#Do You Know: Arctic Sea Ice To Hit Record Low This Year

Global warming is now on its fullest and showing its presence which can be felt across the globe. Now how much prepare you are. What are some smart ideas running in your mind to build a safe and protective planet from this giant? What sort of damage this relentlessly increasing warming can do to planet one can simply imagine it and what it is going to do in its latest addition just look for it.

Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is likely to shrink to a record small size sometime next week, and then keep on melting; a scientist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center revealed this.

“A new daily record … would be likely by the end of August,” said Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the data center, which monitors ice in the Arctic and elsewhere. “Chances are it will cross the previous record while we’re still in sea ice retreat.”

The amount of sea ice in the Arctic is important because this region is a potent global weather-maker, sometimes characterized as the world’s air conditioner.

As parts of the Arctic melted, 2012 also set records for heat and drought in much of the Northern Hemisphere temperate zone, especially the continental United States.

This summer could see the ice retreat to less than 1.5 million square miles (4 million square km), an unprecedented low, Scambos said.

The previous record was set in 2007, when Arctic ice cover shrank to 1.66 million square miles (4.28 million square km), 23 percent below the earlier record set in 2005 and 39 percent below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000.

However, 2007 was a jaw-dropping “perfect storm” of conditions that primed the area for thawing sea ice: warmer and sunnier than usual, with extremely warm ocean water and winds all working together to melt the Arctic.

Last year, Arctic sea ice extended over the second-smallest area on record, but that was considered to be closer to a “new normal” rather than the extreme conditions of 2007, NSIDC said then.

If the sea ice record is broken this month, which would be unusually early in the season; last year’s low point came on September 9, 2011.

Overall, the decline of Arctic sea ice has happened faster than projected by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change five years ago, according to NSIDC data.

This summer has also seen unusual melting of the ice sheet covering Greenland, with NASA images showing that for a few days in July, 97 percent of the northern island’s surface was thawing. The same month also saw an iceberg twice the size of Manhattan break free from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier.

 “What you’re seeing is more Open Ocean than you’re seeing ice,” he said. “It just simply doesn’t look like what a polar scientist expects the arctic to look like. It’s wide open and the (ice) cap is very small. It’s a visceral thing. You look at it and that just doesn’t look like the Arctic Ocean anymore.”

If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed. - Chinese Proverb

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

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Arctic Ice, Climate Change, Global warming, Green House Gas