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Web edition: September 11, 2012
During the winter, frozen sea ice covers most of the Arctic Ocean. Every summer, a portion of that ice melts away. Government scientists who keep track of those losses during the warmer months now report this summer has been one for the record books.
On August 26, Arctic sea ice cover fell to 4.1 million square kilometers (about 1.6 million square miles). That’s the smallest ice cover ever observed since scientists started using satellite data in 1979 to measure the yearly melt, note researchers at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.
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Citations
A. Witze. Arctic sea ice hits record low, and keeps going. Science News Online, August 28, 2012. [Go to]
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Apparently small changes in solar energy output are greatly amplified by earth's oceans and watery atmosphere. With the Sun warming again, the next few years should give us more ice melt as the planet continues thawing out of the Little Ice Age.
If we are lucky, the Earth will get as warm as it was a thousand years ago during the Medieval Climate Optimum, which lengthened growing seasons in the temperate zones and created a time of plenty for human civilizations there.
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