28 March 2016, NASA, 2016 Arctic sea ice wintertime extent hits another record low. Arctic sea ice appears to have reached a record low wintertime maximum extent for the second year in a row, according to scientists at the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and NASA. Every year, the cap of frozen seawater floating on top of the Arctic Ocean and its neighboring seas melts during the spring and summer and grows back in the fall and winter months, reaching its maximum yearly extent between February and April. On March 24, Arctic sea ice extent peaked at 5.607 million square miles (14.52 million square kilometers), a new record low winter maximum extent in the satellite record that started in 1979. It is slightly smaller than the previous record low maximum extent of 5.612 million square miles (14.54 million square kilometers) that occurred last year. The 13 smallest maximum extents on the satellite record have happened in the last 13 years. The new record low follows record high temperatures in December, January and February around the globe and in the Arctic. The atmospheric warmth probably contributed to this lowest maximum extent, with air temperatures up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit above average at the edges of the ice pack where sea ice is thin, said Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Read More here
Tag Archives: Arctic
3 March 2016, Energy Post, Exxon’s never-ending big dig. ExxonMobil not only appears to have ignored its own scientists when they warned about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions in the 1980s, the company even took advantage of its inside knowledge by leasing large tracts for Arctic oil exploration, writes famous author and activist Bill McKibben in a revealing essay. What is worse, says McKibben, is that even today Exxon continues to spend billions finding and producing ever more fossil fuels. But he notes that “revulsion is growing”: Big Oil may yet suffer the same fate as Big Tobacco. Courtesy of TomDispatch.com. Here’s the story so far. We have the chief legal representatives of the eighth and 16th largest economies on Earth (California and New York) probing the biggest fossil fuel company on Earth (ExxonMobil), while both Democratic presidential candidates are demanding that the federal Department of Justice join the investigation of what may prove to be one of the biggest corporate scandals in American history. And that’s just the beginning. As bad as Exxon has been in the past, what it’s doing now – entirely legally – is helping push the planet over the edge and into the biggest crisis in the entire span of the human story. “We will adapt to this … It’s an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions” Back in the fall, you might have heard something about how Exxon had covered up what it knew early on about climate change. Maybe you even thought to yourself: that doesn’t surprise me. But it should have. Even as someone who has spent his life engaged in the bottomless pit of greed that is global warming, the news and its meaning came as a shock: we could have avoided, it turns out, the last quarter century of pointless climate debate. Read More here
9 January 2016, Climate News Network, Ice melt speeds up sea level rise. Scientists have found evidence suggesting that melting icecap water from the interior of Greenland is adding to sea level rise faster than previously realised. Water may be flowing from the Greenland icecapand into the sea more quickly than anybody expected. It doesn’t mean that global warming has got conspicuously worse: rather, researchers have had to revise their understanding of the intricate physiology of the northern hemisphere’s biggest icecap. There is enough ice and snow packed deep over 1.7 million square kilometres of Greenland that, were it all to melt, would cause a rise in global sea levels of about six metres. Climate calculations Since the icecap is melting as the atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide rise, and global temperatures rise with them, as a consequence of the human combustion of fossil fuels, the rate at which summer meltwater gets into the oceans becomes vital to climate calculations. The latest rethink begins not with the pools of water that collect on the surface each summer, or the acceleration of the glaciers as they make their way to the ocean, but with a granular layer of snow just below the surface, called firn. This is old snow in the process of being compacted into glacier ice, and covers the island in a layer up to 80 metres thick. Until now, researchers have understood this firn layer as a kind of sponge that absorbs meltwater and holds it, thus limiting the flow of melting ice into the sea. Read More here
20 December 2015, Climate News Network, Rapid warming brings Arctic changes. Tundra plants that bloom fresh and green in the short Arctic summer are declining or turning brown as rising temperatures increasingly affect the region. Scientists in the US who have been checking on the health of the Arctic over the last year are worried by what they’ve learned: it’s warmer, has less ice, and some of its animals and fish are facing new stresses. And in a surprise finding , which they cannot yet explain, the scientists discovered that green vegetation over much of the Arctic began a few years ago to turn an uncharacteristic brown. Plenty of what they detail in the Arctic Report Card − published annually to document the sometimes rapidly changing conditions in the region − comes as no great surprise. The latest Report Card, sponsored by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), shows the air temperature continuing its warming trend. In 2015, it was well above average across the Arctic, with temperature anomalies over land more than -0.16°C above average − the highest since records began in 1900. The report reveals increases not only in air but also in sea surface temperatures, decreasing sea ice extent and Greenland ice sheet mass, and changes to the behaviour of fish and walruses. Read More here