Scientists based in South Korea, Canada and Germany used observational data from 1979 to 2019 to run new simulations.
And they concluded in their research, the results of which were published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday, that “the results indicate that the first of September without sea ice will arrive early between the years 2030 to 2050, regardless of the scenarios of ’emissions’.
When experts talk about no ice, they mean an area of less than a million square kilometers, because there could still be ice along the coasts.
The Arctic Ocean spans an area of approximately 14 million square kilometers and is covered in ice most of the year.
September is the month when snowfall usually reaches its annual minimum.
Song Ki-min, a researcher at South Korea’s Pohang and Yonsei Universities, co-author of the study, notes that the predicted date “will be nearly a decade earlier than the latest predictions published by the Intergovernmental Panel on climate change. that is to say the climate experts mandated by the United Nations.
The researchers also believe that the decrease in this ice can be attributed mainly to greenhouse gas emissions, while other factors (including aerosols, solar activity and volcanism) are of much lesser importance.
Sea ice is salt water on the surface of the ocean, which has frozen under the influence of cold. Its melting does not directly cause a rise in the level of the oceans (unlike ice caps and glaciers), but it nevertheless has serious consequences.
Indeed, this ice plays a very important role in summer, by reflecting the sun’s rays, which helps cool the Arctic. But this mirror is shrinking rapidly, so the Arctic is warming up much faster than other regions.
Song Ki-min notes that the disappearance of the ice “will accelerate warming in the Arctic, which could increase extreme weather events at mid-latitudes, such as heat waves and wildfires”.
“It could also accelerate warming, by melting permafrost, and contribute to sea level rise by melting the Greenland ice sheet,” adds the researcher.
“It would be the first major element of our climate system to be lost through greenhouse gas emissions,” says Dirk Notts of the University of Hamburg, another co-author of the study.
He regrets that “academics have warned of this disappearance for decades, and it is sad to see that these warnings have often fallen on deaf ears”.
Notts hopes policymakers will take an interest in the researchers’ findings “so that we can at least protect the other components of our climate system and limit future warming as much as possible.”
Read the Latest World News Today on The Eastern Herald.
