The Arctic could see its first completely ice-free day within a decade, or perhaps even sooner: according to the study published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment and led by the American University of Colorado in Boulder, it could fall into a late August or early September day in the 2020s to 2030s. Instead, the first full month free of floating ice will likely come by 2050, in September, when sea ice cover hits its lowest , and by the end of the century the ice-free season could already last several months.
These data are in line with those of another recent research published in June 2023 by the Pohang University of Science and Technology, South Korea: the results indicated that the Arctic summer could become ice-free between 2030 and 2050.
When experts talk about an ice-free Arctic, they don't mean the complete absence of ice in the water: instead, they're referring to the moment when the ocean's ice cover drops below 1 million square kilometers.
This threshold, in fact, represents less than 20% of the minimum coverage reached in the 1980s. At the moment, the Arctic Ocean has reached a minimum sea ice extent of around 3.3 million square kilometres, again reached in the month of September .
Researchers led by Alexandra Jahn re-examined studies conducted so far and data on sea ice cover, to try to more accurately assess how the Arctic may change in the future.
They thus discovered that the first day in which the ice will fall below the threshold of one million square kilometers could occur 4 to 18 years earlier than the first ice-free month, already between the 2020s and 30s of 2000.
An ice-free Arctic is therefore inevitable, but future levels of greenhouse gas emissions are still crucial in deciding how often such conditions will occur.
If polluting emissions remain more or less at the same level as current ones, the disappearance of ice could remain limited to the end of summer and the beginning of autumn, while in the case in which greenhouse gases increase further, the Arctic could remain free of sea ice for up to 9 months of the year by the end of the century.
“This would transform the Arctic into a completely different environment, from a 'white' Arctic to a 'blue' one,” comments Jahn.
There is good news, though: Arctic sea ice is very resilient and could reform quickly if the climate allowed it.
“Unlike the Greenland ice sheet, which took thousands of years to form – says the researcher – if we managed to reverse global warming, Arctic ice could return within a decade”.
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