Related topics: climate change

Researchers take on atmospheric effects of Arctic snowmelt

Researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute are exploring the changing chemistry of the Arctic's atmosphere to help answer the question of what happens as snow and ice begin to melt.

Unraveling a major cause of sea ice retreat in the Arctic Ocean

Ice-covered sea areas in the Arctic Ocean during summer have nearly halved since the 1970s and 1980s, raising alarm that the ocean is shifting from a multiyear to a seasonal ice zone. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate ...

NASA scientists seek to improve sea ice predictions

Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is in a downward spiral, with summer minimum extents about 40 percent smaller than in the 1980s. But predicting how the sea ice is going to behave in a particular year is tricky: There are still ...

The glaciers are going

As can be seen above, the Waggonwaybreen glacier in Svalbard, Norway, has retreated substantially since 1900. Svalbard's glaciers are not only retreating, they are also losing about two feet of their thickness each year. ...

Melting sea ice may lead to more life in the sea

When spring arrives in the Arctic, both snow and sea ice melt, forming melt ponds on the surface of the sea ice. Every year, as global warming increases, there are more and larger melt ponds.

Solving the mystery of the Arctic's green ice

In 2011, researchers observed something that should be impossible—a massive bloom of phytoplankton growing under Arctic sea ice in conditions that should have been far too dark for anything requiring photosynthesis to survive. ...

NASA study improves forecasts of summer Arctic sea ice

The Arctic has been losing sea ice over the past several decades as Earth warms. However, each year, as the sea ice starts to melt in the spring following its maximum wintertime extent, scientists still struggle to estimate ...

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