Friday, December 14, 2007

In 2007, Polar Ice Cap Vanished at Record Clip





Arctic ice at the North Pole melted at a record rate in the summer of 2007, the latest sign that climate change has accelerated in recent years, climate scientists said on Wednesday.

"In 2007, we had off-the-charts warming," Michael Steele, an oceanographer at the University of Washington, said at the 2007 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, where 15,000 researchers have gathered to discuss earthquakes, water resources, and climate change.


It gets scarier . . .

An Ice-Free Arctic?

A scientist from NASA is predicting that the Arctic Ocean could be completely barren of ice by the summer of 2012. Scientists are alarmed at the rapidly increased melting in the Arctic. In recent years, the total amount of yearly melted ice has risen dramatically from the year before. Scientists fear a feedback loop, where the newly melted ice warms the world's oceans while the increasing lack of ice cover, which reflects 80% of the Earth's sunlight, will hasten the melting process.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

An accelerating positive feedback loop--was this fact ever really brought out before now? So much for prior super-computing modeling without proper variables-GIGO.