No Arctic ice as early as 2020: new research

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 02 May 2007 04:46

Science - Climate

Arctic sea is melting much faster than previous climate models predict and may disappear completely as early as 2020, according to new research.

A study published by a team of scientists in the journal Geophysical Reseach Letters, published by the the American Geophysical Union, compared models used to predict sea ice decline used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) for more than 50 years and compared them to actual observations. The observations show ice declining faster than the models.

"From 1953 to 2006, Arctic sea ice extent at the end of the melt season in September has declined sharply. Though all models used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report show declining Arctic ice cover over the observational record, none of the models individually shows trends comparable to observations during this time period," the report states.

The inescapable conclusion is that Arctic sea ice may be gone far sooner than the IPCC models predict.

"Given that as a group, the models still underestimate observed ice loss, the authors expect that the externally forced component of Artic sea ice decline may be larger. This suggests that the Arctic could be seasonally free of sea ice earlier than the IPCC projections, which range from 2050 to well beyond 2100," an extract of the report states.

According to a report in National Geographic, researcher Julienne Stroeve, lead author of the study, believes that actual Arctic sea ice melt is about 30 years ahead of what the predictive models show. Thus, by the end of the next decade, summers in the Arctic could be completely free of sea ice.