AGU: Geophysical Research Letters

 

Editors' Highlight

Arctic could be nearly free of ice in 30 years

The Arctic is losing ice much faster than anticipated. By 2008, the Arctic had already reached a milestone of two sequential years of extremely low summer sea ice extent, a situation that the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report predicted would not occur until much later in the century. To improve predictions of Arctic sea ice extent, Wang and Overland (2009) performed a new analysis based on the six models (out of 23 available for IPCC analysis) that best reproduced ice extents observed in the present and recent past. Three of the models they selected used sophisticated sea ice physics calculations, giving the authors additional confidence in the chosen models. On the basis of the average of these six models, the authors predicted that by summer 2037, the Arctic could be nearly free of ice, with less than 1 million square kilometers of ice coverage, with quartiles at ±10 years. By contrast, about 4.6 million square kilometers of sea ice exist today. In addition to reduced sea ice extent, the authors predict that sea ice thickness will also decline rapidly.

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