Climate change and ice hazards in the Beaufort Sea

Abstract

Abstract Recent reductions in the summer extent of sea ice have focused the world’s attention on the effects of climate change. Increased CO2-derived global warming is rapidly shrinking the Arctic multi-year ice pack. This shift in ice regimes allows for increasing development opportunities for large oil and gas deposits known to occur throughout the Arctic. Here we show that hazardous ice features remain a threat to stationary and mobile infrastructure in the southern Beaufort Sea. With the opening up of the ice pack, forecasting of high-frequency oscillations or local eddy-driven ice motion will be a much more complex task than modeling average ice circulation. Given the observed reduction in sea ice extent and thickness this rather counterintuitive situation, associated with a warming climate, poses significant hazards to Arctic marine oil and gas development and marine transportation. Accurate forecasting of hazardous ice motion will require improved real-time surface wind and ocean current forecast models capable of ingesting local satellite-derived wind data and/or local, closely-spaced networks of anemometers and improved methods of determining high-frequency components of surface ocean current fields ‘up-stream’ from drilling and extraction operations.

Keywords

• climate change
• sea ice
• arctic