An Upheaval at the Ends of the World

Read: The pond at the North Pole
Alex Gardner, another glaciologist at nasa, said that warming oceans—and not just a warming climate overall—seemed to be causing the decline in glacier levels. Some of the fastest-collapsing glaciers in the world—such as the Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland—are primarily giving way because of warm ocean waters wearing at their icy fronts.
Both researchers said that existing models of sea-level rise may not account for these changes. “We weren’t expecting it because we never knew it was happening,” Walker said. “This isn’t new; it started happening 10 years ago. We just couldn’t see it.”

Not that the other end of the world is doing much better. noaa’s new Arctic Report Card—an annual analysis, now in its 13th edition—finds that the world’s Far North is going through a tremendous upheaval. The report says that the catastrophic effects of climate change now wreak mayhem in every season of the year.
In the winter, when the Arctic Ocean has historically frozen into an enormous skating rink, sea ice now struggles to form at all. 2018 was the second-worst year on record for sea ice, the report says. The Arctic is now so warm that it hemorrhages ice even at the coldest, darkest time of the year: “During two weeks in February—normally the most important weeks for sea-ice growth in the year—the Bering Sea actually lost an area of ice the size of Idaho,” said Don Perovich, a geophysicist at Dartmouth, on Tuesday.
But he did not endorse any attempt to fight climate change. “The data is the data. Changes are occurring,” he said. “What we need to do is adapt to those changes—and we can adapt as a country effectively by better understanding and improving our predictions.”
Asked whether he or any other senior noaa official had talked to the president about climate change, he admitted he had not, and did not acknowledge any other efforts. “No,” he said. “I personally have not briefed the president on climate change.”
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