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With the Arctic recording its second warmest year on record, despite global temperatures moderating slightly, the U.S. National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (N0AA) on Tuesday warned that the polar ice caps “shows no sign of returning to the reliably frozen region it was decades ago.”
That latest warning comes at a time when Alaska is witnessing another unusually warm winter, and scientists from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California are theorizing that the loss of Arctic sea ice could have a profound affect on the climate of the Pacific Rim even without global warming.
Ivana Cvijanovic and her colleagues, writing in Nature Communications earlier this month, argue there is evidence that sunlight heating dark, exposed Arctic Ocean waters instead of being reflected back into space by white, snow-covered ice there so alters the energy balance of the North Pacific Ocean that the atmosphere is effected.