Arctic Ice Levels Fall to Historic Low

Increased melt means increased opportunity to traverse the Northern Sea Route

Arctic ice levels have fallen to their lowest summer cover since satellite data collection began, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said in a statement on Wednesday.

"We are now in uncharted territory," said NSIDC Director Mark Serreze.

Sea ice extent fell to 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles) on September 16, 2012 which NSIDC is likely to be the lowest extent for the year.

While ice extent has shown a dramatic overall decline over the past thirty years - NSIDC said this year's minimum will be nearly 50 percent lower than the 1979 to 2000 average - the rate of melt has still taken some by surprise.

"While we've long known that as the planet warms up, changes would be seen first and be most pronounced in the Arctic, few of us were prepared for how rapidly the changes would actually occur," said Serreze.

"While lots of people talk about opening of the Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic islands and the Northern Sea Route along the Russian coast, twenty years from now from now in August you might be able to take a ship right across the Arctic Ocean," he added

NSIDC scientist Julienne Stroeve said, "Recent climate models suggest that ice-free conditions may happen before 2050, though the observed rate of decline remains faster than many of the models are able to capture."

Northern Sea Route

Shipping and bunker companies are among those who have been monitoring the Artic melt, as increased melt means increased opportunity to traverse the Northern Sea Route (NSR) connecting Asia to Europe.

The NSR is attractive to ship operators because of the much shorter journey time, with Nordic Bulk Carriers A/S (Nordic) saying Murmansk, Russia to China is cut to 23 days from the 43 days it takes going through the Suez Canal.

This means less fuel is used, which is better for the environment as less emissions are produced, and also saves money.

Nordic said in June it was planning to transport six to eight 70,000 metric tonne (mt) shipments of iron ore to China using the NSR this year, having made its first voyage across the route in 2010.

In July, St. Petersburg based bunker supplier LLC LUKOIL-Bunker said it expects growth in the volume of bunker fuel sales to vessels sailing on the NSR "since the number of ships following the route has been increasing."

Fundamental Change

NSIDC scientists said there has been a fundamental change in the Arctic's sea ice cover, which used to be dominated by multiyear ice, or ice that survived through several years.

Lately, the Arctic is now more typically seasonal ice cover, and large areas are now prone to completely melt away in summer.

"The strong late season decline is indicative of how thin the ice cover is," said NSIDC scientist Walt Meier. "Ice has to be quite thin to continue melting away as the sun goes down and fall approaches."