Finding Consensus on Arctic Ocean Climate History

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By Jochen Knies, Matt O’Regan and Claude Hillaire Marcel, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: The Arctic...average temperatures...rise up to 4 times faster than on the rest of the planet. Among the many environmental effects of this warming, the Arctic Ocean, critically, is moving toward a “blue” state, ...becoming ice free during the summer months. This shift raises significant concerns about the region’s future. Arctic Indigenous peoples...heavily rely on stable ice conditions for traditional hunting, fishing, and travel. ...Global geopolitical and economic pressures will also rise as new shipping routes open, previously inaccessible resources become available for extraction, and international competition over these resources rises. Currently...scientists struggle to predict how an ice-free Arctic will react to and amplify a warmer global climate. The lack of clear climate projections...is largely due to a shortage of key geological data describing former climatic conditions and how the Arctic has responded to past changes. ...Deep-sea sediment cores provide some of the best available archives from the Arctic Ocean. These cores...contain sediments deposited over hundreds of thousands of years that offer clues about past ocean temperatures, sea ice and ice sheets, and ocean circulation changes. ...scientists focus on past “greenhouse” states, when Earth’s climate was warmer than it is today, such as the Last Interglacial, about 130,000 years ago.... 

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