Scientists who predicted a few years ago that Arctic summers could be ice-free by 2013 now say summer ice will probably be gone within this decade. The original prediction, made in 2007, gained Wieslaw Maslowski’s team a deal of criticism from some of their peers.
Now they are working with a new computer model – compiled partly in response to those criticisms – that produces a “best guess” date of 2016.
Their work was unveiled at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) annual meeting.
The new model is designed to replicate real-world interactions, or “couplings”, between the Arctic Ocean, the atmosphere, the ice and rivers carrying freshwater into the sea.
“In the past… we were just extrapolating into the future assuming that trends might persist as we’ve seen in recent times,” said Dr Maslowski, who works at Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
“Now we’re trying to be more systematic, and we’ve developed a regional Arctic climate model that’s very similar to the global climate models participating in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments,” he told media.
“We can run a fully coupled model for the past and present and see what our model will predict for the future in terms of the sea ice and the Arctic climate.”
And one of the projections it comes out with is that the summer melt could lead to ice-free Arctic seas by 2016 – “plus or minus three years”.
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