Study Finds Link Between Lightning At North Pole, Melting Ice Sheets

A new international study that includes Israeli researchers has discovered that the reduction of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean at the North Pole is directly accelerated by increased lightning storms in the area – a phenomenon itself exacerbated by climate change. 

“Until recently, lightning as a phenomenon was extremely rare in the Arctic region of the North Pole, due to the intense cold,” said the researchers, who include participants from Tel Aviv University (TAU). 

“However, due to the warming of the Earth, lightning storms have become more common there in the summers, and these storms further increase the process of melting the ice sheets,” they said. 

The researchers found that lightning storms, which were extremely rare in the Arctic until recently, have been observed in recent decades in the summer months, when the sun does not set at all. 

Believing that there was a link between this new phenomenon and the melting of the ice sheets, the researchers cross referenced four decades of NASA satellite images showing the retreat of the Arctic Sea ice with 14 years of data collected by lightning detection stations worldwide – including one at TAU. 

Analyzing the two data sets showed a correlation between ice sheet retreat and the number of lightning storms: an increase in the number of local storms matched an increase in the melting of the sea ice. 

“In our research, we found a clear statistical relationship between the number of lightning storms in the Arctic region in a certain year and the rate of sea ice melting in that year,” said Prof. Colin Price from the Department of Geophysics at TAU’s Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences.

“This means that the storms are another factor that increases the melting of the polar ice, producing a feedback loop: the initial melting of the ice increases the dark surface areas of the sea, which absorb more of the sun’s rays, warming up the waters, causing more melting, accelerating the rate of warming, which in turn increases the amount of lightning storms, and the cycle repeats itself. 

“As a result of this, and of the warming of the Earth in general, we expect that the frequency of lightning storms in the Arctic region will increase in the coming years, and with it the rate of sea ice retreat in the Arctic Sea will accelerate.”