Sea Ice 2008

Arctic sea ice declined this summer to its second smallest extent in the satellite era, suggesting that the record set in 2007 may not have been an anomaly. If recent trends in the melt rate continue, we could see a virtually ice-free Arctic each summer much sooner than previously thought.

What is said in the film

the polar ice caps have been shrinking in summer and expanding in winter for millions of years but in the last three decades the Arctic sea ice at the end of each summers melt has been getting steadily smaller the decline was already alarming but in 2007 when the sea ice melts shattered the previous record by almost twenty-five percent researchers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center wondered is this an anomaly or part of an even more alarming trend we have had low ice cover since 1998 in the Arctic and what that means is that you have more open water in the region and with more open water you're getting more solar energy into the system so the Arctic Ocean has actually been warming up as the ice melts less light energy is reflected back into space and more of the sun's energy is absorbed into the ocean which fuels further melting in march two thousand eight the ice cap rebounded to a near normal winter level but much of this ice was thin single year ice and after a record rate of melting in the month of August the ice shrank to its second smallest extent on record if it keeps on going then the potential is that you lose the perennial ice altogether then we'll have a blue ocean in the Arctic now if the ocean becomes low there will be a lot of environmental impacts there are a lot of ecological impacts chemie so says the 30 years of satellite data we have on Arctic sea ice suggests that it's not likely to recover as a scientist he is intrigued by the trends but personally he worries about the planets future well it makes me feel sad a lot of things can happen in terms of the impacts to the environment impacts to the ecosystem not just in the Arctic but for the whole whole earth and the ocean is such a big part of the climate system and you / curve it a little bit and you're going to chance the climate of the world one result of such global climate change has already begun to emerge at the other end of the earth summer sea ice minima in the southern hemisphere have not been declining as warmer ocean water promotes evaporation which creates more snow to feed the Antarctic ice fields NASA scientists are using a suite of satellites to study sea ice at both poles trying to better understand how a complex set of phenomena such as cloud cover reflectivity a thickness of the ice weather patterns like La Nina and El Nino and ocean temperature affect the trends we see today you

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