Blanket Of Ice Covering Arctic Ocean Turning Into Thin Crust & Melting Faster Than Normal

One of the most alarming consequences of global warming in the Arctic is the rapidly melting ice cover. The Arctic ice cover, an expanse of frozen seawater floating on top of the Arctic Ocean and surrounding seas, thickens and expands during the fall and winter month, a NASA report states.

NASA

It thins and shrinks during the spring and summer until it reaches its annual minimum extent in September. Rising temperatures in the Arctic over the past decades has thinned the sea ice crust to an alarming extent.

A 2018 study led by Ron Kwok, a sea ice researcher with NASA＊s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena found that 70 percent of the ice pack now consists of seasonal ice 〞 sea ice that grows rapidly in the winter only to melt during the next summer, states NASA.

※The large changes in ice coverage associated with the loss of the multiyear ice pack have already occurred,§ Kwok said.

※The seasonal ice now represents a larger fraction of the Arctic sea ice cover. Because this young ice is thinner and grows faster in the winter, it is more responsive to weather and makes the sea ice cover respond differently than before. It＊s not that we won＊t see new wintertime or summertime record lows in the next years 每 it＊s just that the variability is going to be higher.§

A Bloomberg report quotes Colorado-based National Snow & Ice Data Center's statement saying, 'this month＊s melt is tracking close to the record set in July 2012.'

The report also says that the heatwave in the Arctic Circle has led to record temperatures in areas of Alaska, Canada and Greenland.

In 2019 alone more than 60 large fires have ravaged Alaska. Brian Brettschneider, a climate scientist with the International Arctic Research Center explains that global warming has been thawing tundra and drying vast stretches of the far-northern boreal forests.

Image: USDA - Flickr

This has caused wild thunderstorms with lightning, which are the main reason behind the fires burning in Alaska. "Unprecedented" number of wild fires are currently raging in the Arctic Circle with over 100 burning in the last few weeks in the Sakha Republic of Siberia and Alaska.

Rapid thawing could release vast quantities of heat-trapping gases and further add to the rise in the atmosphere＊s temperature.

Ice flows are melting faster than average rates observed over the last three decades, losing an additional 12,427 miles of cover per day 每 an area about the size of Wales.