PolarisProject

After several months of work, on March 16, 2007, we submitted our Polaris Project proposal to the National Science Foundation’s International Polar Year grant competition.  Six months later we learned that our proposal was successful – the project would actually happen.  We’ve now completed our first round of on-campus courses at the collaborating colleges and universities, and it one week we launch our first of three annual field courses in the Siberian Arctic (which are really the core of the Polaris Project).  Wow – it is kind of hard to believe this is actually going to happen!

I’m actually surprised about how relaxed I am right now.  I know that we’ll have surprises and challenges along the way, but at the moment everything is just about as good as it could be.  We have a magnificent group of students and scientists (well, really all scientists – some just a bit older than others!) and the remarkably complicated logistics necessary to undertake this adventure are all falling nicely into place.  So, in just over a week, we’ll all meet in JFK Airport in New York and then travel together first to Moscow, then Yakutsk, then Cherskiy.  Though I’ve been to Siberia many times now, as I sit here now on a Friday evening at home with my wife, 2 and half year old soon, and dog, I still have a hard time imagining that I’ll be in the far reaches of the Siberian Arctic in just 10 days or so – crazy…

My expectation is that all of the Polaris Project team will learn a tremendous amount about the Arctic, about climate change, about working in a large collaborative project, and about themselves.  Here we go!

Max

Max and Russian student Anya Suslova did an interview on public radio about the Student Partners Project. They give a great interview and talk about the Polaris Project a bit at the end. Listen here. You’ll learn something about rivers in the Arctic and something about how the Polaris Project got started.

Betting on future climate has become a phenomenon on lately. See here and here, and here. (Those are all blogs I like by the way). In a related vein, there is also a pool for bets on what the minimum arctic sea ice extent will be in 2008. See here. Some foolish members of the Polaris Project decided to roll up to the betting table as well.

(Click on the thumbnail for a better view)

So far Max and Karen are predicting further decline. I’m predicting a rebound and others fall in between. Each of us has reasons with various levels of sophistication for making those predictions. Karen thinks that the way things are shaping up this year and the age of the ice, indicate a new record minimum in September. I think that last year’s minimum was extreme and although we might have tipped to a new state it’s too early to say for sure. I based my guess on statistical modeling of trends (using an AR2 model) and the cool state of Pacific.

Like many things in the climate system, gauging sea ice changes is complicated. It involves understanding ocean and atmospheric temperatures and circulation and the way ice accumulates and ablates.  This is physics that is pretty tough in and of itself. But sea ice involves a classic feedback to the climate system through changing albedo.

The ice-albedo feedback is an easy concept to understand and easy to describe qualitatively but a quantitative understanding is far more difficult. Here is the qualitative story: the snow-covered sea ice reflects most of the incoming sunlight. Albedo (Latin for white) is just a fancy term for how bright things are. Once the climate warms the ice melts which lowers the albedo, resulting in more absorbed energy from the sun, increasing melting, and further lowers the albedo. Taking this qualitative story and turning it into numbers that can predict sea ice extent is where it gets tricky and this is why cryospheric scientists and climate modelers get out of bed in the morning. 

What’s the bottom line in summer 2008 sea ice? What will happen? We’ll have to wait and see.