Breckenridge Destinations supports independent journalism. Click for great deals on vacation lodging in Breckenridge.
National Research Council compiles latest Arctic research
Big changes are coming to Antarctica. PHOTO BY BOB BERWYN.
By Summit Voice
SUMMIT COUNTY — Global warming is changing Earth’s polar regions faster than expected, according to the U.S. National Research Council.
Ice sheets around the poles are showing evidence of serious retreat, which is expected to continue, and perhaps accelerate over coming centuries as warm ocean currents melt the ice front faster than anyone had grasped before. As, well, sea level rise from melting polar ice sheets is today slowly affecting every shoreline on the planet.
The findings were compiled in a synthesis of reports from thousands of scientists in 60 countries who took part in the International Polar Year 2007-08. The studies offer a benchmark for environmental conditions and new discoveries in the polar regions.
“As a result of this work, we have a new benchmark,” said University of Massachusetts Amherst geosciences researcher Julie Brigham-Grette,who co-chaired the NRC report. “Seven of 12 Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves are either gone or now in severe decline,” she said. “This type of information makes the report all the more important because the changes we expect to see in the next few decades are going to be incredible.”
Worldwide, scores of oceanographers, meteorologists, geologists, climate scientists, ecologists and other researchers contributed to the report.
Bologists, for example, have document diatoms, microscopic phytoplankton at the base of the food chain, in North Atlantic waters where they hadn’t been in 800,000 years, the last time the Arctic provided a cold barrier to migration, Brigham-Grette said.
“We’re beginning to see that when the west Antarctic ice sheet collapses, the Arctic warms up. This is a new benchmark linking warming events in these two places for the first time.”
“I think if you look at everything we’ve learned, we see the polar regions are much more vulnerable to global warming than we thought. Global biological and oceanographic systems are responding faster than we ever expected. Earth has gone through this before, and some past warm cycles have been extreme, but we as humans have never seen anything like it in our 10,000 years on the planet. It’s extraordinary.”
As they release the NRC report to policymakers this week, Brigham-Grette said the authors understand that leaders must try to balance the country’s energy needs at the same time they address global climate change by decreasing fossil fuel use.
Related articles
- Global Warming: USGS to assess Arctic impacts (summitcountyvoice.com)
- Global Warming: ‘Revenge of the atmosphere’ (summitcountyvoice.com)
- Study: Some corals may adapt to ocean acidification (summitcountyvoice.com)
- Global warming: German researchers find more evidence for links between Arctic sea ice decline and European weather (summitcountyvoice.com)
- Global warming: New estimates of sea-level rise (summitcountyvoice.com)
Filed under: climate and weather, Environment, global warming Tagged: | Antarctica, Arctic, climate, Environment, global warming, International Polar Year
Arapahoe Basin supports independent journalism. Click to visit The Legend online.
Powder's falling at Monarch!! Have you reserved your spot yet?
Innovative energy underwrites coverage of energy stories.
[...] here to read the rest: Global warming: Polar regions changing faster than expected Filed Under: global warming Tagged With: and-perhaps, around-the-poles, coming-centuries, [...]
OMG, not again. Every year someone claims tha polar climates are changing faster than previously expected. Every year! At this rate there will be palm trees growing at the north pole by next fall. In reality its not the poles that are wacky, its the people making the claims.
Read the science. It’s stunning.
Don’t know if you accept suggestions for further ‘arctic’ reading, but here goes: Finished reading After the Ice – Life, Death, and Geopolitics in the New Arctic (pub. 2009), by A. Anderson. The title suggests one of those accounts you mostly snore through. Not so in this case. It has been, for me, a heart-pounding narrative. A terrifying read, not merely ominous, highlighting endlessly shifting variables. The reader is forced to concede that humans rarely factor in sufficient risk criteria before taking actions that often culminate in a blight of consequences. (Well, we already know this, of course.) Anderson writes like the biologist/sci-mag editor he is, journalistic in his approach, resoundingly humane in his subjective analyses. This is a layperson’s book, for people who have never been to the arctic and will probably never visit it. It is for people who nevertheless intuit that polar sea-ice melt is bound to impact global weather patterns, in turn affecting trillions of organisms living between two poles.Some of the data boggles the untutored mind, but A’s narrative quality provides a foil to unfamiliar stats that would otherwise seem more like landminds than enlightenment. This book reveals the lie within the truth, as far as any perspective can gauge between the two, as all good non fictions should.
[...] Global warming: Polar regions changing faster than expected [...]