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Oceans to be ice-free within century, study says
Greenwire
08/24/2005 06:24 PM


Body: Arctic ice melting is rapidly increasing without a reversal in sight, according to a report released yesterday by the National Science Foundation's Arctic System Science Committee. The study was published in this week's Eos, the weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union.

Oceans could be ice-free within a century due to melting while land-based glaciers could take much longer but could raise the sea levels, potentially affecting coastal regions worldwide.

"What really makes the Arctic different from the rest of the nonpolar world is the permanent ice in the ground, in the ocean, and on land," said Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona the ASS committee. "We see all of that ice melting already, and we envision that it will melt back much more dramatically in the future, as we move toward this more permanent ice-free state," he said (Randolph E. Schmid, AP/Seattle Times, Aug. 24).

No longer are scientists questioning whether melting could happen, but instead they are trying to figure out when, Overpeck said.

"If we lose the sea ice in the summer, there will be strong downstream effects," said Mark Serreze, a senior research scientist with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and one of the paper's co-authors. "The Arctic is the heat sink of the Northern Hemisphere, and the equator the heat source. If we change the nature of that Arctic heat sink, we radically alter that system" (Todd Neff, Boulder Daily Camera, Aug. 24). -- LK

Reprinted from Greenwire with permission from E&E Publishing, LLC
http://www.eenews.net/Greenwire.htm