Berlin, German:
The tipping point for irreversible international warming may well have currently been triggered, the scientist who led the greatest-ever expedition to the Arctic warned on Tuesday.
“The disappearance of summer sea ice in the Arctic is one of the first landmines in this minefield, one of the tipping points that we set off first when we push warming too far,” mentioned Markus Rex.
“And one can essentially ask if we haven’t already stepped on this mine and already set off the beginning of the explosion.”
Rex led the world’s greatest mission to the North Pole, an expedition involving 300 scientists from 20 nations.
The expedition returned to Germany in October right after 389 days drifting by way of the Arctic, bringing home devastating proof of a dying Arctic Ocean and warnings of ice-free of charge summers in just decades.
The 140-million-euro ($165-million) expedition also brought back 150 terabytes of information and more than 1,000 ice samples.
Summarising their 1st findings, Rex mentioned scientists located that the Arctic sea ice had retreated “faster in the spring of 2020 than since the beginning of records” and that “the spread of the sea ice in the summer was only half as large as decades ago”.
The ice was only half as thick and temperatures measured 10 degrees larger than in the course of the Fram expedition undertaken by explorers and scientists Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen in the 1890s.
Because of the smaller sized sea ice surface, the ocean was capable to absorb more heat in the summer time, in turn which means that ice sheet formation in the autumn was slower than usual.
‘Painful’
“Only evaluation in the coming years will allow us to determine if we can still save the year-round Arctic sea ice through forceful climate protection or whether we have already passed this important tipping point in the climate system,” Rex added, urging speedy action to halt warming.
World leaders had agreed beneath the Paris agreement in 2015 to take action to limit international warming to nicely beneath 2 degrees Celsius, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared with pre-industrial levels.
Stefanie Arndt, who specialises in sea ice physics, mentioned it was “painful to know that we are possibly the last generation who can experience an Arctic which still has a sea ice cover in the summer”.
“This sea ice cover is gradually shrinking and it is an important living space for polar bears,” mentioned Arndt, though recounting observations of seals and other animals in the polar habitat.
The information collected in the course of the expedition incorporated readings on the atmosphere, ocean, sea ice and ecosystems.
Several hundred scientific publications analysing the findings are anticipated to be published involving 2021 and 2023.
During the expedition, scientists had set up 4 observational internet sites on the sea ice in a radius of up to 40 kilometres (25 miles) about the mission’s “Polarstern” (North Star) ship.
Among information collected had been water samples from beneath the ice to study plant plankton and bacteria and superior fully grasp how the marine ecosystem functions beneath intense situations.
More than one hundred parameters had been measured practically constantly all through the year.
The abundance of facts will feed into the development of models to assist predict what heatwaves, heavy rains or storms could look like in 20, 50 or one hundred years.
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