The North Pole Is Basically Hot Right Now
Nineteen separate polar bear populations live throughout the Arctic, spending their winters and springs roaming on sea ice and hunting.
For us to get a really cold winter, we need cold, dry air to invade the prairie provinces of Canada and hang out for a while. The previous hottest year on record?
Using Earth’s history to guide them, Friedrich’s team combined data from ice cores and ocean sediment cores with computer models of temperatures, to cover the past 784,000 years – a time frame spanning 8 different different glacial cycles.
One reading from Danish Meteorological Institute, for example, found that over the past several days temperatures have been about 36 degrees Fahrenheit higher than average around the North Pole.
Practically all of the scientists and experts agree that this development is another sign that the world climate is indeed warming up.
While the headline may not be exact as of the time of publishing, air temperatures over the Arctic Ocean have been far, far warmer in recent times than is “normal”.
As per Climate Change Institute, University of ME, the North Pole is warmer than it is supposed to be as the winter season approaches.
The years of diminishing sea ice extent has been caused by temperature increases scientists have attributed to greenhouse gas emissions from humans.
Sea ice around the North Pole is almost 28 per cent down and average temperature is roughly 36 degrees above the normal, according to a new study by NASA researchers.
“There was no way to go around (the ice) and if you tried to go over it, it was more than a hundred kilometres of solid ice, so the animals slowly starved”, he said. Among these regions, specialists list Kara Seas and Barents, situated in the Atlantic area in the vicinity of the Arctic Ocean.
Melting sea ice does not cause sea levels to rise – melting land ice causes that.
“When we have large areas of open water, it also raises air temperatures, and it has been up to 10/15 Celsius warmer”.
Starting in September every year the ice begins to reform, growing to a maximum.
“It’s been quite striking”, said Parkinson.
Something threw that trend off course recently.
This follows the amount of sea ice at both poles, arctic and Antarctic.
What’s happening, he explains, is sort of a “double whammy”.
The fact that the Arctic climate is showing signs of distress isn’t new, given that the region has been warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world, with sweeping impacts from sea ice melt to potential changes in weather patterns across North America and Europe.
Observations of climate change in the Arctic revealed that a ton of Carbon dioxide provokes the melting of three square meters of Arctic summer sea ice and the only way to stop it is to create awareness on global warming. Antarctica doesn’t play the same role in global weather patterns at the Arctic.
“It’s expected that, eventually, warming will catch up and become a significant player in the Antarctic”, Meier said.
So far, scientists have had the belief that the reason behind the Antarctic ice gain is natural fluctuation in the atmosphere.
“Continued reductions in sea ice may result in increased predation at key aggregation areas and shifts in beluga whale behavior with implications for population viability, ecosystem structure and the subsistence cultures that rely on them”, said O’Corry-Crowe.