Open water has replaced sea ice in much of the Bering Sea off Alaska’s west coast, leaving villages vulnerable to powerful winter storms and adding challenges to native hunters seeking marine mammals, an expert said on Monday.
Rick Thoman of the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks said that winter storms over five weeks obliterated thin ice that had formed since December last year.
Wind blew ice to Russian beaches in the west and to the south side of Norton Sound south of Nome, but left open water all the way to the Chukchi Sea north of the Bering Strait.
“You can take your sailboat from Dillingham to Diomede today,” he said.
Sea ice historically covers much of the Bering Sea throughout the winter, with maximum coverage through this month. Kotzebue Sound, a great bay northeast of the Bering Strait, already has open water, an occurrence normally seen in June.
Phyllis Stabenow, a physical oceanographer at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, part of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, on Monday said that storms played a large role in the extreme low ice.
Winds from November to April typically blow out of the north or northwest and are cold, driving ice southward, she said by e-mail. This year, warm winds in a series of storms blew out of the southwest in mid-January and especially last month.
“These storms broke the ice up and pushed it north. Also some of the ice melted. So the ice is now similar in extent to what it was last year at this time and last year had the lowest maximum ice extent ever observed,” she said.
Thoman and Stabenow did not label the unusual ice event as climate change.
The Bering Sea has been warm for several years, Thoman said. The ice loss can be attributed to a warm ocean and combination of an unusual, but not unprecedented weather pattern.
Sea ice is an important feature of the ecosystem. Its absence has implications above and below the ocean surface.
Coastal communities historically could rely on a barrier of sea ice to protect them from the pounding of fierce winter storms. Without an ice cover, waves erode beaches and sometimes flood villages, Thoman said.
Residents of coastal villages traditionally hunt and butcher marine mammals such as walruses and seals when the animals “haul out” on the ice. Residents of St Lawrence Island last year had to try to hunt in open water far from shore, Thoman said.
“It’s much more difficult to butcher an animal the size of a walrus in a boat as opposed to on ice,” Thoman said. “Much greater chance of injury to the people. Much greater chance of losing the animal altogether.”
Sea ice historically has formed a “cold pool” in the central Bering Sea, a barrier of cold water that sets the structure for fish. The cold pool acts as a thermal wall, keeping valuable commercial fish such as walleye pollock and Pacific cod in the southern and central Bering Sea.
In the absence of sea ice last year, federal fish biologists conducting surveys found that a cold pool had not formed and that southern species had migrated north in far greater numbers.
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