JPL/Fisheries & Oceans Canada Study - Arctic Sea Ice Thickness Down 53% Since 1980 - AFP

[hatrack]

his summer, a group of scientists and students - as well as a Canadian senator, a writer, and a filmmaker - set out from Resolute Bay, Canada, on the icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent. They were headed through the Northwest Passage, but instead of opening shipping lanes in the ice, they had gathered to open up new lines of thinking on Arctic science. Among the participants in the shipboard workshop (hosted by Fisheries and Oceans Canada) was Ron Kwok of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Kwok has long provided checkups on the health of Arctic sea ice - the frozen sea water floating within the Arctic Ocean basin. He also knows that some important clues about ice changes can't be seen from a ship.

While satellites provide accurate and expansive coverage of ice in the Arctic Ocean, the records are relatively new. Satellites have only monitored sea ice extent since 1973. NASA's Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) has been on the task since 2003, allowing researchers to estimate ice thickness as well.

To extend the record, Kwok and Drew Rothrock of the University of Washington, Seattle, recently combined the high spatial coverage from satellites with a longer record from Cold War submarines to piece together a history of ice thickness that spans close to 50 years. Analysis of the new record shows that since a peak in 1980, sea ice thickness has declined 53 percent. "It's an astonishing number," Kwok said. The study, published online August 6 in Geophysical Research Letters, shows that the current thinning of Arctic sea ice has actually been going on for quite some time.

"A fantastic change is happening on Earth - it's truly one of the biggest changes in environmental conditions on Earth since the end of the ice age," said Tom Wagner, cryosphere program manager at NASA Headquarters. "It's not an easy thing to observe, let alone predict, what might happen next."

EDIT

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Satellites_And_Submarines_Give_The_Skinny_On_Sea_Ice_Thickness_999.html

[XemaSab]

1. I have a prediction! I have a prediction!

:bounce: