Researchers Predict An Ice-Less Arctic By 2040

Ice is melting so fast in the Arctic that the North Pole will be in the open sea in 30 years, according to leading climatologists.


Ships will be able to sail over the top of the world and tourists will be able visit what was, until climate change, one of the planet's most inaccessible landscapes.

American researchers, assessing the impact of carbon emissions on world climate have calculated that late summer in the Arctic will be ice-free by 2040 or earlier, well within a lifetime.

Some ice would still be found on coastlines, notably Greenland and Ellesmere Island, but the rest of the Arctic Ocean, including the pole, would be open water.

The researchers, who were funded by NASA, said that the ice retreat is likely to remain fairly constant until 2024 when there will be a sudden speeding up of the process.

In 30 to 50 years, they concluded, summer sea ice will have vanished from almost the entire Arctic region.

Their forecast may, however, already be out of date and over-optimistic, said Professor Chris Rapley, head of the British Antarctic Survey.

He said a recent study by the Global Carbon Project suggested that emissions were rising more than twice as fast as in 2000, which was likely to speed up ice-loss even further.

"The study may be an underestimate of when the Arctic summer ice might be all gone," he said. "It could well be their assumptions are more optimistic than they might be."

He described the report as "worrying" but said it fitted into recent findings based on satellite observations of the speed at which ice was retreating.

Over the past 25 years Arctic ice has been reduced by 25 percent. Scientists have long realised that ice reflects heat and as the quantity reduces so, too, does the amount of heat that can be bounced away from the Earth. However, the study team from the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, and two U.S. universities, identified warmer ocean currents as an additional factor to be considered.more