Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Arctic”
THE NEWS LAST WEEK THAT SUMMER ICE COVERING THE ARCTIC OCEAN WAS TIED FOR THE SECOND-LOWEST EXTENT ON RECORD IS A SOBERING REMINDER THAT THE PLANET IS SWIFTLY HEADING TOWARD A LARGELY ICE-FREE ARCTIC IN THE WARMER MONTHS, POSSIBLY AS EARLY AS 2020. After that, we can expect the ice-free period in the Arctic basin to expand to three to four months a …
The planet’s air conditioning system is on the blink, working intermittently, losing its glinting, lustrous white reflectiveness, as it turns deep blue, absorbing 90% of sunlight rather than reflecting it back into outer space. The repercussions of Arctic sea ice loss are immense. “Our planet has actually changed colour,” Peter Wadhams, A Farewell to Ice (Allen Lane an imprint of …
Climate change could remobilize abandoned hazardous waste thought to be buried forever beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet, new research finds. Camp Century, a U.S. military base built within the Greenland Ice Sheet in 1959, doubled as a top-secret site for testing the feasibility of deploying nuclear missiles from the Arctic during the Cold War. When the camp was decommissioned in …
In order for solar power to compete with other forms of energy, the conventional thinking goes, it needs to become way cheaper. Installing rooftop solar panels can be prohibitively expensive, after all, and it takes years before the resulting energy savings pay off. For the individual, it doesn’t matter whether solar panels will save you money in the long run if …
Environmental records of all kinds are being shattered as climate change takes effect in real time, scientists warned on Tuesday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) released its annual State of the Climate report with the dire warning that 2015 was the hottest year on record since at least the mid-to-late 19th century, confirming the “toppling of several symbolic milestones” in …
Two key climate change indicators — global surface temperatures and Arctic sea ice extent — have broken numerous records through the first half of 2016, according to NASA analyses of ground-based observations and satellite data. Each of the first six months of 2016 set a record as the warmest respective month globally in the modern temperature record, which dates to …
“Obliteration” is intentionally Machiavellian, and over-reaching, but the hard truth is that obliteration (extinction) could really, truly happen, assuming certain things happen, or not, depending…. In such case, in order to gain a full understanding of Arctic ice loss as it relates to obliteration, query the world’s foremost Arctic expert, Peter Wadhams, professor of Ocean Physics, University of Cambridge. All …
The Arctic has been the fascination of many people for centuries. Hundreds of years ago, the Europeans saw the Arctic’s frigid waters as a potential gateway to the Pacific. The region has also been home to many unique native cultures such as the Inuits and Chukchi. Lastly, it goes without saying that the Arctic is unsurpassed in many aspects of …
A new study by researchers from Denmark and Canada’s York University, published in Geophysical Research Letters, has found that the climate models commonly used to simulate melting of the Greenland ice sheet tend to underestimate the impact of exceptionally warm weather episodes on the ice sheet. The study investigated the causes of ice melt during two exceptional melt episodes in …
Vanishing Arctic sea ice. Dogged weather systems over Greenland. Far-flung surface ice melting on the massive island. These dramatic trends and global sea-level rise are linked, according to a study coauthored by Jennifer Francis, a research professor in Rutgers University’s Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences. During Greenland summers, melting Arctic sea ice favors stronger and more frequent “blocking-high” pressure …
