Clear skies spell trouble for Arctic sea ice
Arctic sea ice
(Credit: Ash. Some rights reserved.)
Clearer skies over the Arctic are causing more sea ice to melt.
That’s according to research led by Jennifer Kay, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
Jennifer Kay: I think that’s a pretty important story to know about, that there’s change happening and the natural variability in something like weather can accentuate that change and make a very dramatic effect, this huge loss of ice.
The year 2007 saw a record summer melt of ice floating in the Arctic sea, which shrank about 40 percent below the 20-year average. Kay and colleagues found that cloud cover also shrank by 16 percent, letting more of the summer sun in.
Jennifer Kay: When you couple together these unusual weather patterns, but not unprecedented weather patterns, and a very vulnerable ice surface, you end up with a very dramatic loss of sea ice, and that’s what we saw this past summer.
Earth & Sky asked Kay why it’s important to study sea ice.
Jennifer Kay: It can play a really important role in modifying the heat and where the heat is going in the Arctic. I think there’s also a lot of focus on sea ice because it’s one of the most visible manifestations of climate change.
Our thanks today to NASA, in celebration of the International Polar Year.
