Arctic sea ice is shrinking to a record low

This summer’s Arctic Ocean-Ice is shrinking to its second-lowest ever in the observation era.

Preliminary figures show that Flores went just under 3.74 million square kilometers (1.44 million square miles) last week.

The only time the 42-year-old spacecraft’s record was beaten was when the pack ice was reduced to 3.41 million square kilometers.

Short days of autumn and frost. This means that the floors are now being redecorated.

• Warm parts of the Greenland ice shelf
• Europe and the United States are ready to measure Antarctic sea ice

It is common for Arctic sea ice to melt every winter and then melt again in the summer, but the September minima, causing some changes, is getting deeper and deeper due to the polar north warming.

Since the satellite regularly monitors floats, the downward trend is about 13% per decade, with the breasts throughout the month.

Computer models project that summer sea ice will regularly fall to less than one million square kilometers after this century.

This is bad news for the weather. Extensive sea ice helps cool the Arctic and the rest of the planet. In its absence, more sunlight will be absorbed by the deeper surface waters of the ocean, promoting warmer temperatures and more ice loss.

“The way I look at it now is that we always have less sea ice,” said Professor Julian Stroeve from the Polar Observatory. It will never go back to the way it was in the 1980s or 1990s. And modeling (CPOM) at University College London (UCL), UK.

“But whether or not we get a new record low from one year to the next – it really depends a lot on what happens in the summer season,” he told BBC News.

Twelfth was notable for some of the late storms that helped break the September lows. Not so in the twenties, but there were some very hot conditions, especially on the Siberian side of the ocean, which contributed much to the melting of the early season.

Pro Strow spent four and a half months working on the ice last winter, studying the situation with an international team based on the German research ship Polarston.

The ship set to work on its own in October last year, although the Covid-19 crisis resulted in the resumption and difficulties of the crew hampering the plan to some extent.

The CPOM-UCL scientist asked Pulanstran’s mosaic mission to test how accurately astronaut sensors view ice.

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Of particular interest to him are the radar altimeters that measure the thickness of floats by measuring the difference in height between the surface of the sea ice and the surface of the ocean – the ice-free board.

Satellites, such as the European Space Agency’s Cryosat-2 platform, can use this observation to detect the depth of a submerged part of a floor – ice draft – and thus obtain a 3D view of packed ice. That’s just the limit of its 2D.

The complication in this approach is taking care of any snow that may be sitting on the ice. This will change the distance from which the radar measurement signal will bounce back to the satellite.

From Pro Strowave’s winter experiments, it appears that Essa’s cryosat mission has a tendency to detect sea-ice that is actually more dense.

The space agency, in collaboration with the European Union, is now developing a new spacecraft called Crystal that will operate at two different radar frequencies.

“This will give you a chance to recover both the thickness of the ice and the depth of the ice on the same satellite system. “At the same time, we want to,” said Professor Stroyev.

Isa on Monday announced a 300 300 million (27 5,275 million) contract with aerospace maker Airbus to begin crystal development.

Jonathan.Amos- [email protected] And follow me on Twitter: BBCMS