We might just melt the north pole yet! Every year around late February to early March, Arctic ice hits its maximum coverage, the point of greatest area and thickest layers, before the sun finally starts cautiously peeking over the horizon to begin its annual challenge to winter’s reign. The ice will begin to recede and thin, torpid polar bears will dig out of snow caves with young in tow, and sea-going mammals like whales and walruses will soon patrol the shallow seas. How far that ice gets at each winter maxima is a big factor on how much it will dwindle through the spring and summer. This year was a record for the lowest annual maximum ever measured:
The extent of floating ice in the Arctic hit a new low for winter: 5.57 million square miles (14.42 million square kilometers). That’s about 35,000 square miles (97,000 square kilometers) — an area about the size of Maine — below 2015’s record. Last year had a shade more than 2015, but nearly a tied record. This puts the Arctic in a “deep hole” as the crucial spring and summer melt season starts and more regions will likely be ice-free, said Mark Serreze , director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, which released the findings Wednesday.
“It’s a key part of the Earth’s climate system and we’re losing it,” he said. “We’re losing the ice in all seasons now.”
Receding glaciers, dwindling ice sheets, giant gas bubbles forming in Arctic tundra, and behind it all, fossil fuel emissions driving up global temperatures. This really isn’t hard to understand or accept, as long as your living doesn’t depend on not understanding it. (For more uplifting science-y insights, you can follow me on Twitter here.)
- The Europa Clipper mission will proceed (without a specific dollar amount), but the separate lander mission did not receive any funding.
- Earth science only gets $1.8 billion. That's about a 13 percent cut from 2017 Obama levels, and in between proposed House and Senate 2017 levels.
- Some Earth science missions would be canceled: PACE (not yet launched), OCO-3 (not yet launched), DSCOVR Earth-viewing instruments (no more pretty pictures of Earth?), and CLARREO Pathfinder (not yet launched).