Arctic Ice Loosing ?

While Group of Eight leaders in Italy haggle over the amount of

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greenhouse gases to cut, grim Arctic reports released this week suggest the planet is not waiting for a consensus.

NASA scientists say that Arctic sea ice has thinned dramatically between the winters of 2004 and 2008 with thin ice replacing older, thicker ice for the first time on record, according to a Science Daily report today.

Based on data from a NASA earth-orbiting satellite, scientists reported that overall Arctic sea ice thinned about 7 inches a year during the four winters recorded, for a total of 2.2 foot of shrinkage. The total area for older, thicker ice shrank by 42 percent, said researchers.

Scientists from NASA and the University of Washington in Seattle conducted the study to make the first basin-wide estimate of the thickness and volume of the Arctic Ocean's ice cover.



Research team leader Ron Kwok of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said "the thickness and volume of the ice cover is continuing to decline making the ice more vulnerable to continued shrinkage."

The findings of their study were published in the July 7 edition of the Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans.

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Another report this week found that permafrost in the Arctic and boreal regions have twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere, according to the Science Daily report.



Findings are more than double that previously estimated, say scientists, and raise concerns over the role of northern regions as greenhouse gas sources, according to lead author Dr. Charles Tarnocai, of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Ottawa.

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"We now estimate the deposits contain over 1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon," said Tarnocai, "about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere."

Dr. Pep Canadell, Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project at CSIRO, Australia, co-author of the study, said the huge deposits of carbon means that any thawing of permafrost due to global warming would lead to significant emissions of greenhouse gases.



The study was published this week in the journal of Global Biogeochemical Cycles, and the radiocarbon study was published in Nature.