Oldest Arctic Ice Breaking Up

Arctic sea ice average extent, September

From ZME Science:

For decades, global warming has been slowly chipping away Arctic ice, so much that since 1979, the region lost 620,000 square miles (1.6m square kilometers) of winter sea ice cover —  an area more than twice the size of Texas. September Arctic sea ice is now declining at a rate of 13.2 percent per decade, relative to the 1981 to 2010 average. To make matters worse, a new study reports that the Arctic’s thickest and oldest ice is now breaking up due to warming, a “scary” event, one scientist says, that will force us to rethink which parts of the Arctic will (inevitably) melt last.

Since scientists started keeping records, sea ice in the north of Greenland has never broken up — this year it happened twice!

Normally, the sea north of Greenland is so cold that it stays frozen stiff. Scientists have always assumed that if the Arctic ever completely melt — estimated to occur in the late 2030s — then this region will be the last to do so. But this bastion has proven to be far less resilient than some had hoped.

Abnormal heat waves in Europe, such as the temperatures spikes in February and earlier in August, have brought hot winds to Greenland, which have pushed the ice further away from the coast than at any time since satellite imagery began in the 1970s.

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