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The Arctic ice cap to become an open sea in our lifetime? That’s what Peter Wadhams, professor of polar ocean physics at Cambridge University, and a team of British explorers are saying – and in only a decade.
“We have taken the lid off the northern part of the planet and we cannot put it back on again," says Wadhams.
Without the ice cap, we'll be looking at a starkly different, much warmer world with massive flooding, big increases in greenhouse gas emissions from carbon pools and extreme global weather changes.
Today Agence France-Presse and other news organizations ran articles about the findings from an expedition led by veteran polar explorer Pen Hadow, who says the Arctic ice cap will completely vanish in 20 to 30 years.
During the 73-day trek, Hadow took 1,500 readings, often during pitch blackness and with windchill factors down to -70 degrees C. The team also made thousands of visual observations to give an impression of how the shape of the ice sheet is changing.
The on-the-ice techniques are helping scientists to understand better what is going on in this fragile ecosystem (that cannot be picked up by computer models), Hadow explains.
The loss of Earth’s ice, accumulated over millions of years but now melting at an alarming rate, is one of the global tipping points, writes geophysicist Henry Pollack, Ph.D., in his newly published book, “A World Without Ice.”
Across the globe, glaciers that have for centuries provided agricultural and drinking water for more than a billion people are quickly disappearing. In Antarctica, ancient ice shelves – some the size of Belgium, Scotland or France -- are beginning to melt, sending massive icebergs into the Southern Ocean. Hundreds of glaciers on Greenland are slipping faster and faster into the Atlantic. And in the Arctic Ocean, where an ice sheet has capped the polar sea for not only the entire history of human civilization but for most of the last three million years, researchers have observed a fast-paced shrinking of the Arctic sea ice that will in just a decade lead to an ice-free Arctic Ocean throughout the summer months,” the foreword to Pollack’s book says.
In "A World Without Ice," Pollack, who has a 40-year record of leading climate research at the University of Michigan, describes why the rapid loss of ice spells serious consequences, even in the near future. He gives clear answers to urgent questions in addition to laying out the actions we must take.
While the ice melts, are these compelling findings enough to generate action from world leaders at the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December?
If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading. – Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher
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