Ice doesn't often make the news, but recent headlines have been hard to ignore.
For instance, a new report finds that melting glaciers could move the North Pole 90 feet by 2100. This shift could cause the planet to rotate like an unbalanced top, wreaking potential climate chaos.
Elsewhere, melting sea ice is changing ocean currents and even ocean chemistry, as pollutants from Siberian rivers spread far and fast.
These changes come as buzz intensifies to open Greenland up to business and tap its vast mineral reserves.
Ice plays a crucial role for the Earth and as it reaches key tipping points, it's critical business leaders understand the potential risks, opportunities and consequences from the big shifts ahead, and the importance of implementing mitigation, resilience and adaptation strategies.
What is ice and why is it important?
Ice is more than just water in a solid form. It's a major part of the cryosphere, a key Earth system that reflects heat from the sun to regulate the Earth's temperature. This system comprises different types of frozen water, from glaciers, ice caps, sea ice and permafrost to the frozen parts of the ocean and the continental ice sheets found in Greenland and Antarctica.
Ice covers roughly 10% of the planet but is disappearing rapidly thanks to a rise in sea and air temperature. This melting is driving the earth to reach dangerous tipping points, thresholds where damage is irreversible. According to current projections, these tipping points will be reached decades earlier than scientists have previously predicted.
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What’s melting and where?
With the failing health of Arctic ice, we've become all too familiar with images of stranded, hungry polar bears. The Greenland icesheet has also been continuously losing ice for the past 28 years, amounting to about 70% of its total.
Increasingly, the health of the Antarctic is coming up on scientists' radars. This area commonly depicted as a pristine land of endless white has long been regarded as a sort of ecological anomaly, seemingly immune to the climate changes experienced by its northern partner.
This is no longer the case. Antarctic sea ice is now melting at an alarming rate. This is a problem because its sea ice holds in place coastal ice shelves, which themselves ring its glaciers and ice sheets. Antarctic sea ice reached a 2,000-year low in 2023, and in 2022, in a single day the region experienced the world’s highest ever recorded increase in temperature – 30-40°C above the norm.
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Three effects of melting ice
Melting ice creates water, much of which goes into the sea, raising sea levels. These rises are always couched in relatively long-term time horizons, but two things have changed – the time horizons are narrowing and the size of the sea rise is growing.
Uneven sea rise. The end of the Greenland icesheet would raise sea levels by 7 metres, but this is dwarfed by the Antarctic, which holds enough ice to raise sea levels by 57 metres. To be sure, a total loss of either would not happen any time soon, but scientists warn that even partial loss can create big challenges, including flooding and displacement. Thanks to the gravitational pull of the landmass, seas aren’t rising at the same rate worldwide. What is melting and where will dictate the most affected areas. For instance, as Greenland’s icesheet melts, sea levels are falling in north-western Europe and eastern Canada but rising around the coast of South America.
New contributions to global warming. The second major issue is the contribution that dwindling ice coverage makes to global warming. Ice sheets act like huge mirrors, reflecting much of the sun’s energy back into space. Sea water, however, does the opposite, absorbing the sun’s heat. As a result, the Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average. This is a problem because we’re reliant on these frozen areas of the oceans to cool the planet through currents, and since the early 1980s, polar sea ice has lost about 14% of its ability to play this role.
Impacts to emissions. The third key problem is emissions. One-third of the Arctic tundra, its forests and wetlands, have become a net emitter of CO2 rather than one of the Earth’s fundamental carbon sinks, as carbon that has been embedded in ice for thousands of years is freed. Arctic soils hold far more carbon than is in the atmosphere, creating a growing problem in terms of wider emissions control.
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What does this mean for business?
On one hand, melting sea ice will create new opportunities. Businesses are eyeing the collapse of the Greenland icesheet with interest. Its disappearance will open up new shipping lanes, radically reducing transport distances, times and costs. Fresh fishing areas will emerge, filled with species seeking out cooler waters. And there will be greater physical access to a wealth of minerals, including oil and gas reserves, as well as – more critically as the century progresses – green energy resources.
All this is undeniable, but the fundamental fact remains that we will still face a warming climate, and the dire predictions hold for what happens as we breach and rise above the 1.5°C threshold.
As Earth systems reach and breach their tipping points, the frequency and severity of climate hazards that directly affect business and society increases. Hazards disrupt every stage of the supply chain from sourcing to consumption. They can also disrupt working patterns and hours, leading to resource shortages and hamper a business’s ability to function.
A recent World Economic Forum report, Business on the Edge: Building Industry Resilience to Climate Hazards, reveals why companies need to build resilience into their operations or risk undermining their ability to compete in a world affected by climate change. The report suggests that fixed asset losses alone equate to a fall in earnings for the average company of 7% each year by 2035.
The report highlights a range of steps businesses can consider to strengthen resilience. Some include:
• Build for flexibility. As melting ice contributes to extreme weather events, businesses must prepare for failures in existing systems, developing storage, logistics, back-up power and recovery solutions that ensure continuity of service.
• Support improved models. Current climate models are inadequate and business must sponsor and support the alignment of commercial and scientific climate models. With improved data, leaders of any stripe can better assess future climate risks and their impacts.
• Capitalize on opportunities. Business should build climate smart portfolio strategies that capitalize on climate risk mitigation as a strategic advantage, alongside deep decarbonization.
• Shape collaborative outcomes. Leaders in business, the civil sector and government can work together to devise breakthrough solutions such as regenerative practices that strengthen food chains or circular tools that preserve resources.
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The great unknown
There’s a surprising amount we still don’t know about ice, particularly Antarctic sea ice. With climate change upending models and assumptions, scientists are racing to provide answers. Perhaps among these will be understanding one of Earth’s climate history mysteries. It is known that glacial cycles suffered a major disruption between 900,000 and 1.2 million years ago, an event that some researchers believe resulted in humankind’s near-extinction. Recently retrieved ice cores may offer an answer, in turn, informing our own understanding of modern-day changes to these vital Earth systems. But will it be an answer that we want to discover?
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