Hottest Arctic on record triggers massive ice melt

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>The Arctic shattered heat records in the past year as unusually warm air triggered massive melting of ice and snow and a late fall freeze, US government scientists said.

>The grim assessment came in the Arctic Report Card 2016, a peer-reviewed document by 61 scientists around the globe issued by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

>“The report card this year clearly shows a stronger and more pronounced signal of persistent warming than any previous year in our observational record” going back to 1900, NOAA Arctic Research Program director Jeremy Mathis told the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco, where the report was released on Tuesday.

>The Arctic region is continuing to warm up more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, which is also expected to mark its hottest year in modern times.

>The Arctic’s annual air temperature over land was 3.5C higher than in 1900, the report said.

>The sea surface temperature in the peak summer month of August 2016 reached 5C above the average for 1982-2010 in the Barents and Chukchi seas and off the east and west coasts of Greenland.

>“Warm air and ocean temperatures in the fall led to a record-breaking delay in fall freeze-up,” Perovich said, noting that the Arctic sea ice minimum from mid-October to late November was the lowest since the satellite record began in 1979.

>It was also 28 per cent less than the average for 1981-2010 in October.

>In 1985, almost half (45 per cent) of Arctic sea ice was called “multi-year ice.” Now, just 22 per cent of the Arctic is covered in multi-year ice. The rest is first-year ice.

>The Arctic could be free of summer ice by the 2040s

http://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/climate-change/hottest-arctic-on-record-triggers-massive-ice-melt/news-story/09c820f9caa4e586167e6656abed3c3b