Knowledge of global warming is nothing new, and neither is the reality that the polar ice caps are melting, but new evidence shows that ice sheets in the Arctic Sea are melting at increasingly accelerated rates. Between 1975 and the year 2000, the arctic ice had thinned by 36 percent. This amount is half of what the current study has shown so far from 2000 to the present. What this indicates is that the ice sheets in the Arctic Sea have thinned more in the past 15 years than they did in the 25 years before that. The rate at which the ice is melting is clearly accelerating, and there’s no reason to think it will slow down.

 

Ron Lindsay of the University of Washington (UW) Applied Physics Laboratory, lead researcher on this study and climatologist, says, “We knew the ice was thinning, but we now have additional confirmation on how fast, and we can see that it’s not slowing down.” Scientists are working to determine, maybe not if but when, the Arctic Sea will start experiencing periodic stints annually when it is completely ice-free. If the ice were to keep melting until it got to that point, it would affect local ecosystems, shipping routes and oceanic and atmospheric patterns.

 

Co-author on the Arctic ice study, Axel Schweiger, says, ““Using all these different observations that have been collected over time, it pretty much verifies the trend that we have from the model for the past 13 years, though our estimate of thinning compared to previous decades may have been a little slow.” Lindsay and Schweiger’s goal now is to get more data through direct observation instead of just prediction models. We need to know what is actually happening in order to effectively address the ice melting issue.