Sea ice News

Arctic Sea Ice Extent (SIE) has been declining at a rate of about 4.4% per decade in annual mean An increase in mid-latitude extreme weather events is associated with Arctic Amplification induced loss in sea ice

NASA will launch two new satellite missions and conduct an array of field research in 2018, the US space agency said on Tuesday.

This winter, a combination of warmer-than-average temperatures, winds unfavourable to ice expansion, and a series of storms halted sea ice growth in the Arctic, the scientists said.

While the year 2016 made history, with a record global temperature, exceptionally low sea ice, and unabated sea level rise and ocean heat, extreme weather and climate conditions have continued into 2017, pushing the world into "truly uncharted territory", said the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). 

The Ku-band Scatterometer on-board SCATSAT-1 is ISRO’s second space borne scatterometer similar to OSCAT on-board Oceansat-2. 

According to estimates by climate scientists at the University of Reading in London, Antarctic has lost only 14 per cent summer sea ice since the early 1900s.

While record low sea ice is nothing new in the Arctic, this was a surprising turn of events for the Antarctic, the report said.

According to scientists, the Arctic is warming at nearly double the global rate as a result of climate change fuelled by mankind's burning of fossil fuels, a process that emits heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

The melt slowed down in June, but scientists say the rate of ice loss picked up again during the first two weeks of August, and is now greater than average for this time of the year.  

This time, NASA's Aqua satellite has sent in its image of the day, which NASA has dutifully released.