The Arctic risks having no sea ice during summer by 2030s: study

(TNS) — The Arctic risks being having no sea ice during the summer by the 2030s, according to a new study.

Previous estimates had the region losing sea ice during the warmer months a decade later, another warning that climate change is accelerating.

The study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, compared satellite images and models from 1979 to 2019 to see how ice was changing and determined previous estimates of the sea ice decline had been too low.

The data also showed that, even with significant, immediate cuts to pollution and emissions, the region will be sea ice-free in the summers by the 2050s.

“Unfortunately it has become too late to save Arctic summer sea ice,” one of the researchers, Prof. Dirk Notz, of the University of Hamburg, said. “As scientists, we’ve been warning about the loss of Arctic summer sea ice for decades. This is now the first major component of the Earth system that we are going to lose because of global warming. People didn’t listen to our warnings.

“This brings another warning bell, that the kind of projections that we’ve made for other components of the Earth system will start unfolding in the decades to come.”

The Arctic typically builds up its sea ice during the colder months. It begins to melt in the summer before the cycle starts over in the early fall. However, if these trends continue there could be close to three months with no sea ice before buildup begins again.

A previous NASA study found that September sea ice had already been shrinking by 12.6% per decade.

The decline of sea ice in the Arctic would have worldwide ramifications.

“We need to prepare ourselves for a world with warmer Arctic very soon,” Seung-Ki Min, lead author of the study and professor at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea, told CNN. “Since Arctic warming is suggested to bring weather extremes like heatwaves, wildfires, and floods on Northern mid- and high latitudes, the earlier onset of an ice-free Arctic also implies that we will be experiencing extreme events faster than predicted.”