Dramatically shrinking Arctic polar ice - truly global warming is upon us

Are we about to get an ice-free Arctic? Disturbing pictures by NASA show the polar cap is shrinking in mass by around 15% per decade
By EDDIE WRENN
DAILYMAIL
June 20, 2012

Only yesterday, NASA released an image of the 'White Marble' - an image from space showing our snow-and-ice-capped planet from above the North Pole.

Today, a new NASA release of pictures shows an alarming decrease in the amount of ice-locked water on the Arctic's floating ice cap - revealing that the oldest and thickest Arctic sea ice is disappearing at an extremely fast rate.

As the pictures below dramatically make clear, the size of the Arctic's floating ice cap has diminished massively over the last 30 years, lending evidence to the theory we are in a period of global warming.

The thicker ice, known as multi-year ice, survives through the cyclical summer melt season, when young ice that has formed over winter just as quickly melts again.

The rapid disappearance of older ice makes Arctic sea ice even more vulnerable to further decline in the summer, said Joey Comiso, senior scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.


1980: The floating ice cap is a large sprawling mass across the top of our planet, holding giant amounts of water


Sign of the times in 2012: The ice covering has dramatically shrunk, with research showing the cap is losing around 15-20% of its mass per decade

The new research takes a closer look at how multi-year ice, ice that has made it through at least two summers, has diminished with each passing winter over the last three decades.

Multi-year ice 'extent' - which includes all areas of the Arctic Ocean where multi-year ice covers at least 15 percent of the ocean surface - is diminishing at a rate of -15.1 percent per decade, the study found.

There’s another measurement that allows researchers to analyse how the ice cap evolves: multi-year ice 'area,' which discards areas of open water among ice floes and focuses exclusively on the regions of the Arctic Ocean that are completely covered by multi-year ice.

Sea ice area is always smaller than sea ice extent, and it gives scientists the information needed to estimate the total volume of ice in the Arctic Ocean.

Comiso found that multi-year ice area is shrinking even faster than multi-year ice extent, by -17.2 percent per decade...

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