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Rising temperatures in the Arctic reduced the ice covering the polar ocean this year to its second-lowest level in four decades, the scientists announced, in another sign of how the climate crisis is rapidly transforming the region.
Satellites recorded this year’s sea ice minimum at 3.74 million square kilometers on Sept. 15, just the second time ice has been measured below 4 million square kilometers in 40 years of record, they said. researchers from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
“It is quite devastating that we have had such a constantly low level of sea ice. But, unfortunately, it’s not surprising, ”said Twila Moon, a glaciologist at the research center in Boulder, Colorado.
The record low of 3.41 million square kilometers, reached in 2012 after a cyclonic storm at the end of the season broke the remaining ice, is not far below what researchers see today.
This year’s decline was especially rapid between Aug. 31 and Sept. 5, thanks to pulses of hot air from a heat wave in Siberia, according to the NSIDC. The rate of ice loss during those six days was faster than during any other year on record. Another team of scientists discovered in July that the Siberian heat wave would have been nearly impossible without human-caused climate change.
As the Arctic sea ice melts, it leaves open patches of dark water. Those dark waters absorb solar radiation instead of reflecting it out of the atmosphere, a process that amplifies warming and helps explain why temperatures in the Arctic have more than doubled than the rest of the world over the past 30 years.
The loss of sea ice also threatens Arctic wildlife, from polar bears and seals to plankton and algae, said Tom Foreman, polar wildlife expert and Arctic guide.
“The numbers that we are getting in terms of the extent of the decline in sea ice each year put us on a red alert in terms of the level of concern we have, our concern for the stability of this environment,” Foreman said.
The same warming that is opening up Arctic waters in summer is also eating away at the ice sheets that cover the Arctic lands in Canada and Greenland. The faster those ice sheets are melting into the surrounding ocean, the faster sea level will rise around the world.
Since a warmer Arctic could affect weather patterns around the world, Moon said the world should not wait for another new record low for sea ice before taking steps to limit climate change.
“We should work very hard to differentiate our pollutant gas emissions so that we don’t see so many records created in the future,” Moon said.
