On the Edge: From Knowledge to Action During the Fourth International Polar Year Circumpolar Flaw Lead System Study (2007-2008)

" ... About 30 years ago, I began my career as an Arctic research scientist. My interest in these early days was on marine mammals and their habitats, including sea ice. For the first 10 years of my career I was skeptical of the reality of climate change in the Arctic. As far as I was concerned, the variability we saw in sea-ice related processes was simply part of the natural variability of the system. I was not convinced that we were experiencing global warming in the Arctic. The summer minimum extent of sea ice is a good metric of how the sea-ice cover responds to changes in temperature of both the atmosphere and the ocean. But in reality sea ice responds to much more than temperature changes, including the movement of the ice, which is also created by changes in the atmosphere and ocean circulation. The general concept is that sea ice decays in the summer and retreats towards the North Pole. Once it begins to cool in the fall, sea ice begins to grow again. The ice that is left at the end of the summer melt, usually mid- to late September, is then considered multi-year sea ice, as it begins to grow again the next winter. The open water areas form sea ice as well, and this is known as annual or first-year sea ice. During the first 10 years of my career, the sea ice minimum hovered around 7.5 million kmp2s. The variability around this summer minimum was about "0.5 million kmp2s. Looking back, I can see why the first 10 years of my career left me with the impression that the Arctic was behaving as it should (Figure 4). But during the next 10 years, things began to change in the minimum extent of sea ice (Figure 4). This period was characterized by an overall average decline in the summer extent to about 7.0 million kmp2s. But the key change was an increase in the overall variability of the minimum extent to about "1.0 million kmp2s. When conducting our field programs during these years, it became quite clear that the sea-ice related processes were all changing in the Arctic - and what surprised me the most was the rate at which this decline accelerated. In the last 10 years of my career, the decline in summer sea ice has been remarkable (Figure 4). We have seen a reduction in the summer minimum of sea ice from 2000 to 2011 of over 2.5 million kmp2s. Although I have illustrated these three decades with three different linear trend lines in Figure 4a, the most physically realistic mathematical function to fit such a decline in the summer minimum of sea ice would be represented by a quadratic (or curvilinear) function (Figure 4b). We know that the decline is better represented by this curve rather than a straight line relationship because of the role feedbacks play in the sea ice climate system. These feedbacks were the key science question we wished to address during the International Polar Year (IPY) Circumpolar Flaw Lead (CFL) system study. In the years leading up to the IPY-CFL project, we learned from other national and international programs (see section 6.2 for more details on these linkages) that climate change was having a profound effect on the sea-ice cover all over the Arctic and throughout the annual cycle. We did not, however, have a good appreciation of the physical processes that affect the sea ice in the winter period - nor the biological consequences of these changes as the ecosystem set up for the spring bloom. Thus we fashioned the IPY-CFL project to do something no one else had ever attempted and that was to overwinter a fully outfitted (both in terms of scientists and their equipment) icebreaker in the open water of the flaw lead of the Cape Bathurst polynya. We recognized early on that the Inuvialuit of the region had a strong and very complementary knowledge system regarding their understanding of the changes unfolding in the region. This recognition of their traditional knowledge led to the IPY-CFL project formulating the concept of "Two Ways of Knowing," a philosophy we used throughout the project. We wanted to im merse ourselves in the middle of this complex system of ice and open water that existed through the winter season to gain a better appreciation for the physical mechanisms that were affecting the lifecycle of the sea ice - while at the same time coming to an understanding of the myriad of related biological, biogeochemical, and ecological processes that are associated with the changes in the sea icescape. This document summarizes the results of this ambitious endeavour. In what follows we attempt to synthesize the work of over 350 scientists, technicians, students, and Inuvialuit partners regarding the results of our work. ... We hope this document serves as a legacy well into the future and that the fifth International Polar Year, some 50 years into the future, will be able to use this as a benchmark against which to measure the changes which are happening all too rapidly in our changing Arctic."--(AU), ASTIS [online] bibliography.