chicot60
01-30-2011, 03:43 AM
By Wendy Koch, USA TODAY
http://i.usatoday.net/communitymanager/_photos/green-house/2011/01/29/Arctictempsx-wide-community.jpg
Water flowing into the Arctic Ocean from the North Atlantic is now the warmest in at least 2,000 years, reports a new international study that's bad news for climate change as well as polar bears needing sea ice for survival.
Waters of the Fram Strait, which runs between Greenland and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, have warmed about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 100 years, according to the study published in the Jan. 28 issue of the journal Science. Temperatures are about 2.5 degrees higher than during the Medieval Warm Period, a time of elevated warmth from A.D. 900 to 1300.
"Such a warming of the Atlantic water in the Fram Strait is significantly different from all climate variations in the last 2,000 years," study lead author Robert Spielhagen of the Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Literature in Mainz, Germany, said in announcing the findings.
"Cold seawater is critical for the formation of sea ice, which helps to cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back to space," said study co-author Thomas Marchitto, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The Arctic lost sea ice larger than the state of Alaska between 1979 and 2009 and could become ice-free during the summers within the next several decades, according to UC's National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Since continuous data for the Fram Strait cover only the last 150 years, the researchers drilled ocean sediment cores dating back 2,000 years and analyzed their chemical composition to determine past water temperatures. Their work was supported by the Norwegian Research Council, the German Research Foundation and the Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Literature in Mainz.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2011/01/arctic-waters-warmest-2000-years/1
http://i.usatoday.net/communitymanager/_photos/green-house/2011/01/29/Arctictempsx-wide-community.jpg
Water flowing into the Arctic Ocean from the North Atlantic is now the warmest in at least 2,000 years, reports a new international study that's bad news for climate change as well as polar bears needing sea ice for survival.
Waters of the Fram Strait, which runs between Greenland and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, have warmed about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 100 years, according to the study published in the Jan. 28 issue of the journal Science. Temperatures are about 2.5 degrees higher than during the Medieval Warm Period, a time of elevated warmth from A.D. 900 to 1300.
"Such a warming of the Atlantic water in the Fram Strait is significantly different from all climate variations in the last 2,000 years," study lead author Robert Spielhagen of the Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Literature in Mainz, Germany, said in announcing the findings.
"Cold seawater is critical for the formation of sea ice, which helps to cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back to space," said study co-author Thomas Marchitto, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The Arctic lost sea ice larger than the state of Alaska between 1979 and 2009 and could become ice-free during the summers within the next several decades, according to UC's National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Since continuous data for the Fram Strait cover only the last 150 years, the researchers drilled ocean sediment cores dating back 2,000 years and analyzed their chemical composition to determine past water temperatures. Their work was supported by the Norwegian Research Council, the German Research Foundation and the Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Literature in Mainz.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2011/01/arctic-waters-warmest-2000-years/1