Rare Lightning Strikes Detected 300 Miles From North Pole
owering thunderheads may be commonplace closer to the equator this time of year, but just 300 miles from the North Pole? That’s pretty rare. This week the dozens of lighting strikes hit in a spot over Arctic sea ice—85 degrees North, 126 degrees East, to be exact. It prompts researchers to wonder: could this be one of the northernmost lightning strikes in recent history?
Scientists haven’t been necessarily been keeping detailed records of lightning strikes for very long, reports Andrew Freedman at the Washington Post. This particular event was detected using Vaisala’s Global Lightning Detection network, which has collected data on lightning strikes around the world going back to 2009. Other sources, including NASA data, go further back in time. Meteorologists hesitate to say that these are the most northerly strikes ever detected since forecasters haven’t really looked into the matter, but the situation is strange.
“I wouldn’t say it’s never happened before, but it’s certainly unusual, and it piqued our attention,” says National Weather Service meteorologist Ryan Metzger, who is based in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Most of the planet’s lightning storms take place at lower latitudes where high temperatures and high humidity power thunderstorms. Occasionally, lightning will occur in very intense Arctic storms, which is one reason meteorologists are hesitant to call these strikes unprecedented. But there was no intense weather event going on over the weekend, which does make the strikes unusual.
It’s an indication that things are changing rapidly in the Arctic, UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain tells Matt Simon at Wired. He explains that typically convective storm clouds need to rise to a minimum of 15,000 feet to produce a thunderstorm. In lower latitudes, that’s not a problem. Heat and humidity are high enough to allow the clouds to form and the tropopause—the boundary between the troposphere and stratosphere—is about 10 miles up, giving large storms plenty of room to form. In the Arctic, however, the tropopause sits around five miles, creating a relatively short ceiling, which makes it much harder for storm clouds to build.
Swain says that a storm forming over the Arctic is rare in the first place. The fact that the data shows the lightning strikes taking place over sea ice is even a step weirder, since the ice provides so little heat and moisture for storm clouds to form.
“That’s pretty amazing, because the preconditions that are necessary, to the extent that they're unusual in the Arctic, they are vanishingly unusual over the sea ice in the Arctic ocean itself,” he tells Wired.
But things in the Arctic are not normal this summer. Sea ice in the Arctic is at its lowest since satellite monitoring began decade ago, but computer modelling shows it’s probably closer to a 1,500 year low, the Post’s Freedman reports. Alaska had its hottest month on record in July, and the Greenland ice sheet shed 197 billion tons of water that month as well, losing 12.5 billion tons on August 1 alone. The Arctic Circle, including areas of Alaska, Siberia, Canada and Scandinavia, is experiencing its worst wildfire season ever, with more than 100 blazes burning through dried up peat bogs, releasing megatons of carbon. Permafrost, layers of Arctic soil that remain frozen year round, are also thawing much more quickly than researchers expected, changing Arctic landscapes.
The Arctic, research has established, is warming about twice as fast as the rest of the globe. “Scientists already knew the Arctic was going to change much more rapidly than the rest of the world, and yet we’ve still been surprised at the rate of change we’ve been observing,” Swain tells Wired’s Simon. “All of those processes have started to accelerate and in many cases have accelerated even faster than had been projected.”
And he says we should be prepared for “nasty surprises” coming from Arctic warming, since we don’t understand all the possible feedback loops.
In particular, researchers worry about a process called Arctic amplification. The lack of white sea ice, which reflects solar heat, is believed to cause the Arctic to warm more quickly. That warming melts the permafrost, which begins to emit carbon as plants and animals frozen in the ice decay. Increased Arctic fires also add more carbon to the atmosphere accelerating climate changes. While researchers don’t know how all these processes work, we might not have to wait much longer to find out.he Trump administration announced on Monday that it will implement several changes to the Endangered Species Act—changes that will, according to conservation advocates, weaken legislation that has played a pivotal role in protecting the nation’s at-risk wildlife.
Signed by President Richard Nixon in 1973, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) currently protects 1,663 animal and plant species, 388 of which are considered threatened and 1,275 are endangered. The law has been credited with helping bring multiple species back from the brink of extinction, among them the bald eagle, the humpback whale, the California Condor and the American alligator. But as Reuters notes, “the law has long been a source of frustration for drillers, miners and other industries because new listings can put vast swathes of land off limits to development.”
Republicans have long pushed for an overhaul of the law. And the new rules, which are expected to go into effect next month, “appear very likely to clear the way for new mining, oil and gas drilling, and development in areas where protected species live,” according to Lisa Friedman of the New York Times.
One of the key changes pertains to threatened species, which are one classification below endangered species but used to automatically receive the same protections. Now, protections for threatened plants and animals will be made on a case-by-case basis, slowing down the process and likely reducing overall protections for species that are ultimately added to the list, as Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity, tells Nature’s Jonathan Lambert.
The new rules also impose limitations on how threats are assessed. Officials used to take into account factors that could harm species in the “foreseeable future,” but now lawmakers have more discretion in deciding what “foreseeable future” should mean. So they may choose to disregard climate factors—like rising sea levels and extreme heat—that will likely impact species several decades from now.
Additionally, the revisions curtail an important function of the ESA: protecting lands that at-risk species need to survive. One new stipulation requires regulators to assess lands that are currently occupied by threatened or endangered species before looking at unoccupied areas. But as Madeleine Gregory of Vice explains, many species are at risk precisely because they have been forced into a small fraction of their original habitat, and protecting more land around them can help species recover.
Yet another change to the ESA saw the removal of language stipulating that only scientific evidence should be considered when deciding whether a species should be protected, essentially allowing reviewers to take economic loss into consideration as well. Gary Frazer, the assistant director for endangered species with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, stressed in a press conference that listing decisions will continue to be based on science. But allowing economic analyses to factor into the process, even just for “informational purposes,” is a “giant concession to industries that have long complained about having to make excessive accommodations because of the law,” the Los Angeles Times writes in an op-ed.
In a statement, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said that the new revisions “fit squarely within the President’s mandate of easing the regulatory burden on the American public, without sacrificing our species’ protection and recovery goals.” But critics maintain that regulations will in fact hamper conservation efforts at a time of biodiversity crisis. In May, the United Nations released an alarming report stating that one million species are at risk of extinction, due to factors like climate change, pollution, deforestation, overfishing and poaching. Advocates say that to ensure the long-term sustainability of the planet’s ecosystems, 30 percent of terrestrial and inland water areas and 30 percent of the world’s oceans will need to be effectively managed by 2030.
"Instead of looking for solutions to the global extinction crisis that threatens up to one million plant and animal species, this administration has decided to place arbitrary and unlawful restrictions on the very federal regulators that Congress has tasked with protecting them," David Hayes, executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at NYU School of Law and a former interior deputy secretary under the Obama and Clinton administrations, tells the Ellen Knickmeyer of the Associated Press.
Conservationists and multiple state attorney generals have promised to sue the administration over the revisions, arguing that they are illegal because they are not rooted in scientific evidence, according to NPR’s Nathan Rott.
"This effort to gut protections for endangered and threatened species has the same two features of most Trump administration actions: it's a gift to industry, and it's illegal,” Drew Caputo, a vice president of litigation for the advocacy group Earthjustice tells the AP. “We'll see the Trump administration in court about it.”
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