Office of Naval Research.įor more information, contact Thomson at 20 or He will be deploying sensors out of Prudhoe Bay from July 24 to Aug. Erick Rogers at the Naval Research Laboratory. “It’s going to be a quantum leap in terms of the number of observations, the level of detail and the level of precision” for measuring Arctic Ocean waves, Thomson said. He hopes to learn how wave heights are affected by the weather, ice conditions and amount of open water. He will be out on Alaska’s northern coast from late July until mid-August deploying sensors to track waves. “A big part of what we’re doing with this program is evaluating those models.” “There are several competing theories for what happens when the waves approach and get in to the ice,” Thomson said. This summer Thomson is part of an international group led by the UW that is putting dozens of sensors in the Arctic Ocean to better understand the physics of the sea-ice retreat. The recent paper recorded waves at just one place. He is deploying the instruments this summer in the Arctic Ocean. Warming temperatures and bigger waves could act together on summer ice floes, Thomson said: “At this point, we don’t really know relative importance of these processes in future scenarios.”Įstablishing that relationship could help to predict what will happen to the sea ice in the future and help forecast how long the ice-free channel will remain open each year.Ī wave sensor developed by Thomson during a 2013 test. They also don’t do well for the sloppy, partially ice-covered waters that are common in the Arctic in summer. Satellites can give a rough estimate of wave heights, but they don’t give precise numbers for storm events. It measured wave height from mid-August until late October 2012. The observations were made as part of a bigger project by a sensor anchored to the seafloor and sitting 50 meters (more than 150 feet) below the surface in the middle of the Beaufort Sea, about 350 miles off Alaska’s north slope and at the middle of the ice-free summer water. Waves breaking on the shore could also affect the coastlines, where melting permafrost is already making shores more vulnerable to erosion. The 2012 measurement was made in deep water in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska. What we’re talking about with the waves is potentially a new process, a mechanical process, in which the waves can push and pull and crash to break up the ice,” Thomson said. “The melting has been going on for decades. It also could be a new feedback loop leading to more open water as bigger waves break up the remaining summer ice floes. “Almost all of the casualties and losses at sea are because of stormy conditions, and breaking waves are often the culprit,” Thomson said. The emergence of big waves in the Arctic could be bad news for operating in newly ice-free Northern waters. Shipping and oil companies have been eyeing the opportunity of an ice-free season in the Arctic Ocean. As waves grow bigger they also catch more wind, driving them faster and with more energy.
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The size of the waves increases with the fetch, or travel distance over open water. Wind blowing across an expanse of water for a long time creates whitecaps, then small waves, which then slowly consolidate into big swells that carry huge amounts of energy in a single punch. In 2012, it retreated more than 1,000 miles. Thomson / UWĪrctic ice used to retreat less than 100 miles from the shore.
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The sea ice in July 2014 as it begins to retreat from the Alaskan coast.