![]() The big question is when the Arctic will “look like a blue ocean,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center. So, no matter what, the Earth will soon see a summer with less than 1 million square kilometers of sea ice scattered in tiny bits across the Arctic. The warming already in the oceans and in the air is committed - like a freight train in motion. “That’s like taking a sledgehammer to the climate system and doing something huge about it.” “That’s something human civilization has never known,” Abdalati said. Many other experts agree with her.įormer NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati, now a top University of Colorado environmental researcher, is one of them. Julienne Stroeve, a University of Manitoba researcher, says summers without sea ice are inevitable. The more the sea ice shrinks in the summer, the thinner the ice is overall, because the ice is weaker first-year ice. How much it shrinks is where global warming kicks in, scientists say. She asks: “Do we really want to be the generation that saw the end of the ability of something as majestic as the polar bear to survive?”Īrctic sea ice - frozen ocean water - shrinks during the summer as it gets warmer, then forms again in the long winter. United Nations Environment Program head Inger Andersen used to lead the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which monitors and classifies species in trouble.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |