Arctic sea ice melting quickly, German report says
UPI
Sept. 13, 2010 at 4:23 PM BREMERHAVEN, Germany, Sept. 13 (UPI) — The ice around the North Pole has experienced another severe meltdown this year, German scientists said. Around 1.9 million square miles of the Arctic Ocean will be covered by ice by the end of this summer, the third-lowest figure since satellite monitoring began in the 1970s, scientists from the University of Hamburg and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research said Monday. In the past four years, the average ice coverage in mid-September was around 2 million square miles, led by a record meltdown to 1.6 million square miles in 2007 from an average winter height of 5.4 million square miles. The scientists attributed the latest meltdowns to a combination of man-made climate change and seasonal temperature shifts. The German statistics come on the heels of a report on Arctic sea ice by the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, which released similar figures last week. Both reports indicate that Arctic ice is thinning, meaning that it takes less energy to melt it. “There are claims coming from some communities that the Arctic sea ice is recovering, is getting thicker again,” Mark Serreze, director of the American center, told Postmedia News. “That’s simply not the case. It’s continuing down in a death spiral.” …
