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Subscribe to RSSNew sea ice is finally starting to form again in the Arctic, scientists reported Wednesday, but not before reaching another record low last Sunday.
"We are now in uncharted territory," Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, said in a statement announcing the record low of 1.32 million square miles -- nearly half the average extent from 1979 to 2010. The extent has been tracked by satellite since 1979.
"While we’ve long known that as the planet warms up, changes would be seen first and be most pronounced in the Arctic," he added, "few of us were prepared for how rapidly the changes would actually occur."
Many experts expect the Arctic to be free of sea ice in summer at some point between 2015 and 2050.
"Recent climate models suggest that ice-free conditions may happen before 2050," noted center scientist Julienne Stroeve. But she added the caveat that the recent sudden rate of decline "remains faster than many of the models are able to capture."
Serreze told NBC News he's figuring on 2030, calling it "a pretty aggressive estimate."
The sea ice extent numbers come after the center reported last month that the summer sea ice on Aug. 26 had broken the previous record low set in 2007 of 1.61 million square miles. On Aug. 26 the sea ice extent was 1.58 million square miles, it said.
"We're smashing a record that smashed a record," center scientist Walt Meier said.
In the 1980s, he said, summer sea ice would cover an area a bit smaller than the Lower 48 states. Now it is about half that.
A report from the National Snow and Ice Data Center shows the Arctic's melting ice is resulting in the lowest sea ice levels since satellites started tracking the measurements in 1979. NBC's Brian Williams reports.
The difference between this year's low and that of 2007 is 293,000 square miles, about the size of Texas, the center noted in its report.
Meanwhile, conditions favorable to new sea ice are taking longer to appear.
"The strong late season decline is indicative of how thin the ice cover is," Meier said. "Ice has to be quite thin to continue melting away as the sun goes down and fall approaches."
The thickness of the ice is also in decline.
"The core of the ice cap is the perennial ice, which normally survived the summer because it was so thick", Joey Comiso, a NASA scientist who uses satellites to study the ice, said in a statement. "But because it's been thinning year after year, it has now become vulnerable to melt."
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NASA also noted that a strong August storm that formed off Alaska's coast and moved to the center of the Arctic Ocean had an impact on ice levels.
"The storm definitely seems to have played a role in this year's unusually large retreat of the ice", said NASA scientist Claire Parkinson. "But that exact same storm, had it occurred decades ago when the ice was thicker and more extensive, likely wouldn't have had as prominent an impact, because the ice wasn't as vulnerable then as it is now."
This year follows several of declining summer sea ice.
"The six lowest September ice extents have all been in the past six years," Serreze said. "I think that's quite remarkable."
The experts also noted that what happens in the Arctic doesn't stay there.
The warmer Arctic is adding increased heat and moisture into the climate system, said center scientist Ted Scambos. "This will gradually affect climate in the areas where we live," he said. "We have a less polar pole -- and so there will be more variations and extremes."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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No doubt we may be speeding up something that is coming anyway - but we are only speeding it up at best:
Read more here:
Well said. This is earths natural cycle. The sun has been very active the last hundred years and there has been a decrease in volcanic activity which dust and and ash from them help cool the earth. Combining those two factors leads to an increase in global tempreture. The suns activity (no sunspots) during the Sporer, Maunder, and Dalton minimums gave us little ice ages.
Unfortunately for your hypothesis, Jim, solar activity and global temperatures are moving in opposite directions.
And there has most definitely not been a recent decrease in volcanic activity.
We are approaching a solar max and I find it interesting the interest expressed about termperature changes over a relatively short period of time, considering the previous cycles of climate change. If we are going to focus on recent events, then it would be logical to compare climate change today with climate change in the 1930's. Record temperatures and drought and no where near the level of industrialization, or level of development in the Third World we have today. The Asians were either walking, riding bicycles or water buffalo, and there were no satelites to measure artic/anartic ice. mathematician-retired
The 1930s were hot in the U.S. - but not even slightly remarkable in terms of global temperatures. In fact, they don't rank in the Top 40 warmest years on record, retired mathematician.
To mer44-while there were no satellites to measure arctic/antarctic ice in the 1930's, today we DO have ice core samples....which go back much further than the 1930's.....
physicist,
Your chart ends just when the sun got going.
h tt p://www.spaceweather.com/
Remove extra spaces in http.
Hmmm The lose of the sea ice will increase warming in polar regions but not effect sea level, Green Land on the other hand is land based ice which is going to effect sea level. Much faster then anyone predicted it would seem.
Hang on sea ice winter is almost here.
I'm going to fill up my gas guzzler!
Nasa News : Antarctic ice has reach a record high, go figure its not news here. All
gloom and doom for the north. Now will this destabilize the poles
It doesn't fit their agenda.
We keep hearing the argument that man couldn't possibly be capable of causing global warming and that it is either just part of a naturally occurring cycle or our scientist are part of a giant conspiracy. We are just simpletons that are easily brainwashed by articles by left leaning nuts bent on destroying our way of life. Those same people that make that argument need to convince me that satellite pictures showing cities covered by dirty air got that way without mankind having contributed to it because from my point of view dirty air, record snow melts, record breaking hot weather are hard to ignore. The question should be: When are you going to wake up and quit living in denial.
De Nile is just a river in Egypt, where they are more concerned with movies and cartoons than with the inconvenient truth of our situation.
In some measure of course the cards of climate change are already played ... read 'em and weep.
Yet in the long term perhaps careful science and creative engineering may pad the blow.
Ditto Head,Man is not causing climate change..Climate change is cyclical..But what most credible scientist agree to is man is accelerating global warming.
Bill, thats called a distinction without a difference.
Hardly. We are indeed amplifying a natural warming trend, this is certain. What is less clear, but accessible to careful research and good modeling, is how far our perturbation will go and what form of "mischief" it will excite.
The truth terrorists are at it again. Journalists are a bigger threat to the intellectual world than al Qaeda. Record low ice going back to 1979! That's about 4.5 billion years have the earth was born. How just going back to 1905 when the Norwegians sailed the arctic in wooden boats? It is time to feed all journalists to the polar bears. At least they would do some good for the world as a fatty source of meat.
Good God! It was true all along! The Corporations / Republicans / Bush / Halliburton / are going to kill us all!
This has nothing to do with climate change. Alex Jones and all his buddies say so, so you know it has to be true. Anyway, what does it matter, end-timers aren't worried because Jesus is coming real soon. In that case why would you worry about the odd flood and dead Polar Bear when you're about to be judged? Use it all up before you go.
Hi Masked Opinionator--Since you brought it up, albeit with satire, I will add something here for Christians to consider---Revelations 11:18 says "He will destroy those who destroy the earth". Also, just because some Christians believe that He will return in our lifetime doesn't mean that He is obliged to do it by their interpretation--what if He waits another 1000 or 10,000 years? And if He does return tomorrow, or next week or next year, and you stand to give an accounting of your actions, what will you say about your stewardship of the earth or lack of it?
I won't have time to make an accounting, before he's jailed with some other old hippies from the Occupy movement.
This is a good thing for Romney! It will open up another area to ship Jobs overseas!
To all you right-wingers : On behalf of Al Gore, apology accepted.
In a more serious vein, Al Gore becoming involved in the climate change debate made the issue more political than it needed to be. What should be objective, rational, scientific evidence based thinking then becomes polarized, irrational and emotional thinking. Kind of like the irrational, baseless hatred of Obama by many righties.
The thing about being a nay-sayer is: no matter how much evidence mounts up, you can always nay-say.
"The massive amounts of junk we dump into our atmosphere is INVISIBLE (e.g. car exhaust fumes) so it must be O.K.!"
Not looking good for the human race. No, you can't fool Mother Nature.
Start saving for ocean front property. I hope my 2 kids never have kids. That generation will be at world conflict when the ecosystems can't sustain humanity and people are at each others throats.
www(dot)ec.gc.ca/glaces-ice/default.asp?lang=En&n=D32C361E-1
Bad news on the doorstep.
(dot)org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_daily_extent_hires.png
(http)://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Whatever happened to that kindergarten rule everybody was supposed to learn--If you make the mess, you clean it up. The bulk of the human race has NOT grown up. This applies to all forms of pollution, not just pumping tons of carbon into the atmosphere.
Yes ! Too bad there are too many idiots like "our planet" above who think its all a big joke. Or worse yet, a liberal conspiracy.
I'm at risk of sounding hopeless about influencing the discussion:
I haven't visited Newsvine (particularly MSNBC posts on Newsvine because I've got better sources for news like NYTimes, the Economist, CSMonitor) and I was half expecting the debate to have shifted- and perhaps in a small way it has judging by the 'midpoint' of the right wing responses on Global Warming:
2006: 'Ain't happening'
2008: ''Ain't happening, and if it were volcanos and sunspots are bigger effects'
2010: 'Ain't happening. Those guys at CRU are lying'
2012:'It's happening but it's natural variation'.
Thomas S Kuhn. Structure of Scientific Revolutions- You don't prevail by persuading the other side to change their minds. You prevail by gathering a preponderance of evidence that makes the opposing position untenable for a knowledgeable person with a firm grasp of the facts. The Origin of Species was published in 1859, and there is still a large, mostly religious, lay audience supported by a tiny pseudo-scientific fringe who happens to argue the other side with circular arguments about information theory and complexity, the inaccuracies of atomic decay measurements, overgeneralized arguments against supers-position and the impact of catastrophic events. But the fact is no reputable journal publishes their articles, nobody cites their literature.A student today cannot obtain an advanced degree in any field of natural science from any legitimate school anywhere in the world arguing the other side and it isn't because there is a conspiracy. There is no other side. The scientific debate is closed.
In the next 5 to 10 years the discussion will be all about mitigating the effects of global warming locally because rampant self-interest will preclude any other option.
I also read that book.
I would like to reccommend to you "A Social History of Truth" by Steven Shapin.
It makes the point that until the division between the powerful and the powerfully intellegent remains we will not be able to decide what the truth is. Truth becomes a social construct more than personal information.
Waaaay too deep for 53% of the posters to this forum though.
An article came out recently that said that the Antarctic ice has the most ice for this time of year then ever recorded. Climate change happens and it's nothing we can control so please stop freaking out about it.
Well... looks like the Human Race is effectively destroying life on this planet as we know it... wonder what the next dominant species will do? Hopefully it'll be smarter than humans.
It raises the question, if life can become intelligent and destroy itself within 40k yrs, a blink of an eye in geologic terms, could it have happened before and just had all traces destroyed by time? Could the dinosaurs have become intellegent in the last 40k years of thier 150M year dominance and caused thier own demise? Would we still be able to detect evidence of this 65M yrs later.
On the other hand envision a race that actually figured out how to coexist and quantify what they needed to survive for the long term, both socially and enviromentally. This race would then have all the necessary components to create seedships and launch them on multigenerational voyages into the universe.
Those are the stakes we play with, the magnitude of our loss if we fail.
Isn't this the place where all the Baggers and their ilk come in and deny that climate change exists? And further, they continue to deny that there is any scientific evidence for the sad state of the Arctic? Or evidence of the dramatic changes in climate and the attendant results of such change in many other parts of the world?
One of the big reasons the ice pack is so different is because of the green house gasses and the biggest culprit of this is oil..the governments have known this for years,but choose to turn a blind eye towards it,they will not be happy till every drop is taken out of this earth,then when it gone there will be a war to end all wars as one country or another will say..Hey you took the last drop ,we should have gotten it,is it not about time you leave what oil is left in the earth ..alone..use other forms of fuel to make cars go,sure there is some on the market but... so expensive.. only the rich can afford them,soak the billions you could save into making these forms of transportation cheaper instead of playing big brother in the world and having a war with every country.. just because you can..time to start living together,and governments should lead the way trying to help this planet..not destroy it like most are trying to do and not one gives a dam..it is all about making money..nothing more
Now that the ice has melted due to burning fossil fuels, let's quickly grab and burn the fossil fuels underneath.
it dosent matter how much you wing nuts or libertards argue and blame each other global climate change is coming and you can do nothing about it - for the scientific oriented, nature can only react with what it has and it has plenty to affect the climate - for the biblically oriented it is god's wrath because we have all been naughty - it may not be directly caused by the 6 billion people on this rock but those 6 billion have accelerated it to the tipping over point - it is said there is nothing sure but death and taxes - add a third one now - nothing is sure but death, taxes and global climate change and no amount of "hot air" will change that - as nature puts it, adapt or die
Just out of curiosity, I wonder why the Arctic sea ice is dissipating and the Antarctic sea ice is not... could it be that the earthquakes we have experienced over the last 20 years have shifted the Earth's axis enough to increase warming at the north pole? I am more in alignment with violent tectonic activity that has shifted the axis than I am with man made greenhouse gases being the cause. Just my $.02
You would think, if that was the case, the north star would have become noticably un-northy. After all its the geometric alignment which dictates available sunlight, not magnetic orientation.
And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations:
I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth,
And it shall come to pass when I bring a cloud over the earth that the bow shall be seen in the cloud:
And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.
Genesis 9:12-15
So what's your point preacher ?? Don't hide behind some ludicrous bible quote. SPEAK !