Deep Parts of the Greenland Sea Are Warming 10 Times Faster Than the Entire Ocean

Considering the mainstream media brouhaha over what Climate Progress's Joe Romm has dubbed the "faux pause" in global warming, it's important to note that 90 percent of global warming heat is going into the world's oceans. Now a new report in Geophysical Research Letters finds that in the deep abyssal areas of the Greenland Sea the water is warming 10 times more quickly than the world's oceans as a whole.

In fact, so much warming is being sucked up by the waters between 2000 meters deep and the sea floor that if the same amount of heat was being accumulated just on land it would warm the atmosphere by 4°C.

How much has the deepest part of the Greenland Sea warmed?

Scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute have determined, based on observations going back to 1950, that in the past three decades 0.3°C of warming has occurred in the lower kilometer and a half of the water just to the south of the Arctic Ocean. Considering that water has the highest specific heat of any common substance, and thus takes an enormous amount of energy to warm as compared to the atmosphere, that change is dramatic.

Dr. Raquel Somavilla Cabrillo, the study's lead author, explains what's going on:

Until the early 1980s the central Greenland Sea has been mixed from the top to the bottom by winter cooling at the surface, making waters dense enough to reach the sea floor. This transfer of cold water from the top to the bottom has not occurred in the last 30 years. However relatively warm water to continues to flow from the deep Arctic Ocean into the Greenland Sea. Cooling from above and warming through inflow are no longer balanced and thus the Greenland Sea is progressively becoming warmer and warmer.

Though the extent of Arctic sea ice melt didn't reach a new low this year—it was the sixth lowest behind the record low set in 2012, according to the National Snow and Ice Date Center—the lack of a new record doesn't mean that global warming has reversed, as has been erroneously reported.

In fact, the surface losses in recent years are a dramatic sign of the warming occurring in the region, which is fueled by warming depths. A positive feedback occurs here, with atmospheric warming increasing sea ice to melt more quickly, leading to more heat being absorbed by the water, leading to further ice melting. What's that mean? As a whole, the Arctic is warming twice as quickly as the rest of the world.