Abstract
The key irrefutable evidence for irreversible change in the Earth’s climate structure lies in the high Arctic. Specifically, the observed loss of permanent floating ice in the Arctic Ocean, which has decreased from 16 × 103 km3 in 1979 to 3 × 103 km3 in 2012, represents an onset of climate change that was not predicted to occur at anything like the observed rate – even as late as the 2007 IPCC report. The rapid loss of permanent ice is still not quantitatively understood in terms of the mechanisms controlling the flow of thermal energy into the system, yet both the rate of loss and the increasing rate of that loss place the time scale for the loss of all permanent floating ice to be within this decade. The remarkable consistency of the quantitative loss in ice volume, as thermal energy flowed into the ice structure, is demonstrated by both the absolute volume as a function of time and the steepening curvature in the time dependence of volumetric loss as shown in Figure 1. This increasing curvature is a clear reflection of the feedbacks that are accelerating further loss as the Arctic Ocean floating ice recedes.
© 2013 Optical Society of America
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