Climate change: Arctic may be ice free in summer by 2030s, warn scientists

Climate change has already begun to have a devastating impact on the Earth's ecosystems despite numerous international agreements and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. According to a new scientific study, summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean could go extinct by the 2030s.

Capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius in line with the Paris Climate Agreement will not stop the north pole’s vast expanse of floating ice from melting away, the study that was published in the journal Nature Communications said.

"We are very quickly about to lose the Arctic summer sea-ice cover, basically independent of what we are doing. We've been waiting too long now to do something about climate change to still protect the remaining ice," co-author Dirk Notz, a professor at the University of Hamburg's Institute of Oceanography, said.

 

"It is too late to still protect the Arctic summer sea ice as a landscape and as a habitat," Professor Notz was quoted as saying by The New York Times."This will be the first major component of our climate system that we lose because of our emission of greenhouse gases."

Decreased ice cover has a significant and lasting impact on weather patterns, human populations, and ecosystems, not just in the region where the ice is melting, but globally. "It can accelerate global warming by melting permafrost laden with greenhouse gases and sea level rise by melting the Greenland ice sheet," lead author Seung-Ki Min, a researcher at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea, said.

Scientists consider the Arctic Ocean to be "ice-free" when the area covered by sea ice is less than one million square km, which is about seven per cent of the ocean's total area.

Meanwhile, sea ice in Antarctica fell to 1.92 million square km in February, the lowest level on record, and almost one million square km below the 1991-2020 mean.