NSIDC — 2005
The overall trend for Arctic Ocean sea ice cover has declined every month for 27 years in a loss driven both by natural cycles and the steady rise in greenhouse gas concentrations.
Supercomputing climate models — where scientists wrestle a universe of data about human emissions and weather through a galaxy of equations — now show uncanny matches to the real world of floes and open leads.
All this cogitation conjures a startling scenario: the Arctic Ocean will soon be free of ice during late summer, possibly as soon as 2040 and almost certainly by 2100.
USFWS
“Given the agreement between models and observations, a transition to a seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean as the system warms seems increasingly certain,” according to new review by senior climate scientist Mark Serreze and researcher Julienne Stroeve with the National Snow and Ice Data Center, and Marika Holland from the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
“The unresolved questions regard when this new arctic state will be realized, how rapid the transition will be, and what will be the impacts of this new state on the Arctic and the rest of the globe.”
And don’t be thinking in terms of some glacial, geologic-speed shift.
“This transition to a new arctic state may be rapid once the ice thins to a more vulnerable state,” the three authors write in Perspectives on the Arctic’s Shrinking Sea-Ice Cover, published March 16 in the journal of Science.
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