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Arctic sea ice had shrunk to 3.74 million square kilometers (1.44 million square miles) last week, U.S. snow and ice monitors said Monday.
This extent is the second lowest measured by satellite since records began in 1979.
The melt illustrated that “we are heading toward a seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean,” said Mark Serreze of the Colorado-based National Snow and Ice Center (NSIDC).
Serreze said a Siberian heat wave last spring and a natural Arctic weather phenomenon were at play, as well as warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.
“This year is another nail in the coffin,” Serreze said. “It has been a crazy year in the north.”
Read more: The South Pole heats up faster than the rest of the Earth: study
Dark open water absorbs energy from the sun
Hamburg-based Greenpeace marine biologist Christian Bussau said the ice dissipation data from the NSIDC shows “how massive global warming is progressing.”
Last April, scientists at the University of Hamburg calculated that by 2050 the North Pole would be ice-free in some Arctic summers.
Every ton of carbon dioxide emitted worldwide caused 3 square meters of ice to melt in the highly sensitive Arctic, said the study’s lead scientist, Dirk Notz.
As Arctic sea ice melts, climatologists say, it leaves dark, open water that absorbs solar radiation, a process that has amplified Arctic temperatures twice as fast.
Polarstern from Germany reaches the North Pole
Colorado’s alert came on Tuesday as the German research ship Polarstern returned home after a yearlong drift on a giant ice floe in the Arctic.
Last month, large openings melted in the sea ice over Greenland allowed the icebreaker to reach the geographic North Pole, which was previously too difficult for shipping.
“Sometimes we had open water as far as the eye could see,” said expedition leader Markus Rex, referring to the area generally covered by thick sea ice.
“I’ve never experienced that this far north before,” added Polarstern captain Thomas Wunderlich.
The project called Mosaic involved scientists from 17 countries, including Russia, France, the United States and China. He delivered the findings to 80 research institutes.
The Polarstern is due to arrive at its Alfred-Wegener-Institute homeport, Bremerhaven, on October 12.
Serious consequences at the North Pole
In a study published last month, the institute said Greenland had lost a record 532 billion metric tons of ice during the Arctic summer of 2019.
Melted, that’s equivalent to California being four feet (1.25 meters) deep in the water.
“Not only is the Greenland ice sheet melting, it is melting at an increasingly rapid rate,” said Ingo Sasgen, lead author and geoscientist at the Alfred-Wegner Institute.
That translated, around the world, into a slow rise in sea levels, added NASA ice scientist and co-author Alex Gardner.
By late July, according to the Canadian Ice Service, the Milne Ice Shelf on the edge of Ellesmere Island in the remote Canadian territory of Nunavut had collapsed.
The 80-square-kilometer chunk had been Canada’s largest intact ice shelf, said an Ottawa glaciologist, larger than New York’s Manhattan Island.
Milne’s shelf had “basically disintegrated,” Copland said, noting that the Canadian Arctic summer of 2020 was 5 degrees Celsius above the 30-year average.
ipj / rt (AP, AFP, dpa)
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