Animation Shows Alarming Trend in the Arctic Ocean
by The Daily Eye Team January 24 2015, 3:05 pm Estimated Reading Time: 0 mins, 58 secsNo, it's not an ultrasound of someone's internal organs. Its sea ice in the Arctic Ocean melting because of climate change. ?Scientists have been using satellites to monitor the yearly fluctuation in the extent of sea ice in the Arctic since the 1970s. But the amount of area covered by sea ice is far from the whole story. Satellites can also be used to measure the age of the ice ? and scientists are worried about the data their instruments are beaming back to Earth. Due to warming ocean temperatures over the past several decades, a greater amount of perennial ice, that is: sea ice that is more than a year old, is melting.
"We've come to an era where the older ice is getting to be less observed and the coverage of the ice pack now is a lot more first-year ice and second-year ice," Mark Tschudi, a research associate at the University of Colorado-Boulder told VICE News. "In general, older ice tends to be thicker ice, so the fact that the pack has transformed into a pack of younger ice means it's more susceptible to melt out in the summer."