By 2050s, Expect One Concentrated Strip Of Arctic Sea Ice Where Polar Species Will Fight To Survive
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Climate models suggest that by the 2050s, less than 200,000 square miles of perennial sea ice will remain. The good news, such as it is: What’s left will collect in a compact region, not here but farther north, above Greenland and Canada’s Ellesmere Island. That shrunken redoubt will be the last stand for many of the Arctic’s wild things.
“The animals that depend on the edge of the sea ice for a living will be congregating there in the summer,” says marine ecologist Enric Sala, leader of the National Geographic Society’s Pristine Seas project. “It will be like one of those watering holes in Africa where everybody shows up.”
Sala has come to Baffin with divers and filmmakers to document the icy world that’s doomed here—and to make the case for preserving the “last ice” farther north. Since he started Pristine Seas a decade ago, the project has helped protect more than three million square miles of ocean. But preserving the remnants of Arctic ice, which will require the cooperation of Greenland and Canada, will be its most ambitious undertaking.
It’s also the most urgent. “The Arctic is changing faster than anything else,” Sala says, and as the ice goes away, shipping, fishing, and oil and gas development may intrude. If sea ice and its denizens are to be protected, it must happen before exploitation of Arctic resources becomes unstoppable. With the last-ice project, Sala says, “we’re looking 25 years ahead.”
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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/01/arctic-wildlife-sea-ice/