Arctic sea ice has melted to a level not recorded since satellite observations started in 1972 — and almost certainly not experienced for at least 8,000 years, polar scientists say.
Daily satellite sea-ice maps released by Bremen University physicists show that with a week’s more melt expected this year, the floating ice in the Arctic covered 4.24 million square kilometers on Thursday. The previous one-day minimum was 4.27 million square kilometers on Sept. 17, 2007.
The US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado is expected to announce similar results in a few days.
The German researchers said that the record melt was undoubtedly because of human-induced global warming.
“The sea-ice retreat can no more be explained with the natural variability ... caused by weather,” said Georg Heygster, head of the Institute of Environmental Physics at Bremen.
“Climate models show that the reduction is related to the manmade global warming, which, due to the albedo effect, is particularly pronounced in the Arctic,” he said.
The albedo effect is related to a surface’s reflecting power — whiter sea ice reflects more of the sun’s heat back into space than darker seawater, which absorbs the sun’s heat and gets warmer.
Floating Arctic sea ice naturally melts and refreezes annually, but the speed of change has shocked scientists: It is now twice as great as it was in 1972, the Colorado center said. Arctic temperatures have risen more than twice as fast as the global average over the past half century.
Separate research suggests that Arctic ice is in a downward spiral, declining in area but also thinning. Scientists at the Polar Science Center of the University of Washington, Seattle, said last week that Arctic sea-ice volume was at its lowest ever level last year and was on course to set more records this year. Their data suggests that the volume of sea ice last month was about 8,900 cubic kilometers — half the average and 62 percent lower than the maximum covering the Arctic in 1979. The research will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research.
“Ice volume is now plunging faster than it did at the same time last year when the record was set,” Axel Schweiger of the Washington center said.
If current trends continue, a largely ice-free Arctic in the summer months is likely within 30 years — that is 40 years earlier than anticipated in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report. The last time the Arctic was uncontestably free of summertime ice was 125,000 years ago, at the height of the last major interglacial period.
“This stunning loss of Arctic sea ice is yet another wake-up call that climate change is here now and is having devastating effects,” Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco, told journalists.
Arctic ice plays a critical role in regulating Earth’s climate. Retreating summer sea ice is described by scientists as a measure and a driver of global warming. This year, the Northwest and Northeast passages were mostly ice free, as they have been twice since 2008. Last month, the 74,000-tonne STI Heritage tanker passed through the Northeast Passage in just eight days on its way from Houston, Texas, to Thailand. The northeast sea route, which links the Atlantic to the Pacific, is likely to become a ship operator’s favorite.
Further evidence of dramatic change in the Arctic came last week from Alan Hubbard, a Welsh glaciologist at Aberystwyth University, who has been studying the Petermann glacier in northern Greenland. The glacier, which covers about 6 percent of the icecap, is 300km long and up to 1km high. In August last year, a 260km2 block of ice calved from the glacier. Pictures show that by July it had melted and disappeared.
“I was gobsmacked. It [was] like looking into the Grand Canyon full of ice and coming back two years later to find it full of water,” Hubbard said.
Last year tied with 2005 as the warmest year on record.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS