Blue Blob is slowing glacier melting

Hyderabad: A massive zone of cool water in the North Atlantic Ocean is slowing the melting of Iceland’s glaciers. But the so-called Blue Blob, an anomaly in an otherwise warming ocean, may only be around for a few decades before the overall trend of warming takes over again, according to new research. Read more about […]

Hyderabad: A massive zone of cool water in the North Atlantic Ocean is slowing the melting of Iceland’s glaciers. But the so-called Blue Blob, an anomaly in an otherwise warming ocean, may only be around for a few decades before the overall trend of warming takes over again, according to new research. Read more about the Blue Blob…

What is the Arctic?

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The Arctic is a polar region located at the northernmost part of Earth. Land within the Arctic region has seasonally varying snow and ice cover. It consists of the Arctic Ocean, adjacent seas, and parts of Alaska (United States), Canada, Finland, Greenland (Denmark), Iceland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden.

Since 2013, India has had observer status in the Arctic Council, which is the predominant inter-governmental forum for cooperation on the environmental and development aspects of the Arctic.

The Arctic Council is the leading intergovernmental forum promoting cooperation, coordination and interaction among the Arctic States, Arctic indigenous communities and other Arctic inhabitants on common Arctic issues, in particular on issues of sustainable development and environmental protection in the Arctic.

Blue Blob’s role

Blue Blob is a cold patch located south of Iceland and Greenland and little is known about it. The cold patch was most prominent during the winter of 2014-2015 when the sea surface temperature was about 1.4 degrees Celsius colder than normal.

The Arctic region is reportedly warming four times faster than the global average and Iceland’s glaciers steadily shrank from 1995 to 2010, losing an average of 11 billion tons of ice per year.

Starting in 2011, however, the speed of Iceland’s melting slowed, resulting in about half as much ice loss annually and the Blue Blob has been linked to cooler air temperatures over Iceland’s glaciers and cooler waters. This trend was not seen in nearby, larger glaciers across Greenland and Svalbard.

Before the Blue Blob, a long-term cooling trend in the same region, called the Atlantic Warming Hole, reduced sea surface temperatures by about 0.4 to 0.8 degrees Celsius during the last century and may continue to cool the region in the future.

A possible cause of the Warming Hole is a slowdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). AMOC is an ocean current that brings warm water up from the tropics to the Arctic, thus reducing the amount of heat delivered to the region.