Ice in the Arctic is melting even faster than before, and scientists fear the effect is 'unstoppable'
A new study on climate change says that the Arctic is warming up so quickly that the region's summer ice cover could vanish as early as 2013, decades earlier than some had predicted.
The data "appears to be tracking the most pessimistic of the models", Warwick Vincent, director of the centre for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec, said on Thursday.
The year "2013 is starting to look as though it is a lot more reasonable as a prediction", he told the Reuters news agency.
"But each year we've been wrong, each year we're finding that it's a little bit faster than expected."
A team of scientists have spent the last 10 years on Ward Hunt Island, a remote spot at least 4,000km northwest of Ottawa, studying the summer ice cover in the Canadian Arctic, a few degrees from the North Pole.
After sharing his findings with the Canadian parliament, Vincent said: "I was astounded as to how fast the changes are taking place. The extent of open water is something that we haven't experienced in the 10 years that I've been working up there.
"We are losing, irreversibly, major features of the Canadian ice scape and that suggests that these more pessimistic models are really much closer to reality."
"Some of the environmental effect is unstoppable. We're in a train of events at the moment where there are changes taking place that we are unable to reverse, the loss of these ice shelves, for example," Vincent said.
Source: Al Jazeera
A new study on climate change says that the Arctic is warming up so quickly that the region's summer ice cover could vanish as early as 2013, decades earlier than some had predicted.The data "appears to be tracking the most pessimistic of the models", Warwick Vincent, director of the centre for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec, said on Thursday.
The year "2013 is starting to look as though it is a lot more reasonable as a prediction", he told the Reuters news agency.
"But each year we've been wrong, each year we're finding that it's a little bit faster than expected."
A team of scientists have spent the last 10 years on Ward Hunt Island, a remote spot at least 4,000km northwest of Ottawa, studying the summer ice cover in the Canadian Arctic, a few degrees from the North Pole.
After sharing his findings with the Canadian parliament, Vincent said: "I was astounded as to how fast the changes are taking place. The extent of open water is something that we haven't experienced in the 10 years that I've been working up there."We are losing, irreversibly, major features of the Canadian ice scape and that suggests that these more pessimistic models are really much closer to reality."
"Some of the environmental effect is unstoppable. We're in a train of events at the moment where there are changes taking place that we are unable to reverse, the loss of these ice shelves, for example," Vincent said.
Source: Al Jazeera
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