The staggering decline of sea ice at the frontline of climate change

Source: The Guardian

Scientists on board Greenpeace's vessel exploring the minimum extent of the ice cap are shocked at the speed of the melt

We are a few hundred miles from the north pole. The air temperature is -3C, the sea freezing. All around us in these foggy Arctic waters at the top of the world are floes – large and small chunks of sea ice that melt and freeze again with the seasons.

Arne Sorensen, our Danish ice pilot, is 60 feet up in the crow's nest of the Arctic Sunrise vessel. Visibility is just 200 yards and he inches the 1,000-tonne Greenpeace ice breaker forward at two knots through narrow passages of clear water. The floes are piled up and compressed in fantastic shapes and shades of grey and blue; they crack, rumble and groan as we nudge them aside or climb over them. Two polar bears on our port side lift their heads but resume hunting.

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The vast polar ice cap, which regulates the Earth's temperature and has been a permanent fixture in our understanding of how the world works, has this year retreated further and faster than anyone expected. The previous record, set in 2007, was officially broken on 27 August when satellite images averaged over five days showed the ice then extended 4.11 million sq km, a reduction of nearly 50% compared to just 40 years ago.

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"It suggests 60% of the observed decline in ice extent in Septembers from 1953-2011 was due to human activity. The decline is linked to the increase in temperatures," she says.

"This year is significant. At the moment the is below what the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report will show in 2014. We are on the extreme edge of the models, suggesting that ice loss is happening much faster than the models suggested," says Stroeve.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/sep/14/decline-sea-ice-arctic

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The scientist John Fletcher from Cambridge University measures the thickness of an ice floe in the Arctic. Photograph: Alex Yallop/Greenpeace

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