Environment Support

ARE THE POLAR ICE CAPS MELTING?

Snow and ice basically form a cooling, protective sheet over the Arctic. When the sheet thaws out, the earth absorbs more sunlight and gets warmer. Recent studies demonstrate that the rise of global temperatures has hastened the melting of glaciers and ice caps. The average temperature in the Arctic region is shown to rise as fast as in any other place on earth. Evidence supports that the Arctic ice is melting, getting thinner, and falling apart.

The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf -- which is the largest single block of ice in the Arctic and has been around for 3,000 years -- started to crack in 2000. In two years time, the ice totally divided and is now floating into thousands of fragmented icebergs. In 2002, the northern section of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica collapsed; and since 1995 the shelf area of the ice has contracted by forty percent. The Arctic sea coverage of ice held the lowest record in September 2007, with nearly half a million square miles less ice than the record in the same month of 2005. Over the past 30 years, over a million square miles of sea ice has vanished. According to NASA, the polar ice cap is presently melting at a disturbing rate of 9% every decade. Various climate models also manifest that sea ice will progressively draw back as the earth warms up. According to scientists from the U.S. Center for Atmospheric Research, if the current pattern of global warming carries on, the Arctic region would be experiencing summer that is free of any ice by 2040, and the entire glaciers in Glacier National Park would be gone by 2070.

This might not sound alarming for people who reside several thousands of miles from this region but we better not ignore this because the Artic ice melt affects us in more ways than we know. Melting glaciers and ice sheets play a role in the rising of sea levels. Erosions and corruption of freshwater supplies, loss of coastal wetlands, estuaries and barrier islands, flooding in coastal communities are also serious effects brought about by the rise in sea levels.

The melting of ice caps would seriously impact the U.S. as well since according to a study conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2001, sea levels would have a three-foot rise by 2100 if such melting persists; this would submerge around 22,400 square miles of land across the Atlantic and Gulf shorelines of the U.S., particularly in Texas, Louisiana, North Carolina and Florida.

The melting of the Arctic ice caps may also influence weather patterns and affect production of food worldwide. One practical example is the effect of this phenomenon on wheat farming in Kansas, where a study projects that warmer days would deprive Kansas of its soil moisture and dry out the land for cropping.

The earth's atmosphere is continually in a cycle of evaporation and precipitation, and as the polar ice melts, ocean temperatures, ocean currents’ speed and courses are affected. This change in oceanic cycles is caused by global warming and will also accelerate global warming because of the change in evaporation rates of the sea. The warmer sea temperatures increase the energy of the climatic system, resulting in more intense rainfall, more powerful and dangerous hurricanes, and more destructive tropical storms.

Resources about the Polar Ice Caps Melting