Arctic ice loss is worrying, but the giant stirring in the South could be even worse

Field camp on the East Antarctic ice sheet.
Nerilie Abram

Nerilie Abram, Australian National University; Matthew England, UNSW, and Matt King, University of Tasmania

A record start to summer ice melt in Greenland this year has drawn attention to the northern ice sheet. We will have to wait to see if 2019 continues to break ice-melt records, but in the rapidly warming Arctic the long-term trends of ice loss are clear.

But what about at the other icy end of the planet?

Antarctica is an icy giant compared to its northern counterpart. The water frozen in the Greenland ice sheet is equivalent to around 7 metres of potential sea level rise. In the Antarctic ice sheet there are around 58 metres of sea-level rise currently locked away.

Like Greenland, the Antarctic ice sheet is losing ice and contributing to unabated global sea level rise. But there are worrying signs Antarctica is changing faster than expected and in places previously thought to be protected from rapid change.

The threat from beneath

On the Antarctic Peninsula – the most northerly part of the Antarctic continent – air temperatures over the past century have risen faster than any other place in the Southern Hemisphere. Summer melting already happens on the Antarctic Peninsula between 25 and 80 days each year. The number of melt days will rise by at least 50% when global warming hits the soon-to-be-reached 1.5℃ limit set out in the Paris Agreement, with some predictions pointing to as much as a 150% increase in melt days.

But the main threat to the Antarctic ice sheet doesn’t come from above. What threatens to truly transform this vast icy continent lies beneath, where warming ocean waters (and the vast heat carrying capacity of seawater) have the potential to melt ice at an unprecedented rate.

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New findings on ocean warming: 5 questions answered

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Almost all (around 93%) of the extra heat human activities have caused to accumulate on Earth since the Industrial Revolution lies within the ocean. And a large majority of this has been taken into the depths of the Southern Ocean. It is thought that this effect could delay the start of significant warming over much of Antarctica for a century or more.

However, the Antarctic ice sheet has a weak underbelly. In some places the ice sheet sits on ground that is below sea level. This puts the ice sheet in direct contact with warm ocean waters that are very effective at melting ice and destabilising the ice sheet.

Scientists have long been worried about the potential weakness of ice in West Antarctica because of its deep interface with the ocean. This concern was flagged in the first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) way back in 1990, although it was also thought that substantial ice loss from Antarctica wouldn’t be seen this century. Since 1992 satellites have been monitoring the status of the Antarctic ice sheet and we now know that not only is ice loss already underway, it is also vanishing at an accelerating rate.

The latest estimates indicate that 25% of the West Antarctic ice sheet is now unstable, and that Antarctic ice loss has increased five-fold over the past 25 years. These are remarkable numbers, bearing in mind that more than 4 metres of global sea-level rise are locked up in the West Antarctic alone.

Antarctic ice loss 1992–2019, European Space Agency.

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Read more:
Antarctica has lost nearly 3 trillion tonnes of ice since 1992

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Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is currently the focus of a major US-UK research program as there is still a lot we don’t understand about how quickly ice will be lost here in the future. For example, gradual lifting of the bedrock as it responds to the lighter weight of ice (known as rebounding) could reduce contact between the ice sheet and warm ocean water and help to stabilise runaway ice loss.

On the other hand, melt water from the ice sheets is changing the structure and circulation of the Southern Ocean in a way that could bring even warmer water into contact with the base of the ice sheet, further amplifying ice loss.

There are other parts of the Antarctic ice sheet that haven’t had this same intensive research, but which appear to now be stirring. The Totten Glacier, close to Australia’s Casey station, is one area unexpectedly losing ice. There is a very pressing need to understand the vulnerabilities here and in other remote parts of the East Antarctic coast.

The other type of ice

Sea ice forms and floats on the surface of the polar oceans. The decline of Arctic sea ice over the past 40 years is one of the most visible climate change impacts on Earth. But recent years have shown us that the behaviour of Antarctic sea ice is stranger and potentially more volatile.

The extent of sea ice around Antarctica has been gradually increasing for decades. This is contrary to expectations from climate simulations, and has been attributed to changes in the ocean structure and changing winds circling the Antarctic continent.

But in 2015, the amount of sea ice around Antarctica began to drop precipitously. In just 3 years Antarctica lost the same amount of sea ice the Arctic lost in 30.

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Read more:
Why Antarctica’s sea ice cover is so low (and no, it’s not just about climate change)

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So far in 2019, sea ice around Antarctica is tracking near or below the lowest levels on record from 40 years of satellite monitoring. In the long-term this trend is expected to continue, but such a dramatic drop over only a few years was not anticipated.

There is still a lot to learn about how quickly Antarctica will respond to climate change. But there are very clear signs that the icy giant is awakening and – via global sea level rise – coming to pay us all a visit.

Nerilie Abram, ARC Future Fellow, Research School of Earth Sciences; Chief Investigator for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, Australian National University; Matthew England, Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow; Deputy Director of the Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC); Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Climate System Science, UNSW, and Matt King, Professor, Surveying & Spatial Sciences, School of Technology, Environments and Design, University of Tasmania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Time will tell if this is a record summer for Greenland ice melt, but the pattern over the past 20 years is clear

Melting on top of sea ice off northwestern Greenland, June 2019.
Steffen M. Olsen/Twitter

Nerilie Abram, Australian National University

Greenland has been in the news a bit lately. From Huskies seemingly walking on water, to temperatures soaring to 20℃ above average for the time of year, to predictions of the vast ice sheet being lost entirely, what is going on?

At its most simple: ice melts when it gets too warm.

Of course, some ice melts every time summer rolls around, but the amount of Arctic ice that melts each summer is growing, and we’re waiting to see whether this turns out to be a record-breaking year for Greenland ice melt.

No part of the planet is free from the impacts of human-caused climate change. But Greenland, and the Arctic more generally, is experiencing the impacts particularly severely. Temperatures in the planet’s extreme north are rising twice as fast as the global average.

Amplification of climate change in the Arctic.

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Read more:
Ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica predicted to bring more frequent extreme weather

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Greenland is warming so rapidly because of what climate scientists refer to as a “positive feedback”. Despite the name, these are not good. A better term might be “climate change amplifier”.

The Arctic has many “positive feedbacks” or “amplifiers” that worsen the effects of climate change here. For example, as snow and ice begin to melt, the surface darkens, allowing it to absorb more heat and thus melt even more.

This effect is most dramatic when snow and ice are lost completely, as in the case of the dramatic loss of the sea ice covering the Arctic ocean. Arctic sea ice loss is one of the major factors that explains why the Arctic is warming so much faster than the rest of the planet.

Another worrisome characteristic of climate change in the Arctic is the potential for ice melt to accelerate. The temperature threshold at which ice begins to melt means that once the climate has warmed enough to start melting ice, any further warming will rapidly cause an even larger amount of melting to occur. That is the reality beginning to play out in Greenland.

Beginning of the 2019 summer melt season

Last month, ice melt across the surface of Greenland made headlines. Surface melting spiked rapidly and was unusually strong for June. Melting was most intense around the edges of the Greenland ice sheet, and about 40% of the entire ice sheet surface was affected to some extent.

Greenland ice melt is typically very irregular during each summer, spiking as weather systems bring warm air masses over the ice sheet. Given this variability, it is not yet clear whether 2019 is going to be an unusually bad year for melting over Greenland – and whether it will rival the worst year on record, 2012, when the entire surface of the ice sheet experienced melting.

But what is very clear from observations since the 1970s (and completely consistent with simple physics) is that as the Arctic climate warms, the Greenland summer melt season is starting earlier, lasting longer, and becoming more intense.

Samples of older ice from inside Greenland’s ice sheet paint an even clearer picture of the changes that climate warming is causing. The amount of summer melting first began to increase in the mid-1800s, not long after human-driven climate warming began. Summer melt over the past two decades has reached levels roughly 50% higher than before the Industrial Revolution, and the speed of ice loss from the Greenland sheet has increased nearly sixfold since the 1980s.

Greenland melt intensity over the past 350 years.

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Read more:
The Industrial Revolution kick-started global warming much earlier than we realised

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Choices for the future

An ice sheet has existed on Greenland for millions of years. But the geological timescales of ice sheet growth and renewal are vastly outpaced by the human-caused changes we see today.

A study published in June this year, at the same time surface melting of the ice sheet was spiking, predicts that if human greenhouse emissions continue unabated, by the end of this century ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet could see the ocean rise by up to 33cm.

If all of the Greenland ice sheet were to melt, global sea level would rise by more than 7 metres. According to the same study, that could potentially happen within 1,000 years.

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Read more:
Cold and calculating: what the two different types of ice do to sea levels

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The evidence is abundantly clear: the rising temperature of the planet is causing more Arctic ice to melt during the northern summer. We cannot avoid further ice loss in coming decades, and people and ecosystems will have to adapt to this.

But there is still a window of opportunity to avoid the worst impacts of future climate change in the longer term. The evidence tells us that the only way to prevent the destruction of the Greenland ice sheet, and multi-metre rises in global sea level, is to make rapid, deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. That is a choice we still have a chance to make.

Nerilie Abram, ARC Future Fellow, Research School of Earth Sciences; Chief Investigator for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica predicted to bring more frequent extreme weather

A new climate model combines data on ice loss from both polar regions for the first time.
Mark Brandon, CC BY-ND

Nick Golledge, Victoria University of Wellington

Last week, rivers froze over in Chicago when it got colder than at the North Pole. At the same time, temperatures hit 47℃ in Adelaide during the peak of a heatwave.

Such extreme and unpredictable weather is likely to get worse as ice sheets at both poles continue to melt.

Our research, published today, shows that the combined melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is likely to affect the entire global climate system, triggering more variable weather and further melting. Our model predictions suggest that we will see more of the recent extreme weather, both hot and cold, with disruptive effects for agriculture, infrastructure, and human life itself.

We argue that global policy needs urgent review to prevent dangerous consequences.

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Read more:
We finally have the rulebook for the Paris Agreement, but global climate action is still inadequate

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Accelerated loss of ice

Even though the goal of the Paris Agreement is to keep warming below 2℃ (compared to pre-industrial levels), current government pledges commit us to surface warming of 3-4℃ by 2100. This would cause more melting in the polar regions.

Already, the loss of ice from ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, as well as mountain glaciers, is accelerating as a consequence of continued warming of the air and the ocean. With the predicted level of warming, a significant amount of meltwater from polar ice would enter the earth’s oceans.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is considered more vulnerable to melting, but East Antarctica , once thought to be inert, is now showing increasing signs of change.
Nick Golledge, CC BY-ND

We have used satellite measurements of recent changes in ice mass and have combined data from both polar regions for the first time. We found that, within a few decades, increased Antarctic melting would form a lens of freshwater on the ocean surface, allowing rising warmer water to spread out and potentially trigger further melting from below.

In the North Atlantic, the influx of meltwater would lead to a significant weakening of deep ocean circulation and affect coastal currents such as the Gulf Stream, which carries warm water from the tropics into the North Atlantic. This would lead to warmer air temperatures in Central America, Eastern Canada and the high Arctic, but colder conditions over northwestern Europe on the other side of the Atlantic.

Recent research suggests that tipping points in parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may have already been passed. This is because most of the ice sheet that covers West Antarctica rests on bedrock far below sea level – in some areas up to 2 kilometres below.

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Read more:
How Antarctic ice melt can be a tipping point for the whole planet’s climate

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Bringing both poles into one model

It can be a challenge to simulate the whole climate system because computer models of climate are usually global, but models of ice sheets are typically restricted to just Antarctica or just Greenland. For this reason, the most recent Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) assessment used climate models that excluded ice sheet interactions.

Global government policy has been guided by this assessment since 2013, but our new results show that the inclusion of ice sheet meltwater can significantly affect climate projections. This means we need to update the guidance we provide to policy makers. And because Greenland and Antarctica affect different aspects of the climate system, we need new modelling approaches that look at both ice sheets together.

When the edges of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet start to recede, they retreat into deeper and deeper water and the ice begins to float more easily.
Mark Brandon, CC BY-ND

Seas rise as ice melts on land

Apart from the impact of meltwater on ocean circulation, we have also calculated how ongoing melting of both polar ice caps will contribute to sea level. Melting ice sheets are already raising sea level, and the process has been accelerating in recent years.

Our research is in agreement with another study published today, in terms of the amount that Antarctica might contribute to sea level over the present century. This is good news for two reasons.

First, our predictions are lower than one US modelling group predicted in 2016. Instead of nearly a metre of sea level rise from Antarctica by 2100, we predict only 14-15cm.

Second, the agreement between the two studies and also with previous projections from the IPCC and other modelling groups suggests there is a growing consensus, which provides greater certainty for planners. But the regional pattern of sea level rise is uneven, and islands in the southwest Pacific will most likely experience nearly 1.5 times the amount of sea level rise that will affect New Zealand.

While some countries, including New Zealand, are making progress on developing laws and policies for a transition towards a low-carbon future, globally policy is lagging far behind the science.

The predictions we make in our studies underline the increasingly urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It might be hard to see how our own individual actions can save polar ice caps from significant melting. But by making individual choices that are environmentally sustainable, we can persuade politicians and companies of the desire for urgent action to protect the world for future generations.

Nick Golledge, Associate Professor of Glaciology, Victoria University of Wellington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How Antarctic ice melt can be a tipping point for the whole planet’s climate

Melting Antarctic ice can trigger effects on the other side of the globe.
NASA/Jane Peterson

Chris Turney, UNSW; Jonathan Palmer, UNSW; Peter Kershaw, Monash University; Steven Phipps, University of Tasmania, and Zoë Thomas, UNSW

Melting of Antarctica’s ice can trigger rapid warming on the other side of the planet, according to our new research which details how just such an abrupt climate event happened 30,000 years ago, in which the North Atlantic region warmed dramatically.

This idea of “tipping points” in Earth’s system has had something of a bad rap ever since the 2004 blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow purportedly showed how melting polar ice can trigger all manner of global changes.

But while the movie certainly exaggerated the speed and severity of abrupt climate change, we do know that many natural systems are vulnerable to being pushed into different modes of operation. The melting of Greenland’s ice sheet, the retreat of Arctic summer sea ice, and the collapse of the global ocean circulation are all examples of potential vulnerability in a future, warmer world.

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Read more: Chasing ice: how ice cores shape our understanding of ancient climate.

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Of course it is notoriously hard to predict when and where elements of Earth’s system will abruptly tip into a different state. A key limitation is that historical climate records are often too short to test the skill of our computer models used to predict future environmental change, hampering our ability to plan for potential abrupt changes.

Fortunately, however, nature preserves a wealth of evidence in the landscape that allows us to understand how longer time-scale shifts can happen.

Core values

One of the most important sources of information on past climate tipping points are the kilometre-long cores of ice drilled from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which preserve exquisitely detailed information stretching back up to 800,000 years.

The Greenland ice cores record massive, millennial-scale swings in temperature that have occurred across the North Atlantic region over the past 90,000 years. The scale of these swings is staggering: in some cases temperatures rose by 16℃ in just a few decades or even years.

Twenty-five of these major so-called Dansgaard–Oeschger (D-O) warming events have been identified. These abrupt swings in temperature happened too quickly to have been caused by Earth’s slowly changing orbit around the Sun. Fascinatingly, when ice cores from Antarctica are compared with those from Greenland, we see a “seesaw” relationship: when it warms in the north, the south cools, and vice versa.

Attempts to explain the cause of this bipolar seesaw have traditionally focused on the North Atlantic region, and include melting ice sheets, changes in ocean circulation or wind patterns.

But as our new research shows, these might not be the only cause of D-O events.

Our new paper, published today in Nature Communications, suggests that another mechanism, with its origins in Antarctica, has also contributed to these rapid seesaws in global temperature.

Tree of knowledge

The 30,000-year-old key to climate secrets.
Chris Turney, Author provided

We know that there have been major collapses of the Antarctic ice sheet in the past, raising the possibility that these may have tipped one or more parts of the Earth system into a different state. To investigate this idea, we analysed an ancient New Zealand kauri tree that was extracted from a peat swamp near Dargaville, Northland, and which lived between 29,000 and 31,000 years ago.

Through accurate dating, we know that this tree lived through a short D-O event, during which (as explained above) temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere would have risen. Importantly, the unique pattern of atmospheric radioactive carbon (or carbon-14) found in the tree rings allowed us to identify similar changes preserved in climate records from ocean and ice cores (the latter using beryllium-10, an isotope formed by similar processes to carbon-14). This tree thus allows us to compare directly what the climate was doing during a D-O event beyond the polar regions, providing a global picture.

The extraordinary thing we discovered is that the warm D-O event coincided with a 400-year period of surface cooling in the south and a major retreat of Antarctic ice.

When we searched through other climate records for more information about what was happening at the time, we found no evidence of a change in ocean circulation. Instead we found a collapse in the rain-bearing Pacific trade winds over tropical northeast Australia that was coincident with the 400-year southern cooling.

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Read more: Two centuries of continuous volcanic eruption may have triggered the end of the ice age.

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To explore how melting Antarctic ice might cause such dramatic change in the global climate, we used a climate model to simulate the release of large volumes of freshwater into the Southern Ocean. The model simulations all showed the same response, in agreement with our climate reconstructions: regardless of the amount of freshwater released into the Southern Ocean, the surface waters of the tropical Pacific nevertheless warmed, causing changes to wind patterns that in turn triggered the North Atlantic to warm too.

Future work is now focusing on what caused the Antarctic ice sheets to retreat so dramatically. Regardless of how it happened, it looks like melting ice in the south can drive abrupt global change, something of which we should be aware in a future warmer world.

Chris Turney, Professor of Earth Sciences and Climate Change, UNSW; Jonathan Palmer, Research Fellow, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences., UNSW; Peter Kershaw, Emeritus Professor, Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, Monash University; Steven Phipps, Palaeo Ice Sheet Modeller, University of Tasmania, and Zoë Thomas, Research Associate, UNSW

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Contributions to sea-level rise have increased by half since 1993, largely because of Greenland’s ice

Water mass enters the ocean from glaciers such as this along the Greenland coast.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

John Church, UNSW; Christopher Watson, University of Tasmania; Matt King, University of Tasmania; Xianyao Chen, and Xuebin Zhang, CSIRO

Contributions to the rate of global sea-level rise increased by about half between 1993 and 2014, with much of the increase due to an increased contribution from Greenland’s ice, according to our new research.

Our study, published in Nature Climate Change, shows that the sum of contributions increased from 2.2mm per year to 3.3mm per year. This is consistent with, although a little larger than, the observed increase in the rate of rise estimated from satellite observations.

Globally, the rate of sea-level rise has been increasing since the 19th century. As a result, the rate during the 20th century was significantly greater than during previous millennia. The rate of rise over the past two decades has been larger still.

The rate is projected to increase still further during the 21st century unless human greenhouse emissions can be significantly curbed.

However, since 1993, when high-quality satellite data collection started, most previous studies have not reported an increase in the rate of rise, despite many results pointing towards growing contributions to sea level from the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Our research was partly aimed at explaining how these apparently contradictory results fit together.

Changes in the rate of rise

In 2015, we completed a careful comparison of satellite and coastal measurements of sea level. This revealed a small but significant bias in the first decade of the satellite record which, after its removal, resulted in a slightly lower estimate of sea-level rise at the start of the satellite record. Correcting for this bias partially resolved the apparent contradiction.

In our new research, we compared the satellite data from 1993 to 2014 with what we know has been contributing to sea level over the same period. These contributions come from ocean expansion due to ocean warming, the net loss of land-based ice from glaciers and ice sheets, and changes in the amount of water stored on land.

Previously, after around 2003, the agreement between the sum of the observed contributions and measured sea level was very good. Before that, however, the budget didn’t quite balance.

Using the satellite data corrected for the small biases identified in our earlier study, we found agreement with the sum of contributions over the entire time from 1993 to 2014. Both show an increase in the rate of sea-level rise over this period.

The total observed sea-level rise is the sum of contributions from thermal expansion of the oceans, fresh water input from glaciers and ice sheets, and changes in water storage on land.
IPCC

After accounting for year-to-year fluctuations caused by phenomena such as El Niño, our corrected satellite record indicates an increase in the rate of rise, from 2.4mm per year in 1993 to 2.9mm per year in 2014. If we used different estimates for vertical land motion to estimate the biases in the satellite record, the rates were about 0.4mm per year larger, changing from 2.8mm per year to 3.2mm per year over the same period.

Is the whole the same as the sum of the parts?

Our results show that the largest contribution to sea-level rise – about 1mm per year – comes from the ocean expanding as it warms. This rate of increase stayed fairly constant over the time period.

The second-largest contribution was from mountain glaciers, and increased slightly from 0.6mm per year to 0.9mm per year from 1993 to 2014. Similarly, the contribution from the Antarctic ice sheet increased slightly, from 0.2mm per year to 0.3mm per year.

Strikingly, the largest increase came from the Greenland ice sheet, as a result of both increased surface melting and increased flow of ice into the ocean. Greenland’s contribution increased from about 0.1mm per year (about 5% of the total rise in 1993) to 0.85mm per year (about 25% in 2014).

Greenland’s contribution to sea-level rise is increasing due to both increased surface melting and flow of ice into the ocean.
NASA/John Sonntag, CC BY

The contribution from land water also increased, from 0.1mm per year to 0.25mm per year. The amount of water stored on land varies a lot from year to year, because of changes in rainfall and drought patterns, for instance. Despite this, rates of groundwater depletion grew whereas storage of water in reservoirs was relatively steady, with the net effect being an increase between 1993 and 2014.

So in terms of the overall picture, while the rate of ocean thermal expansion has remained steady since 1993, the contributions from glaciers and ice sheets have increased markedly, from about half of the total rise in 1993 to about 70% of the rise in 2014. This is primarily due to Greenland’s increasing contribution.

What is the future of sea level?

The satellite record of sea level still spans only a few decades, and ongoing observations will be needed to understand the longer-term significance of our results. Our results also highlight the importance of the continued international effort to better understand and correct for the small biases we identified in the satellite data in our earlier study.

Nevertheless, the satellite data are now consistent with the historical observations and also with projected increases in the rate of sea-level rise.

Ocean heat content fell following the 1991 volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo. The subsequent recovery (over about two decades) probably resulted in a rate of ocean thermal expansion larger than from greenhouse gases alone. Thus the underlying acceleration of thermal expansion from human-induced warming may emerge over the next decade or so. And there are potentially even larger future contributions from the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.

The acceleration of sea level, now measured with greater accuracy, highlights the importance and urgency of cutting greenhouse gas emissions and formulating coastal adaptation plans. Given the increased contributions from ice sheets, and the implications for future sea-level rise, our coastal cities need to prepare for rising sea levels.

Sea-level rise will have significant impacts on coastal communities and environments.
Bruce Miller/CSIRO, CC BY

John Church, Chair professor, UNSW; Christopher Watson, Senior Lecturer, Surveying and Spatial Sciences, School of Land and Food, University of Tasmania; Matt King, Professor, Surveying & Spatial Sciences, School of Land and Food, University of Tasmania; Xianyao Chen, Professor, and Xuebin Zhang, Senior research scientist, CSIRO

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

This terrifying GIF shows how much Arctic ice has disappeared in the last 20 years

The Himalaya shows off how fast it can melt, too

Antarctic Ice Melt Increasing Rising Sea Levels

The link below is to an article that looks at the rising threat of the Antarctic ice melt to sea levels around the world.

For more visit:
http://inhabitat.com/melting-east-antarctic-ice-sheet-could-raise-sea-levels-for-thousands-of-years/

North Pole Ice Melt

The link below is to an article reporting on the massive ice melt at the North Pole.

For more visit:
http://www.treehugger.com/climate-change/there-lake-north-pole.html

Article & Videos: Arctic Sea Ice Melt

The link below is to a very informative article (with videos embedded) reporting on the record sea ice melt in the Arctic.

For more visit:
http://www.climatecentral.org/blogs/images-of-2012s-record-arctic-sea-ice-melt-15026