When the white sea-ice cover shrinks, less solar energy is reflected back into space – which in turn actually accelerates global warming, the dominant factor for the historic melt. „This vicious circle has impacts on the whole planet as well as regionally, contributing for instance to to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet that stores a potential for long-term sea-level rise of several meters,” said Levermann who is a lead-author of the sea-level-change chapter in the upcoming assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Peter Lemke of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research pointed out that the Arctic sea-ice, though far away, actually matters for Europe. The sea-ice melt for instance might disturb global oceanic circulation patterns as well as atmospheric circulation patterns. Lars Kaleschke of the Universitiy of Hamburg highlighted that not just the surface area covered by ice is reduced but also the thickness. In fact, the overall volume of the ice around the North Pole has shrunk by roughly three quarters. Dirk Notz of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology said that Arctic summer sea-ice might disappear almost completely by the middle of our century already.
Weblink to additional information at the University of Hamburg
Weblink to a background paper by the German ice researchers
(only available in German)
