleagues have developed a reactor that uses cerium oxide as a catalyst. Cerium oxide is an abundant material suitable for commercial-scale fuel production, but it hadn't been demonstrated in a reactor under realistic conditions.

In Chueh's reactor, concentrated solar energy enters the chamber through a window. Once inside the chamber, the sunlight is reflected several times to capture as much of the solar energy as possible. It is used to heat a 35 millimetre-diameter cylinder of cerium oxide to around 1500 degrees Celsius. This causes the cerium to release an oxygen atom.

The temperature in the chamber is then reduced to around 900 degrees Celsius, and carbon dioxide is pumped into the chamber through an inlet. The cerium grabs an oxygen atom from the carbon dioxide to replace the one that it has lost, producing carbon monoxide and cerium oxide.

The carbon monoxide is then removed from the chamber, which is heated back up to 1500 degrees Celsius and the whole cycle is repeated.

The same process is also used to generate hydrogen from steam. The team has successfully run the process to produce the two gases in over 500 cycles.

The efficiency of the device is low, at around 0.4 per cent, but much of this is due to heat loss through the reactor walls and aperture, which can be dealt with through improvements to the device's insulation and design, the team say. Efficiencies of up to 19 per cent should then be possible, they add.

Carbon monoxide and hydrogen can be converted into a synthetic liquid using a technique such as the Fischer-Tropsch process, in which they are heated in the presence of an iron-based catalyst to produce hydrocarbon fuels.

Ultimately, such plants could use carbon dioxide from the air to produce fuel. Team member Aldo Steinfeld at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, has already demonstrated that a similar process can be used to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

He and his team used concentrated sunlight to heat calcium oxide to 400 degrees Celsius, causing it to react with CO2 in the air to form calcium carbonate. When heated again, this time to 800 degrees Celsius, the calcium carbonate releases a pure stream of CO2 that can then be used in the solar fuel reactor.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1197834

NASA Mars: Trees on surface are frozen Co2

A Nasa probe has sent back photographs of what appear to be trees on the planet's surface. But it is an optical illusion - they are sand dunes coated with a thin layer of frozen CO2. The "trees" are trails of debris caused by landslides as ice melts

Picture: NASA

Shell CO2 storage plans under fire

Shell CO2 storage plans under fire

A plan by oil giant Shell to store 300,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year in a depleted gas reservoir beneath the Dutch city of Barendrecht has drawn the ire of residents and local officials who have vowed to thwart it.

"We are going to do everything to oppose this project," declared Barendrecht deputy mayor Simon Zuubrier, who voiced fears for the safety of the city's 50,000 inhabitants.

"We are taking legal action to get it cancelled and we'll approve none of the required permits."

Anglo-Dutch Shell in November was authorised by the Dutch government to undertake a project to capture and store a portion of the 5.0 megatonnes of carbon dioxide emitted each year by the company's refinery in Pernis, Europe's largest. Pernis is located 15 kilometers (9.4 miles) from here.

Under the scheme, set to get under way in 2012, the CO2 will be carried by a pipeline and, after being compressed, will be injected into a depleted gas reservoir 1,800 meters (5,900 feet) under ground. The reservoir has a capacity of 800,000 tonnes.

Shell has said that over time the CO2 will dissolve or form minerals.

With a positive evaluation of the initiative by government-mandated experts, the project will be extended in a few years to another nearby gas reservoir, with a 9.0 megatonne capacity and part of which lies under Barendrecht city center.

"It's ridiculous to carry out such an experiment in a densely populated area," insisted Zuubrier.

Climate Change and the Greenhouse Effect