Arctic ice will disappear completely by 2050: new study

Arctic ice will disappear completely by 2050: new study
Arctic ice will disappear completely by 2050: new study
Anonim

Climatologists say that in thirty years the Arctic will be so hot that it will lose all its ice over the summer.

For millions of years, the same cycle took place in the Arctic. In winter, the sea ice layer expanded as the air temperature dropped below freezing. In the summer, part of the ice thawed, and the salt water returned to the ocean. However, then the era of man came - and everything changed.

Due to the fact that the abundance of greenhouse gases warms the atmosphere from year to year, the total volume of ice began to gradually decrease. However, even in summer, the Arctic remained buried under a layer of ice, which simply did not have time to melt before the onset of winter. However, this will soon come to an end.

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A visual comparison of the size of the Arctic ice cover in 1984 and 2016

The results of a recent analysis showed that in just a few decades, the Arctic Ocean will be completely free of ice for the summer period. And this is in the most optimistic case if we manage to seriously reduce the amount of harmful emissions into the atmosphere.

“The vast majority of our models indicate that ice in the Arctic will simply disappear by 2050, provided that CO2 emissions are at least 1,000 gigatons less than in 2019,” the researchers write.

What does this mean for you and me? First, the planet will then begin to warm up even faster, since the ice will no longer reflect much of the sunlight back into the atmosphere. In addition, the level of the world's oceans will rise during the Arctic summer, and the local oceanic fauna will have to dramatically adapt to changing conditions. What will happen to the ecology of this region as a result, we will find out in a couple of decades.

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