How is the melting of glaciers affecting the Russian economy?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In only twenty years, there will be no ice at all in the Arctic in the summer. Global warming is rapidly accelerating, which has a particular impact on Russia and adjacent territories. How justified are the threatening forecasts of scientists - and how will the melted Arctic affect the Russian economy?

In the summer, there will be no ice in the Arctic in 20 years. At least, this is exactly the forecast made at the Polar Institute of Norway. Scientists see this as a threat to polar ecosystems - but is the warming happening in the Arctic really that dangerous, including for Russia?

Once upon a time already melted

The story about the melting of glaciers and floating ice in the Arctic should start with a short historical excursion. The glaciation of the Arctic is a fairly late climatic process that started only about 200 thousand years ago, in the geological era called the Middle Pleistocene. For comparison, the Antarctic ice sheet is much older and is about 34 million years old.

Such a late glaciation of the Arctic has its own explanation - the appearance of floating ice requires much more severe climatic conditions than the appearance of continental ice. This is influenced by two factors. First, a glacier on land usually occurs in mountains, at an altitude much higher than the level of the World Ocean, where the temperature is lower due to the altitude gradient. Secondly, the land under the glacier quickly cools down to the state of permafrost, but floating ice always comes into contact with relatively warm liquid water, whose temperature is always above 0 ºС.

As a consequence, floating ice is much less resilient to abrupt climate changes. The floating ice breaks down first, and then it comes to the mainland ice located in the same latitudes. Therefore, when it comes to the catastrophic melting of ice in the Arctic, they are talking about the floating ice of the Arctic Ocean and adjacent seas. At the same time, the Greenland ice sheet, even in the most apocalyptic scenarios, is assigned at least several hundred, or even thousands of years before its complete disappearance. When the Greenland ice completely melts, the sea level will rise by seven meters.

We can calculate the rate of formation or melting of Arctic ice in a given historical period by the ice itself - by drilling the Greenland glacial shell, scientists obtain cores of glacial deposits. These ice columns, like the annual rings of trees, keep the history of glaciation and the accompanying climate. Each "annual ring" of the ice core shows not only the intensity of ice growth - with the help of fine isotopic analysis of gases inside air bubbles enclosed in ice, even the temperature of a certain year can be measured. From Greenlandic ice cores, we know the clear boundaries of two large-scale climatic events, echoes and direct information about which have come down to us from the chronicles and historical evidence: the Medieval climatic optimum (from 950 to 1250) and the Little Ice Age (from 1550 to 1850) …

Apparently, during the Medieval climatic optimum, the Arctic ice already intensively melted once. This period was characterized by relatively warm weather similar to the last decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. The interval of the Medieval climatic optimum accounts for the discovery of Iceland by the Vikings, the founding of Scandinavian settlements in Greenland and Newfoundland, as well as the first period of intensive growth of northern Russian cities. A highly developed civilization came to a place where before that only tribes of hunters and gatherers lived - and the mild climate of the Medieval climatic optimum was responsible for this process.

The time of the Little Ice Age, on the contrary, became the interval of the most intensive growth of glaciers in recent centuries. This period is already well reflected in written sources, and its artifacts were quite indicative. At that time in the summer in Moscow it snowed many times, the Bosphorus Strait froze several times, and once even the delta of the Mediterranean Nile. Another consequence of the Little Ice Age was the mass famine of the first half of the 14th century, known in European chronicles as the Great Famine. The fate of Greenland, which at the discovery of the Vikings called the "green land", was also sad. The place of endless grass was again occupied by a glacier, and the permafrost expanded again.

Modern times: melting faster and faster

The fluctuations of the boundaries of the floating ice of the Arctic after 1850 are already known to us from the mass of scientific evidence. From the middle of the 19th century, people began to observe the ice cover of the Arctic. Then the mass balance of many glaciers of the planet and floating ice in the Arctic took negative values - they began to sharply lose in their volume and area of distribution. However, between 1950 and 1990, there was a stabilization and even a slight increase in glacial masses, which is still difficult to reconcile with the theory of global warming.

The situation with the Arctic ice is greatly complicated by seasonal variations: its volume changes almost fivefold during the year, from 20-25 thousand km³ in winter to 5-7 thousand km³ in summer. As a result, significant trends can be caught only over periods of entire decades, and such time intervals are already climatic periods in themselves. For example, we know for sure that the period of 1920-1940 was extremely ice-free throughout the Arctic, but there is no exact explanation for this event even today.

Nevertheless, the main forecast for today is precisely the melting of the Arctic floating ice. As already mentioned, floating ice, in comparison with the mainland glacier, has another "enemy" - this is the water underneath. Warm water can melt floating ice very quickly, as happened, for example, in the summer of 2012, when large masses of warm water from the North Atlantic were thrown into the Arctic as a result of a strong storm.

Over the past two decades, the water temperature in the World Ocean has increased by a record 0, 125 ºС, and over the past nine years - by 0, 075 ºС. The apparent insignificance of such an increase should not be deceiving. We are talking about the entire colossal mass of the Earth's oceans, which act as a gigantic "heat accumulator" that takes over most of the excess heat energy arising in the process of global warming.

In addition, an increase in the temperature of the oceans inevitably leads to an increase in water circulation - currents, storms, which makes catastrophic events in the Arctic, similar to the flooding of warm water in the summer of 2012, more likely. Therefore, the only question is whether the Arctic will melt by 2100 or by 2040, and there is no doubt about the inevitability of this process.

What should we do?

Let's start with a simple one: such an iceless Arctic has already existed in the history of the planet. Initially - 200 thousand years ago, before the arrival of the ice ages of the late Pleistocene. Then, on a smaller scale, during the Medieval climatic optimum of 950–1250 and in the low ice period of 1920–1940.

The melting ice of the Arctic, of course, is dangerous for the mass of endemic species - for example, the polar bear, which mankind, it is possible, will need to be preserved in zoos or on the remnants of the Arctic ice cover. But for our civilization this is, of course, a whole bunch of new opportunities.

First, the ice-free Arctic is one of the most convenient transport arteries, the shortest sea route from Southeast Asia to Europe. Moreover, it is devoid of additional difficulties in the form of an expensive Suez Canal. As a result, the importance of the Northern Sea Route in the world of the "ice-free Arctic" is increasing many times, and Russia is becoming the main beneficiary of the emergence of new transit flows.

According to the most conservative estimates, about 13% of the world's oil and gas reserves are concentrated in the Arctic today - and more than half of this amount lies on the Russian sea shelf. If Russia can reasonably increase its exclusive economic zone, these reserves can only grow.

So far, this "pantry" is inaccessible, but after the melting of sea ice conditions in the Kara or Chukchi Sea will be, albeit harsh, but much more acceptable for the start of economically viable resource extraction. Of course, such future availability of Arctic riches will inevitably increase international competition in the region, but here Russia has many strong trump cards - in particular, our country has the longest Arctic coast, and most of the promising resources lie in the country's inland seas bordering the Arctic Ocean …

In addition, Russia has applied for the expansion of the exclusive economic zone in accordance with the rules of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea - and it may well return almost to the boundaries of the "Arctic possessions" declared by the USSR. There are also trump cards in the real world - so far Russia has the most powerful Arctic infrastructure, which simply needs to be developed and maintained in the most modern state.

And finally, thirdly, the liberation of the Arctic from floating ice in itself will become a powerful trigger of global warming. Floating ice and snow lying on it are good reflectors of sunlight, as they have a high albedo. Translated into Russian, snow and ice are white, the former reflects 50–70% of the sun's rays, and the latter 30–40%. If the ice melts, then the situation changes dramatically and the albedo of the sea surface drops, since seawater reflects only 5–10% of the light, and absorbs the rest. As a result, the water immediately heats up and melts even more ice around. Therefore, the climate of the Arctic after the melting of floating ice is monotonous, but will inevitably begin to warm, which will immediately be reflected in the form of milder and warmer winters throughout Russia. But the summer can become more rainy - water evaporates more readily from the open surface of the ocean.

In general, it will be like in the times of the medieval climatic optimum. When the Vikings easily bred livestock in Greenland on vast grassy meadows, and in more "southern" Newfoundland (whose climate today is more reminiscent of Russian Arkhangelsk) they grew grapes. As it is seen, we will survive the liberation of the Arctic from the ice. Moreover, today it really looks inevitable.