Arctic sea ice melting at fastest rate in 40 years

The area covered by Arctic sea ice has reached its lowest point this week since satellite observations started in 1972,scientists have claimed.

The area covered by Arctic sea ice has reached its lowest point this week since satellite observations started in 1972,scientists have claimed and blamed it on the increasing human-induced global warming.

According to researchers at the University of Bremen in Germany,the area covered by the Arctic sea ice shrank to 4.24 million sq km on September 8.

The previous one-day minimum was 4.27 million sq km recorded on September 16 2007,the Guardian reported.

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The historic low measurement is about a half-percent below the previous record and it was undoubtedly because of human-induced global warming,said Georg Heygster,head of the Physical Analysis of Remote Sensing Images unit at Bremen Universitys Institute of Environmental Physics.

The sea-ice retreat can no more be explained with the natural variability from one year to the next,caused by weather influence, Heygster said.

It seems to be clear that this is a further consequence of the man-made global warming with global consequences.

Climate models show that the reduction is related to the man-made global warming,which,due to the albedo effect,is particularly pronounced in the Arctic, he said.

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The albedo effect is related to a surfaces reflecting power — whiter sea ice reflects more of the suns heat back into space than darker seawater,which absorbs the suns heat and gets warmer.

Arctic ice plays a critical role in regulating Earths climate by reflecting sunlight and keeping the polar region cool. Retreating summer sea ice is widely described by scientists as both a measure and a driver of global warming,with negative impacts on a local and planetary scale.

Floating Arctic sea ice naturally melts and re-freezes annually,but the speed of change in a generation has shocked scientists — with a decline of about 10 per cent per decade,it is now twice as great as it was in 1972,according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder.