August 5, 2014 — Record-high waves hit Alaska's Beaufort Sea in September 2012, when Arctic sea ice shrank to an extreme summer low, a new study reports.
The study authors blame shrinking Arctic sea ice for the house-size swells, and predict that waves will grow larger as the Arctic ice pack melts further in future decades.
"We have long known that waves are the combined results of winds, time and distance," said lead study author Jim Thomson, an oceanographer with the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory in Seattle."In the Arctic Ocean, those distances are changing dramatically, and we are now observing the result," Thomson told Live Science in an email interview. [See Stunning Photos of Monster Waves]
Wave size rises with the amount of open water over which the wind blows, called fetch. On Sept. 18, 2012, high winds roared across more than 620 miles of ice-free ocean in the Arctic, kicking up huge swells. A sensor anchored offshore of northern Alaska that day measured waves more than 16 feet high, Thomson and co-author W. Erick Rogers, of the Naval Research Laboratory, reported June 2 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.