The polar caps of the planet, the regulators of the global climate and on which the future of humanity depends, accelerated its alarming evolution in 2022. While the Arctic has lost 40% of the ice it had 44 years ago, Antarctica, which seems more or less safe from this destruction, offered minimal ice cover last year. because there are records.
If there’s one place on the planet where everything is changing at a dizzying speed, it’s the North Pole. As a result of global warming caused by man, the climate does not change as much as there. One of the most visible manifestations of this change is the sharp reduction in snow and ice cover.
A new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) examining the evolution of the Arctic over 2022 confirms that this region is warming four times faster than the planet as a whole. This is causing a truly alarming 20% loss of ice and snow every decade.
This Arctic ScorecardAs the name of the report, it also points to: It rains more and it snows less in the Arctic. Most of this rain occurs during the winter months, which is a completely icy period when it has snowed but not rained so far.
This fact is accelerating the loss of sea ice as well as changing the wildlife in the region.
Meanwhile, Greenland ice sheet is accelerating melting, as recently confirmed by other studies. As a result of this process, more and more fresh water enters the sea, causing a net rise in sea level and shifting ocean currents.
Why does it rain at the North Pole?
But why is it raining more in the Arctic now? In reality everything is a feed back chain. The lower the sea ice, the more surface water is exposed, thus adding more moisture to the atmosphere.
In fact, satellites have found that the entire region has lost more than 40% of sea ice coverage during the summer months over the past 44 years.
Moreover, Arctic atmosphere itself is warming more than the rest of the planetand warmer air is easier to cause rain.
And there’s more: the polar soil itself is melting. The so-called permafrost is melting, which is nothing more than the frozen ground on which many populations and infrastructures have settled. and endanger these structures. It also threatens the livelihoods of indigenous peoples.
The very white color of snow helps provide the Arctic’s cool temperature as it reflects most of the solar radiation and returns it back to space. If there is less snow in this area, its surface will be darker and therefore absorb more of the radiation.does not reflect it, thus warming the North Pole more.
What ultimately happens is that the Arctic loses its ability to regulate the earth’s climate, and therefore the consequences will be global.
Antarctica recorded a minimum of ice in 2022
But the problems don’t end there. On the other side of the world, in Antarctica, which until now seemed safe from such a situation, the biggest loss of ice since the record was observed in 2022 was observed in 1978.
Unlike the Arctic, Antarctic sea ice has increased by about one percent every decade since the late 1970s.
But in 2017, this trend was broken. and sea ice in the southern hemisphere recorded a repeating historical minimum in 2022.
On February 25, 2022, at the end of summer in the southern hemisphere, data showed significantly less ice than normal in the Bellingshausen/Amundsen Seas, Weddell Sea, and the western Indian Ocean.
Moreover, sea ice coverage across the region was 30% below the average for the thirty-year reference period 1981-2010.
In recent years, many reasons have been proposed to explain the variability of Antarctic sea ice, but there is still no scientific consensus and the phenomenon remains theoretical and unexplored.
The emergence of a new minimum in the size of sea ice in such a short time prompted Chinese researchers to investigate what happened and why.
After analyzing the satellite data, they observed that thermodynamics dominates the processes that cause the sea to melt in the summer. Anomalies of polar heat transport in the Bellingshausen/Amundsen seas, the western Pacific Ocean, and the eastern Weddell Sea, especially.
Global infrared radiation also increases with light, temperature, and albedo (the “whiteness” of a surface, because the whiter it is, the greater the reflection of that radiation, and the darker the absorption, the greater).
The water formed by the melting of the ice in Antarctica flows into the sea and directly contributes to the rise in the level of the oceans. all over the planet.
Reference work: https://www.arctic.noaa.gov/Report-Card/Report-Card-2022/ArtMID/8054/ArticleID/993/Precipitation
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