An interview with Hajo Eicken, professor of geophysics at the UAF Geophysical Institute.

Hajo Eicken  is part of an international research group studying the seasonal arctic ice zone through the Arctic Observing Network. His research interests include how small-scale properties and microstructure of sea ice impact processes on a larger scale as well as the role of sea ice in the climate system.

Eicken is deeply involved with the University of Alaska’s International Polar Year efforts including serving as co-chair of the IPY steering committee research group as well as working to develop the North by 2020 research initiative (learn more at www.ipy.alaska.edu).

Eicken sat down with UAF Vice Chancellor for Research Buck Sharpton to discuss his work, IPY and his views on climate change. The following are excerpts from that interview.

Sharpton: Why don’t you give us a little background on how you became a scientist? When was it that you thought about going into research, in general, and how did you focus in on the kind of research that you’re doing today?

Eicken: My grandfather, on my father’s side, was the sort of person who spent a lot of time outdoors, and he lived in a really rural area in Germany. So, I spent a lot of time outdoors with him. That got me interested in natural sciences and learning more about the environment. And in my case I actually did go to university and study mineralogy.

But at some point when I was about 20 I got a winter job and I went to Antarctica on an ice breaker. That was a really interesting cruise because it was the first winter cruise. I think that shaped my career in the sense that when I left, I never would have considered doing that as a career. At university I had spent a lot of time identifying hundreds of different minerals, and you go out on the ice and there’s only one. So from that perspective it’s kind of boring.

But there were a few really interesting people on that ship who I learned a lot from and that motivated or inspired me to look from a perspective outside of the strong disciplinary bent that was present in Germany. So this expedition to the Antarctic, that was really the point where I thought, yeah, you know, polar research, in particular sea ice, and studying not just sort of a mineralogy of the ice but also how it interacts with other parts of the environment, that’s really what I’m interested in.

Sharpton: So, here you are studying sea ice during IPY-4. What is the connection between ice in general, or sea ice specifically, and climate change?

Eicken: Well, it’s interesting that I just picked up an article from the latest “Geophysical Research Letters” where they show that apparently, even in the sophisticated climate models of today, all it takes is a few years of darkness and you can turn the Earth into a snowball. Maybe that says more about today’s climate models than it does about what’s actually doable. But, if you look at the climate history of the Earth, it’s amazing just how broad a range of conditions we can have in the polar regions. In part, of course, that’s due to our privileged position in the solar system. Where, on the one hand, 45 million years ago the Arctic Ocean, with the North Pole very close to where it is now, was a duck pond with temperatures in the summertime warmer than the hottest summer day at Chena Lakes these days.

Now we have that ice cover up there, but you also have periods during Earth’s climate history that, as far as paleontologists tell us, pretty much the entire ocean, with some exceptions, was covered by ice.
So, I think that if you look at the various factors that control climate, sea ice has to form first. There’s got to be something that actually triggers ice formation, allows ice to be stable. But once you have it, because sea ice is one of the most reflective media in the solar system, particularly if it’s snow covered, it can completely flip the global energy balance. So from that perspective, sea ice is that very important switch—a switch that has us flipping back and forth between very warm and very cold states.
Take the present day discussion—we’re talking about global warming, emission of greenhouse gases and so forth—if you double the carbon dioxide concentration relative to preindustrial levels, you’re basically increasing the radiative forcing by something on the order of three to four watts per meter squared.

The ice-albedo feedback component of sea ice and—the fact that sea ice has a very high albedo, much higher than that of open ocean—accounts for at least as much as one-and-a-half to twice the amount of external forcing. Again, all of this is based on climate model results and I’m not sure how accurate those numbers are, but you could argue that sea ice is at least as important for climate under present day conditions as the doubling of CO2.

Sharpton: You just discussed how the retreat of sea ice is causing a positive feedback to climate change, right? Once the ice is gone, though, it’s troublesome to me to think about how you get it back.

Eicken: Well, if we say the ice is gone in the Arctic, what we’re talking about is the vanishing of the perennial ice cover, so you’ll always have seasonal sea ice.

Sharpton: But let’s take in the Eocene when methane and CO2 abundances were an order of magnitude or more higher than what you have right now. And we had no sea ice whatsoever. What’s the mechanism by which the Earth recovered from so that much, much later we experienced the ice ages and things of that nature?

Eicken: Well, I’m not a paleo-oceanographer, but what I would think is that during those episodes the hydrologic cycle is accelerated. So you have much fresher oceans, and during the warm period in the Arctic, the Arctic Ocean was, at the surface, a freshwater lake. Under those conditions, even if summertime temperatures are 20 centigrade, once polar night comes along and you have no cloud cover, you’re radiating hundreds of watts per meter squared out to space. If you have freshwater you don’t have to get all the heat out of the ocean underneath, to get back to an ice cover. This is why you can get ice on lakes at very low latitudes as long as you have clear sky conditions at night.

Of course, you still have a lot of heat in the ocean. But one of the interesting things that this Geophysical Research Letters paper said, which I never appreciated, was that in their simulations they find that if you go from present day ocean, which is pretty cold in the lower depths, it only takes 10 years in their simulations to cool the global ocean to the freezing point. And they argue that, and of course you have to look at the parameterizations, but they argue that because sea ice, once you start expanding the ice cover, is so effective in deep mixing that if you push this out to the lower latitude it just happens very, very quickly.

So again, you could argue that as long as conditions are such that you have an appreciable ice cover that is expanding southwards, that would also be the mechanism through which you can extract heat out of the ocean very quickly.

Sharpton: What is the current status of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean? Is the ice edge higher…

Eicken: Well, you often read about it in the media. I look at climate models not as something that is going to help me plan my family vacation in 2037, but as a tool that provides a range of possibilities.
So if you look at a period of five to 10 years, we’ve seen more accelerated ice retreat than the models are telling us, but I wouldn’t assign too much significance to that. If the models are not predicting the retreat rapidly enough, then one factor could be that the models are assuming that all the ice in the Arctic Ocean is multi-year ice. I mean, the parameterizations, in particular for albedo, but also for a lot of other properties, are based on people going out and making measurements on ice and then those processes get turned into some kind of simple scheme that allows a modeler to predict, say, what the albedo is going to be if you change a surface temperature.

Seasonal ice cover has significantly lower albedo, by as much as 0.15, 0.2, which is huge for ice. And as a result of that, you’re already getting way more heat into the ocean in those seasonal ice zones than the models would currently predict.

Sharpton: Now, under the reasonable assumption that things are going to proceed as the models suggest, and sea ice is going to continue to retreat throughout the remainder of the 21st century, what are the opportunities and threats that an open Arctic Ocean poses for the people of this particular planet?

Eicken: Well, it’s difficult to come up with good answers, but there are indications. For instance, climate model simulations suggest that if the ice edge retreats further to the north, you’re changing the position of the Aleutian Low, which changes atmospheric circulation in the North Pacific. One model suggests that, as a result of these shifts, water availability is going to go down 20 to 30 percent in the American West.

So, you’re going to have droughts. You’re going to see really large-scale shifts in the climate patterns, and in particular in things that you normally wouldn’t associate with a change in sea ice, but because the Earth is finite, if you start fiddling around with something at the top, it’s going to have repercussions all over the planet.

Sharpton: What about those more immediate effects to transportation and exploration of resources that might be more locally related to the people of the north?

Eicken: The different arctic nations are reevaluating their territorial claims, in part, because the retreating sea ice now starts to make the different shelves more accessible. Canada is thinking about ships using the Northwest Passage; they’re thinking about a deep-water port. The Russians have shown with the Japanese that they can move all kinds of goods along the northern sea route with sea ice being less extensive. So there’s all these massive tectonic shifts in geopolitics that we’re seeing that I would argue that the retreating sea ice plays a very important role in.

From what I hear from people like Lawson Brigham, who’s looked at this through his position with the Arctic Research Commission, and who is looking at marine transportation for the Arctic Council, there’s a significant increase in marine traffic in the U.S. and Canadian waters. More tourism, more destinational traffic.

This summer we have a fleet of 18 or 20 icebreakers, drilling vessels and supply vessels out in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas to explore these offshore oil and gas leases. These are the first leases ever sold in the Arctic by the U.S., and Canada is doing the same thing over in the Beaufort Sea.
So we have all these changes happening and what makes it interesting is that it’s not just environmental change, but the fact that the environmental change is then engendering bigger economic interest. It’s changing geopolitics.

Sharpton: And how does your North by 2020 project play into all this?

Eicken: With the urgency that we see now, that’s clearly one of the things that North by 2020 is trying to do—to have all these different experts both at the university and across the state sit down and say, “OK, we know there are lots of scientific measurements going on during IPY. We know that there are lots of observing activities, but how can we build on that and really improve the planning environment taking advantage of opportunities and making sure we’re not running risks we don’t want to handle or can’t handle.” North by 2020 does that.

Amy Lovecraft from the Department of Political Science here at UAF, Sharman Haley from the Institute of Social and Economic Research in Anchorage and myself are working to see how we can balance competing interests in oil and gas development by providing better information about environmental change and other relevant aspects.

Oil and gas is a really contentious issue, especially on the North Slope. The North Slope Borough has a policy that is opposed to offshore oil and gas development because local residents feel that you cannot completely eliminate risks—and the resulting risks and potential damage is so significant to the marine environment that it would completely undermine their livelihood. On the other hand, the oil and gas industry has collected a lot of experience over the last decades working in ice-covered areas and they are saying, “Well, we understand all of this but we feel we have the capability to contain risks now.”

The problem is that I don’t really know where things are between those opposite views, but the one thing that I find to be very important for academia is that our role should be to provide information to all parties interested in the problem that will help them make better decisions. Whether they decide to be pro or con for oil development, that’s not our business. The university’s role is to make sure that people are making educated and well-founded decisions, and that’s really where I see North by 2020 coming in.

Sharpton: I want to ask you one last question, just on IPY. Let’s look ahead to IPY-5. Looking at the crystal ball, the tea leaves, wave the monkey paw and tell us what you think the world is going to be like 50 years from now.

Eicken: Well, at heart I’m an optimist. I think at that time there’s going to be a multi-cultural Arctic.
I think, or I hope, that with these changes ultimately people will realize that we’re all in the same boat. Whether you’re working for industry, whether you’re a local resident who’s hunting seals on the ice, whether you’re a Russian diplomat who’s charged with administering some remote region of the country. People from outside of the Arctic are moving here. Just look at Barrow. In the 1950s and 60s, Barrow was 95 percent or so Inupiat and now you have Pacific Islanders, Koreans, Filipinos, Caucasians and Mexicans. You even have a Mexican restaurant.

So I really do think that if we do it right, we can achieve what is happening in the Antarctic, where everybody says, “Hey, this is part of the world heritage.”

Of course, certain things you cannot do because territories exist, but the people are free to move or free to exchange, and my vision for IPY is that it will be planned to happen in a world where the Arctic is not just some place up north, but where really a lot of ideas that are driving societies forward are coming out of the North.

I think we should certainly hold this university’s feet to the fire in that regard because I think that’s an area where we can play an important role.

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