Word: arctic ocean
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Cost of a Warming Arctic" study, funded by the Pew Environment Group, assessed trends in the Arctic's cooling mechanisms and examined the financial consequences. The research team looked at the rate at which surfaces change from white ice and snow to ocean or exposed tundra, since darker surfaces absorb, rather than reflect, solar heat. According to the report, this shift and the increased methane emissions linked with melting permafrost currently slap us with annual losses in the range of $61 billion to $371 "resulting from such changes as heat waves and flooding." But the anticipated monetary fallout described...
...frequently admit, and even when researchers uncover a new piece of data, it isn't always clear what it means. That's very much the case with a new paper about methane emissions, published Thursday in Science. Based on a series of expeditions to the margins of the Arctic Ocean by ship and helicopter, University of Alaska researcher Natalia Shakhova and her colleagues report that methane, a greenhouse gas that is 30 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, is bubbling up from the continental shelf and leaking into the atmosphere. The estimated total...
Scientists have made lots of projections over the past few years about how warming temperatures and a changing climate will affect the planet. Real-world measurements have confirmed at least some of them: sea level is clearly rising, for instance, and the ice that covers the Arctic Ocean is shrinking and thinning - in the latter case, faster than anyone had expected just a few years...
...scientists feared the record-thin Arctic ice cover might melt away. But it didn't, because of unusually favorable ocean currents and weather patterns. "Early in the 2009 season it looked like we might be on the way to a record melt," says Julienne Stroeve, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, in Boulder, Colo., "but then winds spread the ice out, so the overall coverage ended up being greater than in 2007." Without those winds, in other words, 2009 might have set a new record for open water. But as it happened, ice cover...
...extent were developed a long time ago," says Stroeve, "based on what 'typical' ice looked like at that time. We know there are errors with the measurements." The weakness in multiyear ice also suggests that if the unfavorable winds and currents that caused the 2007 meltback should recur, the Arctic Ocean could undergo another especially dramatic summer melt. Not just the first-year ice might go, but also some of the "rotten" multiyear ice that Barber encountered...