The north winds are blowing and it's cold; just the right combination to cool down the Northern Bering Sea.
"These strong, frigid winds out of the north, we could push ice quickly over the shelf,” said Phyllis Stabeno with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.
Stabeno is cheering the north wind on because the last few years of warm conditions have destroyed her theory that the Northern Bering Sea would remain cold even after the southern part had warmed.
She came up with that idea about six years ago, when it was still fairly cold, but recent record-setting temperatures in the Arctic have forced her to rethink it. A few years ago, a huge area of warm water commonly known as “the blob” showed up in the Gulf of Alaska. A bit of that warm water even leaked into the Southern Bering Sea, creating hot spots last year. Several years of warm summers, combined with the lack of consistent sea ice, meant that the water in the Northern Bering Sea never got cold the way it had previously. Normally it cools in the fall and winds circulate the chilled water, which makes the shallow sea all one temperature just in time for the ice to arrive.
"And as the ice goes further and further south, the whole shelf cools like that. So you have just a nice big freezer and it stays like that until the ice disappears,” Stabeno said. “But the bottom of the Northern Bering Sea can remain below minus one degree Celsius for the whole year until you begin to mix again in the fall."
This is not what's been happening recently. The Northern Bering Sea's temperature remained warm, and one of the casualties has been Stabeno's theory. She's not sure it's completely dead, but she admits next year is supposed to be warm again. Her hopes lie with the ice.
The Northern Bering Sea is so shallow that a good ice year can erase the heat of summer and set up the ecosystem conditions to be favorable for the fish and marine mammals that people depend on. That's why she's rooting for the North Wind.