Area Of Arctic Sea Ice Missing As Of 10/29 Equal To 1/3 Of US East Of The Mississippi River
In September, Arctic sea ice reached its second lowest extent on record. Now, in one significant way, the situation has only gotten worse. With the onset of winter, large swaths of Arctic waters that should be frozen over by now remain ice free. As a result, the extent of the ice is currently running at record lows for this time of year.
As of Oct. 29th, sea ice extent was 1.3 million square miles less than the median extent for the years 1981 through 2010. That area of 'missing' ice is about a third again as large as all of the U.S. states east of the Mississippi River.
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"The main factor is ocean heat," says Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. (By way of full disclosure, the NSIDC is based at the University of Colorado, where I direct the Center for Environmental Journalism.) In September, sea surface temperatures in the Laptev Sea off Siberia climbed higher than 5 degrees C, or 41 F. "That’s insanely warm for the Arctic Ocean, especially in that region, far away from any warmer inflow from the Atlantic or Pacific."
Meier notes that winds and waves have mixed some of that heat down into the water column. For ice to form on the surface, heat needs to be lost to the atmosphere. "So that’s where we are now," he says. "The ocean still has heat, so ice is not yet forming. And that heat is going into the atmosphere."
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The outlook for temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere through Nov. 13, as calculated by a model. The dark colors over the Arctic show where temperatures are forecast to be more than 10 degrees C warmer than normal. (Credit: WXCHARTS.com)
EDIT
https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/insanely-warm-arctic-ocean-waters-are-delaying-freeze-up-and-pouring-heat
= new reply since forum marked as read
Sorry for the oversight!
