In anticipation of the new Flood?
The temperature of the planet is steadily growing. The first victim of global warming may become Arctic. If the Earth will lose its ice cap?
Melting Arctic ice is alarming long. And it can no longer be blamed on the private opinions of individual scientists and journalists inflated sensation. Three hundred experts from 8 countries bordering the Arctic, during the four years evaluated the state of the ice in northern latitudes. Installed: Arctic polar cap over the past 30 years decreased nearly one-fifth.
Now pack ice in the Arctic Ocean covers approximately 8.4 million sq. km. This average value: winter ice armour grows to 18 million square feet. km, in summer decreases. Scientists fear that in a hundred years, the area of Arctic ice in the summer months will be reduced by half. The melting ice will increase sea levels, and this will entail further changes in climate on a planetary scale. And for fauna of the northern areas in any case would be a catastrophe. For example, polar bears are constantly roaming about on the floating ice of the Arctic, just no room for life.
One of the main causes of climate change - the enhanced greenhouse effect due to increasing atmospheric concentrations of certain gases - primarily carbon dioxide. If the current rate of emissions continues, the concentration of CO2 in the air to the top XXII century will double!
Alas, the forecast prepared by the Computing Center of Academy of Sciences of Russia, in general confirms the disappointing conclusions. The calculations show: the two-fold increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will warm the Arctic Ocean by 1,5 ° C, and the area of ice in the summer months decreased by 80%.
And this is not the most pessimistic of the possible scenarios. Some experts predict that by 2070 the Arctic ice may completely melt.
On the Earth the periods of cooling and warming replace each other. 8-5,5 thousand years ago, the weather in Europe was on average 2-3 degrees warmer than today, and ice cover the ocean - nearly half.
Commence in the first quarter of the second millennium cooling was short-lived and at the end of XIX century gave way to warming. As a result, in the 1930 winter temperatures in Greenland rose by 5 ° C, Svalbard - at 8-9 ° C! In Iceland, there were swallows and starlings in Greenland were nesting blackbirds. And with 1940's temperature was lowered again, and for the next 25 years, the ice in the Arctic has increased by 10%. It is believed that all these "wavering" - the result of overlap cycles warming - cooling off "of different lengths - from short to tens of thousands of years.
How long will the present warming and what its consequences will be is unknown. Even if all countries will join the Kyoto Protocol, controlling emissions of industrial gases in the atmosphere, it will not bring quick results.
Hopefully in the correctness of the hypothesis according to which the Arctic ice - the system self-regulating. If melting of the polar cap at the ocean surface layer appears desalinated water. Between him and the deep layers creates a transition layer that prevents the rise of warmer waters to the surface of the ocean. Water is cooled, freezes, and the ice armour of Arctic regions expands again.