"The Extraordinary Years Have Become Normal Years" - Arctic Scientists On "Radical" Arctic Meltdown
A group of scientists studying a broad range of Arctic systems — from sea ice to permafrost to the Greenland ice sheet — gathered in D.C. Wednesday to lay out just how extreme a year 2016 has been so far for the northern cap of the planet.
“I see the situation as a train going downhill,” said Marco Tedesco, who studies Greenland at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. “And the feedback mechanisms in the Arctic [are] the slope of your hill. And it gets harder and harder to stop it.”
The word “record” was uttered repeatedly at the event at the National Press Club, which was sponsored by SEARCH (the Study of Environmental Arctic Change). Walt Meier, a scientist with NASA who studies Arctic sea ice, laid out a series of “really extreme conditions” that began with sharply anomalous above-freezing temperatures at the North Pole for a short stint during the winter, and then led to large early breakups of ice above Alaska and in other regions. Overall, the Arctic sea ice extent has been at record lows for five out of six months so far this year.
“We’ve lost about twice the size of the state of Alaska in terms of area,” said Meier, referring to the long-term trend in Arctic sea ice over the past several decades. “It’s also thinning as well, we’ve lost about 50 percent of the thickness. And this is happening more rapidly than even the most aggressive climate models.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/07/13/the-extraordinary-years-have-become-the-normal-years-scientists-survey-radical-melt-in-the-arctic/
