Extent Of April Arctic Sea Ice Lowest Ever Recorded For The Month

[hatrack]

The Arctic Ocean sea ice area was smaller last month than any other April since NASA starting taking satellite images nearly 30 years ago, climate scientists said. The National Snow and Ice Data Center uses the daily satellite data to continually measure the vast floating pack ice, and is releasing the April findings today.

"It's safe to say that this April will be a new record low. Up until now, last year had been the lowest,'' said Walt Meier, a research scientist at the University of Colorado's snow and ice center. What happens in the Arctic affects the rest of the planet because the sea ice provides a cooling effect as it reflects sunlight back into space.

Between 1979 and 2006, the summertime icepack shrank 9 percent each decade, according to the satellite data. It is at its smallest each year in September, which is the end of summer in the Arctic. The ice is largest in March. Although it is also getting smaller each year during winter, those changes aren't happening nearly as quickly as they are during the summer.

Sea ice could disappear during the summertime between 2050 and 2100, leaving the polar bear, walrus, ring seals and other Arctic creatures without habitat, according to estimates of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But in a new study published Tuesday, scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and the National Center for Atmospheric Research conclude that the shrinking summertime Arctic pack ice is about 30 years ahead of the climate model projections.

EDIT

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/05/02/MNGTCPJ7A51.DTL

[Dogmudgeon]

1. That's a lot of fresh water

More heat trapped in the Arctic atmospheric circulation zone.

More oceanbed methane hydrate release.

More oceanic thermohaline stalling.

More biologically active peat bogs and other microbiota.

More water vapor (the overlooked GHG) in the atmosphere, but just above 60°N.

More changes to the weather -- and we have NO idea what might happen there.

And now, we are losing our ability to model the changes as we tumble into a new realm of weird.

The end-of-the-world legends of the autochthonous northern peoples are starting to come true. But the stories in those legends get wilder and scarier, like the angry dancing weather demons, in stories from Siberia to Greenland, that set the sea itself on fire and turn whole nations to ice.

--p!