Is Arctic sea ice melting faster than predicted?

Question

Looks like scientists say it is. But some people here on Yahoo said it was a record year for sea ice. Hmmm, should I believe the scientists or the yahoo skeptics?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080424/sc_afp/canadaarcticclimateenvironment

Answer 1

You should beleive yahoo...

Answer 2

The Arctic Ocean undergoes cyclic melting and re-freezing.  It was in a melting cycle for a couple of years recently but has refrozen this winter.  The ice will probably be thicker than normal for the next few years then thin out again when the current solar minimum is over.

Answer 3

Antarctic sea ice is melting more slowly than predicted.  I guess the skeptics are right and the "experts" are wrong.

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/st...

http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/200208...

Answer 4

"Although this March the area is slightly larger than last March, the area of [thick] perennial ice has reached an all time low," said Seelye Martin, manager of the Cryospheric Sciences Program at Nasa headquarters in Washington DC.

"So the volume of Arctic ice continues to decrease."

"It's becoming thinner and thinner and much more susceptible to melting during the summer - much more likely to melt away," commented Walt Meier from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder.

"It may look OK on the surface, but it's like looking at a Hollywood movie set - you see the facade of a building and it looks OK, but if you look behind it, there's no building there."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7303...

'eric'; 2002? 2005? do keep up!

jello do you have a link? all i can find is nasa and all other researchers saying the exact opposite re. thickness, i.e its thinner and there is less perennial ice;

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...

http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_ice.html

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/

Answer 5

There is later snow than for many years ,that should give u a clew.

Answer 6

The report you refer to talks about volume, in cubic meters.

The yahoo skeptics quote blogs that talk about normal winter refreezing, the amount of area covered in square kilometers.  We did have a cold La Nina year, so a lot of water was covered.

Unfortunately, the ice lost is thick multi-year ice, while the refreezing was thin, so the volume estimation is the one that matters, and that shows that we have a problem.  

We have a serious issue in the Antarctic as well.  Ice mass is being lost, and the loss is accelerating:

The Antarctic has recently been measured to be losing total ice mass as well.  

"Over the 10 year time period of the survey, the ice sheet as a whole was certainly losing mass, and the mass loss increased by 75% during this time. Most of the mass loss is from the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica and the northern tip of the Peninsula where it is driven by ongoing, pronounced glacier acceleration. In East Antarctica, the mass balance is near zero, but the thinning of its potentially vulnerable marine sectors suggests this may change in the near future."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...

The warming in some parts of Antarctica is much faster than elsewhere in the world, and it even extends deep into the nearby oceans:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/20...

"A new report from WWF, published at the UN conference on climate change in Bali, has found that global warming is occurring five times faster in the Antarctic peninsula than the rest of the world, and threatening the survival of the emperor, gentoo, chinstrap and Adélie penguins that breed on the continent.

The Antarctic peninsula is warming five times faster that the average rate of global warming and the waters of Southern Ocean have become warmer as far down as 3,000m, the report found.

Sea ice is now covering 40% less area that it did 26 years ago off the west Antarctic peninsula. "

We can even see that the melt rate is unprecedented for the last several thousand years:

New Research Confirms Antarctic Thaw Fears - Spiegel Online

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk...

"...the Pine Island Glacier has shrunk by an average of 3.8 centimeters annually over the past 4,700 years. But the Smith and Pope glaciers have only lost 2.3 centimeters of their thickness annually during the past 14,500 years. Satellite measurements taken between 1992 and 1996, though, show a loss of 1.6 meters in thickness per year on the Pine Island Glacier -- a figure that represents 42 times the average melt of the past 4,700 years."

42X faster melt than historic trends!  That's huge!!

Answer 7

Because they know so much about the Artic.  They have been monitoring it for a little over 2 decades.  Truth is, they have NO idea how to predict it's melting and freezing.  Why don't you look up a few other sites, they have information that will argue against the WWF.  By the way, they have doubled their revenues in the last decade by supporting this c**p.  Funny how money makes people and companies act.

Adam, but how does that indicate anything when the polar Artic polar caps may have been completely melted as recent as 1000 years ago?

Answer 8

Yes, it is.  

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroo...

The 'skeptic' argument stems from the fact that sea ice extent recovered quickly because there was so much open sea to refreeze due to the record melt from last summer.  However, although the sea ice extent returned to previous levels, the thickness did not.  Because of this, we can expect to see even further melting in upcoming summers.

Answer 9

The truth is things are worse than expected! Get ready for food shortages and more severe weather!  I've started stocking up on food and supplies,you should too!  

Here is a link to a site that refutes all the 'deniers' wild claims.  

http://environment.newscientist.com/chan...

Answer 10

Consider the source.  The WWF is not a scientific source.  NASA has the ice level at above normal area AND thickness!

Answer 11

believe on the scientists.

Not only Arctic sea ice but wherever there is snow its melting faster than predicted and the sea level is consistantly rising.I think it will dump the land and thus scientifically there will be loss of life and maybe the planet toooooooooooo.this is fairly perplexing us mannn

Answer 12

The article also mentions the Greenland Ice Sheet melting.  It doesn't mention that as the glaciers recede that farms from 800 years ago are exposed.  

That pesky medieval warming period throws ice-water on the whole man-made global warming argument.  It has happened before.  It is happening again.  Big Deal.

Answer 13

It most certainly is melting faster

Believe the scientists  they know more that we do

Answer 14

I won't answer your question directly as the answer could lie just as much in the prediction as the melting (e.g. if I said that arctic ice would all melt in 3 minutes but it melted in 3 days, some people would say, 'see, it's melting slower than predicted so there's no problem'!).

I want to address a couple of misconceptions:

1 - The term Global Warming does not mean that all places on the globe will all warm all the time - just in general, over signifcant time, the globe will be warmer. Regional variations mean that some places will get colder (e.g. Europe when the Gulf Stream gets knocked out by melting arctic ice) and other places warmer. It also means that some years things will be cooler (thicker ice) than warmer but the trend is for warmth, melting look at any old pictures of glaciers), rising sea levels, bigger hurricanes, etc, etc

2 - No, Liss, warming does not equal more food. Some cold places that get warm (e.g. northern Canada) may then become agriculturally productive. Other warm places (e.g. US corn belt) will get hot and change to less productive crops and some hot places (e.g. Central America) will become too hot and dry to grow anything.

3 - Mikeb420, it is possible, through ice cores, rock samples from the sea bed etc to get a good understanding of ice flow patterns over millenia, not just decades.

4 - And for all those who say it is a cycle... yes, cycles have happened and will always happen. It's just that:

a) this one has the possibility much, much bigger than anything seen for millions of years and;

b) is happening much, much faster meaning no time to adjust, adapt or cope. (those farms gradually froze over in a 100 years; they unfroze in 3!) and;

c) natural cycles still happen but this time us humans are adding to the natural cycles

I'm looking for an analogy here... how about cars:

Imagine your car 'naturally' accelerates from 0-60 in 8 seconds with your foot to the floor.

The skeptics would have us believe that this means that any acceleration is OK.

What the scientists are trying to get across is that this time, the car will accelerate from 0-600 in 0.00008 seconds!

In other words, the car will be out of control and probably crash, killing people...

Answer 15

Warming means less food?  On what world are you talking about?  (not the question asker but another answerer)  Warming means more food!

At any rate.  My gosh.  Ice melting in spring!?!?  Heaven forbid!!!

Where the ice is now, Vikings FARMED years and years and years ago.  Hundreds of years before the SUV.

It's a cycle.  Get over it.

Answer 16

The north west passage was wide open last fall when we lost 3,000,000 square km of PERMANENT ICE.That ice was so old it was fresh water,no salt in it.The new ice is salty will melt real fast.Since ice reflex sun light and water absorbs it the more ice that disappears the quicker the remaining ice melts.

If you lived in the north you would not be asking,you can see the effects of global warming quite easy.The farther you get from the equator the greater the temperature rise is.We had lots of snow this year.I already predicted it when i seen the ice disappear.Wind blowing across water creates snow,wind blowing across ice does not.