incredibly shrinking ice

Here's another story, made in Alaska by the Anchorage Daily News' George Bryson, about recent research suggesting the Arctic ice cap is melting faster than scientists thought.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, widely regarded as the gold standard for such projections, had estimated that summer sea ice in the Arctic probably declined at a rate of 2.5 percent a decade from 1953 to 2006. At that rate, the IPCC said, the summer ice cap would disappear sometime between 2050 and next century.

That estimate reflected the average of 18 separate IPCC climate scenarios, the most pessimistic of which placed the rate of ice shrinkage at 5.4 percent a decade.

But newly available data, "blending early aircraft and ship reports with more recent satellite measurements," show that the September ice actually declined at a rate of about 7.8 percent per decade from 1953 to 2006, the ice data center reported in a press statement.

"Because of this disparity, the shrinking of summertime ice is about 30 years ahead of the climate model projections," said NSIDC scientist and co-author Ted Scambos.

That means the summer ice cap could disappear earlier than 2050. If it does, scientists say, the Earth will begin warming much more rapidly -- as the Arctic Ocean begins to soak up all of the sun's rays without the protective shield of the ice cap to bounce them back into space.

In Alaska, polar bears would lose the summer ice floes they depend upon to hunt for seals. Instead, they'd have to find food on the mainland. But that might be the least of the Earth's ills. If a rapidly warming climate causes major portions of Greenland or Antarctica to melt, the rising sea level would drown low-lying seaports and communities all around the world. Portions of Manhattan and the coast of Florida would disappear.

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