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Environment

Arctic Sea Ice Is Melting Fast

May 7, 2007 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 85, Issue 19

Arctic sea ice is melting at a much faster rate than projected by the most advanced computer models, says a government-funded study published online on May 1 in Geophysical Research Letters (DOI: 10.1029/2007GL029703). In February, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded on the basis of computer models that September sea ice in the Arctic had declined an average of 2.5% per decade between 1953 and 2006. (September marks the yearly minimum of Arctic sea ice.) In the new study, scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the National Snow & Ice Data Center, both located in Boulder, Colo., compared decades of measurements by ships, airplanes, and satellites and found that the area of September sea ice actually declined 7.8% per decade over that period. As a consequence, they predict that if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, the Arctic will be ice-free in September as soon as 2020.

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