Japan’s spectacular sea ice floes may soon be a thing of the past

In December, just 48 per cent of a typical year’s snowfall was recorded in far northern Hokkaido, where visitors have long come to marvel at the drift ice

But warmer weather and high winds have put a dampener on winter tourism this year – and the long-term outlook is even bleaker

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Dramatic sea ice floes, long a tourist draw in northern Japan’s Hokkaido, have become less predictable in recent years. Photo: Denis Sinyakov / Greenpeace

Published: 7:00am, 7 Feb 2020Updated: 7:23am, 7 Feb 2020

For years, the spectacular floes of drift ice off the coast of Monbetsu in the far north of Japan have been an enduring tourist attraction, bringing throngs of visitors in the first months of the year to marvel at the sight. But this year, the ice hasn’t come yet.

“It’s late again,” said 43-year-old Mitsunobu Fumoto, who grew up in Monbetsu and now works at the town’s Okhotsk Sea Ice Museum. “I can remember when I was a boy and the ice used to cover the whole bay and was much thicker than it has been for several years now.”

Though drift ice – known locally as ryuhyo – has been spotted in places off of Hokkaido island, there has been no sight yet of the undulating floes for which Monbentsu is famed. Which is bad news for the town’s tourism industry.

“We used to look out across the bay and everything was just white, as far as you could see,” Fumoto said. “Little by little, it has got less and less, but this year the conditions do seem to be particularly bad.”

The arrival of the ice this year has been delayed by high winds that have driven the floes out into the Pacific Ocean instead of the sweeping natural bay of northern Hokkaido, according to the local meteorological office, but there are other reasons that the ice is not turning up when it’s supposed to.

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