Yes, Mr. President, We Remade Our Atlas to Reflect Shrinking Ice Unveiling his most aggressive plan yet to combat climate change, President Obama on Monday referenced recent dramatic changes that National Geographic made to its atlas because of melting sea ice. "Shrinking ice caps forced National Geographic to make the biggest change in its atlas since the Soviet Union broke apart," Obama said during a speech at the White House. (Watch a video of his speech.) He's right. The shrinking of the Arctic ice sheet in the 10th edition of the National Geographic Atlas of the World is one of the most striking changes in the publication's history. After the publication of the atlas in September 2014, the ice has melted even further, notes National Geographic Geographer Juan José Valdés. "The end of Arctic summer is still several weeks away, and it's still too early to say if another record will be broken. As the ocean heats up due to global warming, Arctic sea ice has been locked in a downward spiral. Publication schedules have an impact as well.
newsweek With the ice in the Arctic melting, the region is in danger of becoming a 21st-century free-for-all for power and riches. You’ve hit your limit of 5 free articles this month.Try our subscription options: Weekly home delivery with free shipping, access to Newsweek’s web site, and the complete online archive Access to Newsweek’s web site, and the complete online archive Two Maps Show Greenland’s Sudden Melt Season Onset Daily surface mass balance estimates of the Greenland ice sheet. Red indicates losses. Credit: Polar Portal It appears that Greenland’s melt season is making up for lost time. After a cool spring kept Greenland’s massive ice sheet mostly solid, a (comparatively) warm late June and early July have turned half the ice sheet’s surface into liquid, well outside the range of normal for this time of year. Despite the ice sheet’s remote location, its slushy fingers reach across the globe, influencing sea levels and how fast the Gulf Stream current moves. Persistent high pressure has been camping over Greenland since mid-June. The high temperatures in Europe have been more eye-popping, clearing 100°F from Spain to the Netherlands and setting an all-time July temperature record at London’s Heathrow Airport. In addition to warmer than normal temperatures, Greenland’s ice sheet has been getting steadily darker. Greenland melt extent. Ice sheet darkness, known as albedo, estimates.
Right Relevance In April of this year, two Dutch polar explorers, Marc Cornelissen and Philip de Roo, set off from Resolute Bay in the Canadian Arctic. They were headed for Bathurst Island, a journey of 400km that was due to take around a month. This was part of the Last Ice Survey expedition to gather data about snow and ice thickness for York University, Ontario. They would walk and ski across a region known as the Last Ice Area, where summer sea ice is expected to be most resilient to climate change. A few days into their trip, when they were still in Resolute Bay preparing for the hard month ahead, Philip found Marc’s sled from a previous unsuccessful expedition being used by a local hunter. In their final voice recording, uploaded on 28 April and since then listened to almost 24,000 times, Marc talks about how unseasonably warm it is – “too warm actually” – and mentions that within 60 minutes of starting their journey that day they were skiing in their underwear.
businessinsider Poles of Inaccessibility - the Remotest Places on Earth Antarctica is the most remote continent, and due to its harsh climate and lack of any roads or trails, its POI may be considered as the most prominent of all POIs. The location of the POI of Antarctica is 54.9681° E and 83.6978° S, while the distance from this spot to the seashore is 1183.421 km. On top of holding the notion of having the hardest to reach POI, Antarctica is also a home to: South Pole the only spot on land that has no time zone assigned (does time stand still here?) South Magnetic Pole as the fast migrating pole, it actually moved out of the land of Antarctica and keeps wandering; South Geomagnetic Pole is not antipodal with its Northern partner; it is moving in the opposite direction than the South Magnetic Pole, yet with a much slower pace. Geometric centroid is the arithmetic mean of all the points of the outline of a polygon. The Soviet Antarctic Expedition in 1958 not only reached the POI, but it also established a research station and hut to house four scientists.
Major Antarctic ice survey reveals dramatic melting - environment - 26 March 2015 It's melting from above and below and crumbling at the edges. Antarctica is in trouble. Its frozen edges, or ice shelves, are disappearing into the ocean faster than we thought. Some have thinned by up to 18 per cent in the past two decades, and the process is accelerating. The most rapidly melting ones are likely to be gone within 100 years. As this happens, the ice sheets sitting over Antarctica's land – which holds the equivalent of 60 metres of sea level – will accelerate their descent into the ocean, causing it to rise globally. These new findings are the culmination of a torrent of studies over the past few years that have significantly boosted our understanding of what is happening to Antarctica. What confounds our ability to predict sea level rise stems from uncertainly over how ice sheets will respond to climate change, says Fernando Paolo from the University of California, San Diego. Poor second half "We are seeing large changes over the course of decades," says Paolo.
Antarctica may have just set its highest temperature on record Antarctica, Earth's coldest, most barren continent, may have just set a remarkably unusual weather record. An Argentinian research station on the rapidly warming Antarctic Peninsula recorded a high temperature of 63.5 degrees Fahrenheit (17.5 degrees Celsius) on March 24, according to reports from Weather Underground. If this is investigated and verified by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), it could become the highest temperature on record for the entire continent of Antarctica. The warmth at the Esperanza research station came one day after a nearly identical high temperature was logged at another Argentinean base, known as Base Marambio, also located along the Antarctic Peninsula. Interestingly, the mild conditions occurred during the Antarctic fall, not the height of summer. If the WMO were to use only the landmass of Antarctica, however, the Esperanza temperature would likely stand as the warmest yet recorded. Have something to add to this story?
Arctic sea ice gains can be seen on new government map of Canada At first blush, the newest edition of the federal government's map of Canada will likely surprise some climate-change scientists. The updated map shows what appears to be more Arctic sea ice than its 2006 predecessor, despite warnings about global warming accelerating the loss of sea ice. A bloom of textured white covers parts of the Beaufort Sea that looked like bare water on the map from eight years ago. A before-and-after comparison shows how the official 2006 map of Canada represented Arctic sea ice, and the apparent gains in sea ice shown in the 2014 edition released this week. Image Credits: Natural Resources Canada See a comparison view of the Arctic ice 2006-2014 The difference is that the 2014 map, unveiled this week by Natural Resources Canada, adopts a new way of representing sea ice, explained Yvan Désy, director of the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing. "The method of calculation is completely different," he said. The lowest period of sea ice on record was in 2012.