The Siberian Arctic region loss its ice coverage faster than ever, data from the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) shows. The region has now less ice being naturally formed but the real threat is accelerated melting speed. The ice shield melts faster than any year in the past four decades.
The amount of ice that has currently formed near the North Pole throughout 2020 becomes lesser. But the most alarming aspect is speed of melting, it increased a lot since 1979. In other words, the huge ice mass is disappearing and regenerating.
The research team from the NSIDC has elaborated all data and formed the diagram, which shows the ice sheets that are more than four years old currently only exist north of Canada and Greenland.
On the other side of the North Pole however, territories of the Russian Siberia are facing an unprecedented heatwave. According to the cardiologists, it would only occur every 80,000 years if not for human interference. That area has little to no new ice that has formed within the last year.
Another comparison released by the leading author Dr Labe and the NSIDC shows that in 2020, the Siberian Arctic’s sea ice mass is lower than any year since 1979. In general, it has never dropped so low so early, based on natural freezing and melting cycles.
“Through the first half of July 2020, sea ice extent declined by an average of 146,000 square kilometres per day, considerably faster than the 1981 to 2010 average rate of 85,900 square kilometres per day,” Labe says.
The research centre has attributed the record-low ice levels to vast areas of open water caused by already-melting ice, as well as “unusually high” air temperatures of up to 10C in the middle of the Arctic.
The study, which has not yet gone through peer review, looked at Siberia from January to June, including a day that hit 38C for a new Arctic record.
Scientists from the United Kingdom, Russia, France, Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland used 70 climate models running thousands of complex simulations comparing current conditions to a world without man-made warming from the burning of coal, oil and gas.
They found that without climate change the type of prolonged heat that hit Siberia would happen once in 80,000 years, “effectively impossible without human influence,” said study lead author Andrew Ciavarella, a scientist at the UK Met Office.
