Arctic Thaw and the World

Arctic Thaw and the World

What happens in Arctic region cannot be treated as something happening

in a far end of the world irrelevant to any of us.

The environmental pressure group Greenpeace has claimed on September 2, 2009 that Greenland's glaciers are melting into the sea faster than ever before. Glaciers move when melting occurs from the effects of global warming, causing masses of ice to slide into fjords and the sea. Greenland's Helheim glacier, which measures six kilometers wide (four miles) and is one kilometer thick, moves about 25 meters (yards) a day. The group has said that it is twice as fast as when its Arctic Sunrise vessel last visited Greenland in 2005. The speed of the other major glacier in Greenland, Kangerdlugssuaq, is even more dramatic. It moves some 38 meters a day or 14 kilometers a year, Greenpeace said. Dr. Gordon Hamilton, from the University of Maine's Climate Change Institute has said, "Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier is probably the world's fastest moving glacier." He is a member of this year's Greenpeace expedition currently inspecting the glaciers in the north and east of the Danish territory.

The group's Arctic Sunrise vessel left for the region at the end of June and is due to complete its mission at the end of September. According to Greenpeace, the two glaciers produce 10 percent of Greenland's ice output into the North Atlantic. Glaciers that shed their ice cause sea levels to rise. Sea levels are currently on the increase by three millimeters a year and pose a serious threat to people living on islands or in coastal regions.

The combination of thawing Arctic sea ice and melting ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica was likely to raise global sea levels by about 1.2 meters (four feet) by 2100, more than previously thought, according to scientists commissioned by the WWF for the report.

The WWF has said, "The associated flooding of coastal regions will affect more than a quarter of the world's population."

Scientists have expressed concern in recent years about the now visible melting of the Arctic region, to the extent that some have predicted virtually ice-free summers there this century.

Air temperatures in the region have risen by almost twice the global average over the past few decades, according to the peer-reviewed scientific report. That is not just down to melting the polar ice pack, a major cooling agent for global weather patterns and reflector of sunlight. It is also linked to the release of more of the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming that are naturally trapped in frozen soil, it claimed.

Martin Sommerkorn, Senior Advisor on the WWF’s Arctic Program, has said, "What this report says is that a warming Arctic is much more than a local problem, it's a global problem. Simply put, if we do not keep the Arctic cold enough, people across the world will suffer the effects."

Sommerkorn pointed out that the melting had already started having an effect on the weather in the northern hemisphere, such as drier conditions in Scandinavia or the southwest of North America, or more humid Mediterranean winters.

The WWF report concluded that melting sea ice and the release of pockets of greenhouse gases -- carbon dioxide from thawing permafrost and methane seeping from the depths of the warming Arctic Ocean - would also fuel disruption to atmospheric and ocean currents much further afield.

Arctic permafrost stores twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere, according to the WWF. Some 90 percent of near surface permafrost in the Arctic could disappear by the end of the century.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has urged on September 2, 2009 that the world leaders should act now to halt global warming. He said, "The Arctic is similar to sending a canary into a coalmine -- this is a danger warning for the global climate."

World leaders are about to gather at a UN climate summit in Copenhagen in December to try and seal a new international accord on fighting climate change.

Source

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Arctic_thaw_threatens_much_of_world_WWF_report_999.html