Latest news with #LinetteBoisvert
Yahoo
30-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Earth's sea ice hits all-time low, NASA satellites reveal
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. New research from NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Colorado measured Arctic sea ice cover on March 22, during what should've been its annual peak. In conclusion, the agency reported seeing 5.53 million square miles (14.33 million square kilometers) of sea ice — for context, that's the lowest Arctic winter sea ice levels have ever been. To make matters worse, NASA scientists also discovered that, this year, summer ice in the Antarctic retreated to 764,000 square miles (1.98 million square kilometers) as of March 1, tying for "the second lowest minimum extent ever recorded there." The combined loss of sea ice in both polar regions has led to an all-time low for total sea ice on the planet. In mid-February 2025, ice coverage globally declined by over million square miles (2.5 million square kilometers) from what the average was prior to 2010. Altogether, the missing sea ice is now roughly the same size as the continental United States east of the Mississippi. "We're going to come into this next summer season with less ice to begin with," Linette Boisvert, an ice scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland said in a statement. "It doesn't bode well for the future." "We're going to come into this next summer season with less ice to begin with," Linette Boisvert, an ice scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland said in a statement. "It doesn't bode well for the future." Sea ice that covers the Arctic plays a fundamental role in the region's ecosystem — for instance impacting the way animals breed and find food. And, with less sea ice in winter months, storms can generally become more severe and coastal erosion can increase. Sea ice reduction happens when more sea ice melts during the summer compared to what freezes during the winter. Last year was Earth's warmest year on record. The Global Carbon Project found that 2024 was also a record high for global carbon emissions from fossil fuels. Scientists find these measurements by using satellites that track natural radiation in the microwave range — the radiation is different for open water and sea ice. Historical data is also used, like data collected in the 1970s and 1980s with the Nimbus-7 satellite. Related Stories: — Arctic ice is melting faster than expected — and the culprit could be dust — How satellite data has proven climate change is a climate crisis — How climate change could make Earth's space junk problem even worse "It's not yet clear whether the Southern Hemisphere has entered a new norm with perennially low ice or if the Antarctic is in a passing phase that will revert to prior levels in the years to come," Walt Meier, an ice scientist with NSIDC, said in the same statement. But it's worth considering that sea ice this year has continued the downward trend scientists have been following for several decades.
Arab News
29-03-2025
- Science
- Arab News
Arctic sea ice hits lowest peak in satellite record, says US agency
Arctic sea ice forms and expands during the dark, frigid northern winter, reaching its seasonal high point in MarchIn recent years, less new ice has formed, and the accumulation of multi-year ice has steadily declinedWASHINGTON: This year's Arctic Sea ice peak is the lowest in the 47-year satellite record, according to data released by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) on Thursday, as the planet continues to swelter under the mounting effects of human-driven climate sea ice forms and expands during the dark, frigid northern winter, reaching its seasonal high point in March. But in recent years, less new ice has formed, and the accumulation of multi-year ice has steadily maximum sea ice level for 2025 was likely reached on March 22, measuring 14.33 million square kilometers (5.53 million square miles) — below the previous low of 14.41 million square kilometers set in 2017.'This new record low is yet another indicator of how Arctic sea ice has fundamentally changed from earlier decades,' said NSIDC senior research scientist Walt Meier in a statement.'But even more importantly than the record low is that this year adds yet another data point to the continuing long-term loss of Arctic sea ice in all seasons.'The Arctic record follows a near-record-low summer minimum in the Antarctic, where seasons are 2025 Antarctic sea ice minimum, reached on March 1, was just 1.98 million square kilometers, tying for the second-lowest annual minimum in the satellite record, alongside 2022 and Arctic and Antarctic sea ice cover — frozen ocean water that floats on the surface — plunged to a record low in mid-February, more than a million square miles below the pre-2010 average. That is an area larger than the entire country of Algeria.'We're going to come into this next summer season with less ice to begin with,' said Linette Boisvert, an ice scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. 'It doesn't bode well for the future.'US scientists primarily monitor sea ice using satellites from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), which detect Earth's microwave open water and sea ice emit microwave energy differently, the contrast allows sea ice to stand out clearly in satellite imagery — even through cloud cover, which obscures traditional optical data is supplemented with historical records, including early observations from the Nimbus-7 satellite, which operated from 1978 to floating sea ice does not directly raise sea levels, its disappearance sets off a cascade of climate consequences, altering weather patterns, disrupting ocean currents, and threatening ecosystems and human reflective ice gives way to the darker ocean, more solar energy is absorbed rather than reflected back into space, accelerating both ice melt and global Arctic ice is also reshaping geopolitics, opening new shipping lanes and drawing geopolitical interest. Since taking office this year, US President Donald Trump has said his country must control Greenland, a Danish autonomous territory rich in mineral loss of polar ice spells disaster for numerous species, robbing polar bears, seals, and penguins of crucial habitat used for shelter, hunting, and year was the hottest on record, and the trend continues: 2025 began with the warmest January ever recorded, followed by the third-warmest predicts that La Nina weather conditions, which tend to cool global temperatures, are likely to give way to neutral conditions that would persist over the Northern Hemisphere regions are especially vulnerable to global warming, heating several times faster than the global mid-2023, only July 2024 fell below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, raising concerns that the Paris Agreement's goal of limiting long-term warming to 1.5C may be slipping out of reach.
New York Times
27-03-2025
- Science
- New York Times
Global Sea Ice Hits a New Low
Earth is missing a lot of sea ice this year. Enough to cover the entire United States east of the Mississippi. That was announced by researchers at NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center on Thursday, who said the amount of sea ice on the planet had reached the lowest level ever recorded in March. The record comes days after the World Meteorological Organization reported that the past 10 years have been the 10 hottest on record, with 2024 the hottest year. The global rise in temperatures is tied to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels. 'Warming temperatures drive melting ice across the globe, and because we're seeing such high temperatures, it's not surprising that this year we're seeing the least amount of ice coverage,' said Linette Boisvert, an ice scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The center has been compiling data for almost 50 years, primarily through a Department of Defense satellite program. The global sea ice extent includes measurements taken in both the Southern Hemisphere and the Northern Hemisphere, which experience opposite seasons. Dr. Boisvert compared the freezing and melting of sea ice between winter and summer to the heartbeat of the planet. The pulses between the winter maximum and summer minimum used to be shorter. But with more sea ice melting away, the distance between pulses has grown larger. 'It's like the heartbeat of the planet is slowing down,' Dr. Boisvert said. 'It's not good.' Sea ice plays many important roles for the global climate: Its white surface can reflect energy back into space, helping the planet cool. It also acts like a blanket for the ocean, insulating it and preventing ocean heat from reaching the atmosphere. Less sea ice means more heat goes in Earth's systems, warming the atmosphere and the oceans. The extent of sea ice isn't the only measurement scientists are tracking. The thickness of the ice also matters and, since the 1980s, Arctic sea ice has become thinner. While thicker sea ice tends to survive the summer melt, nowadays most of the sea ice completely melts during the summer, preventing it from thickening year after year. More open ocean means more dark surfaces to absorb more heat from the sun, which in turn melts more ice. The melting becomes its own positive feedback loop. Changes in remote polar regions affect the rest of the globe, including changes to ocean currents and weather patterns. 'It's really important to have scientists' eyes on the data,' Dr. Boisvert said. 'It would be really detrimental not to have funding for this type of work.' Melting sea ice also has negative implications for marine life, tourism in polar regions and global shipping. It's important for military activities, Indigenous communities in Alaska and the fishing industry, according to Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, a research organization at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The trend of decreasing sea ice in the Arctic is an increasingly clear indicator of global warming, he said. 'We're seeing something that's pretty unprecedented, at least on scales of human society for thousands of years,' Dr. Meier said. Under the Trump administration, scientific agencies monitoring weather and climate data have been under threat. In March, NASA fired its chief scientist and eliminated more than a dozen other senior positions. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which collects global climate data, fired hundreds of probationary employees in February and officials said officials they had plans to shrink its work force by nearly 20 percent. Projects focused on polar regions lost managers who oversee research when the National Science Foundation laid off about a tenth of its work force. When asked about the cuts, Dr. Meier noted that groups in Europe and Japan also monitor global sea ice. 'It's not like there's not going to be any knowledge of what's going on in the Arctic, regardless of what happens in the U.S.,' he said 'But I, and I think all of us here at N.S.I.D.C., are focused on the data and our research and doing our best to serve the public by keeping people informed on what's happening in the polar regions.'
Yahoo
16-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Arctic ice is melting faster than expected — and the culprit could be dust
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. NASA's most ambitious Arctic voyage to date has revealed surprisingly high concentrations of ice particles in clouds over Greenland, a clue that may help explain why Arctic ice is melting even faster than predicted. "The Arctic is changing faster than anywhere else on the planet, so the question we're trying to ask here is: Is the Arctic going to change fast — or really fast?" Patrick Taylor, the deputy science lead for the mission known as ARCSIX, for Arctic Radiation Cloud Aerosol Surface Interaction Experiment, told This bold mission to one of the world's most forbidding regions involved sending a small fleet of instrument-laden planes, including a NASA C-130 and a P-3 Orion, to dart through Arctic clouds and drop buoys into gaps in iceberg-laden waters below. While agency scientists are still studying the data, which was collected last summer, they say it's already clear that dust from Greenland's increasingly exposed landmass is melting vulnerable sea ice toward northern parts of the globe. It's like a self-reinforcing feedback loop that spells danger for one of the planet's most vulnerable regions. The ARCSIX plane flew in the summer of 2024, from May until July 25, when seasonal sea ice melt was at its height. The team expected to find ice with a thickness of about 11.5 feet (3.5 meters); instead, they saw a thickness of just 7.2 feet (2.2 meters). "It's alluding to the fact that this thicker sea ice north of Greenland is not as sustainable as it once was," Linette Boisvert, the ARCSIX cryosphere lead, told The Arctic has lost about 12% of its ice every decade since satellite records began in 1979, equaling about 1.16 million square miles of ice (3 million square kilometers),an area bigger than Alaska, Texas, California and Montana combined — and the pace appears to be visibly accelerating, with Arctic sea ice now shrinking at a rate of 12.2% per decade, six times as fast as the 1990s. Specifically, NASA launched ARCSIX to try to find out how long the sea ice in the Arctic had left, and the summer of flying yielded "the most comprehensive set of sea ice, cloud, radiation and aerosol measurements ever collected in the Arctic," Taylor said. Collecting so much data in such a remote place was an extreme logistics challenge, requiring a team so large that NASA had to rent extra seats on a Space Force transport plane to ship cargo and extra supplies. "I get shivers just thinking about it," Christina McCluskey, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Science, told One of the transport flights to Pituffik Space Base in far northeastern Greenland carried a NASA flag, a gift from the U.S. Space Force to the base commander, who displayed it proudly in the base coffee shop and community center. To measure the thickness of the ice, NASA dropped buoys with thermometers attached to gaps between the floating ice. It was a tricky operation: some of the buoys were smashed apart by icebergs, while others were under threat by curious animals — which is one reason the buoys had to be painted white. "If you make them a different color, polar bears become attracted to them and will destroy them,' says Taylor. Over time, he said, the surviving buoys will yield valuable data. "Because those buoys are simple points, the aircraft data that we took will tell us spatially what's the variability of that sea ice thickness … putting the two together will give us a clear picture of how thick this multi-year ice is." Climate models — scientific estimates of how the Earth's climate might change in the future — run on supercomputers that have to process enormous amounts of data every day as clouds form and dissipate all over the world. One aspect of these models concerns particles within clouds, which are sometimes only nanometers wide, that need to be scaled up and measured across the surface of the Earth. "The scales we need to understand are insane," says McCluskey. "Clouds are the most fascinating things on the planet, I see them as the way in which everything comes together." NASA scientists looking at seven years of satellite data had previously found that 4.5% of clouds below 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit) changed from liquid to ice when they became dusty. The scientists estimated that the clouds contained 93 nanograms of dust per cubic meter — but results from the ARCSIX mission are expected to reveal far higher dust concentrations. "We're trying to figure out why we're finding all this ice in the clouds," says Taylor. "The answer could help scientists understand the pace of Arctic melt." Clouds reflect sunlight and slow down the melting of ice, protecting the Arctic. Ice crystals make clouds heavier and more likely to dissipate, leaving the ice vulnerable to rays of hot sun. But the ice can't form in the clouds without something to latch on to. That's where the dust comes in, providing a kind of "seed" or "nucleus" for the ice to form around. NASA scientists hypothesize that as the ice retreats, more of Greenland's exposed landmass is shedding dust, which is then carried north by heavy winds to form ice particles in the clouds above. These dust-heavy clouds then disappear more quickly and leave more Arctic ice exposed, hastening the melt. "The sea ice north of Greenland had a giant opening in it in the summer months," says Boisvert. "We think it's caused by really warm, moist air being blown through Fram Strait,' a passage between Greenland and Svalbard, "up and towards the central Arctic." — NASA aircraft uncovers site of secret Cold War nuclear missile tunnels under Greenland ice sheet — How satellite data has proven climate change is a climate crisis — The next ice age is coming in 10,000 years — unless climate change prevents it Further analysis of the data the team collected is expected to shed light on how quickly the Arctic will lose its ice. "That's why these results are so important because they help quantify the amount of ice crystals and we can start plugging that into our models to understand how clouds will change," Julia Schmale, a German scientist who specializes in aerosols and their interactions with clouds, told
