Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Polar ice packs”
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 …
A devastating dose of long-term climate change combined with a strong El Niño in 2015 seemingly left every major climate record on the books shattered, according to an annual international climate report released Tuesday. The State of the Climate report, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and described as Earth’s “annual physical,” finds that the health of the planet has, once …
“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 …
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 …
This winter was the warmest on the record for the continental U.S., new data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows, as average temperatures climbed nearly 5 F above normal. How temperatures compared to long-term averages across the contiguous U.S. during the winter of 2015-2016. Photo credit: NOAA Every state in the lower 48 saw temperatures at least 1.7 F above average. New England …
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says last month was the warmest January on record. That sets off alarm bells for climate scientists, but for the average person living in a northern climate, it might not sound so bad. That’s what many people are saying these days in Russia, where the expected icy winter has failed to materialize this year …
New data from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggest that January of 2016 was, for the globe, a truly extraordinary month. Coming off the hottest year ever recorded (2015), January saw the greatest departure from average of any month on record, according to data provided by NASA. [January was the ninth straight month of record breaking global warmth] But as …
Arctic sea ice is melting at a record pace – and every summer looks grimmer. This past summer saw the ice pack at its fourth-lowest level on record, and the overall trend in recent decades suggests this will only continue. “Using satellites, scientists have found that the area of sea ice coverage each September has declined by more than 40 …
Just a few more decades of ocean warming would be enough to destabilise the relatively small region of ice by the Amundsen Sea − starting a cascade of slipping and sliding that would tip enough ice into the ocean to raise sea levels by three metres. The loss of ice would continue for centuries. Two scientists at the Potsdam Institute …
In the late 1970s, scientists first came to a consensus that global warming was likely to result from increasing greenhouse gases released by the burning of fossil fuels. This idea had been around since the turn of the century, but the development of computer models made it possible to make quantitative predictions. Almost immediately, a small group of politically connected …
