Rising sea levels signal disaster

Earth's oldest and the coldest refrigerator, the Arctic, is warming up faster. Soon it would be the world's biggest carbon emitter. How do you like it? The climate change that we are talking about now will be nothing compared to the catastrophe awaiting us from this pole. This is not a new warning emitting from the North Pole. The Earth is losing its battle against the climate depravity being inflicted on it by man. Sea ice is dynamic. It expands and contracts, melts and freezes; it's never stationary. At some point during the year, sea ice covers an average of 25 million square kilometres of our planet's surface, an area about two and a half times the size of Canada. But it's shrinking fast, flooding Earth's oceans with freshwater, causing sea levels to rise and affecting ocean currents.

This sea ice is the foundation of an entire ecosystem, providing a habitat for species found nowhere else on Earth. As light trickles through the ice, a home is created for microscopic algae and plankton, which feed fish and whales, and, in turn, seals, beluga whales and narwhals feed on the fish. The polar bear tops the food chain. September sea ice — the ice left at the end of the summer melting season — is now declining at a rate of almost 13 per cent per decade. With the melt, algae is threatened and the food chain begins to collapse.

Scientists have long predicted that sea level rise will be one of the most disastrous consequences of global warming -- and now, they're discovering that the northernmost region, the biggest contributor to sea level rise, is warming at unprecedented rates. Climate change is transforming the Arctic into a "dramatically different state," with the region warming at a rate more than twice as fast as the rest of the world due to the melting of white and sea ice, according to the 2021 Arctic Report Card released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The latest reports from NASA suggest an even faster decline of ice volume.

The substantial decline in Arctic sea ice extent since 1979 is one of the most iconic indicators of climate change, according to the report. Summer 2021 saw the second-lowest amount of older, multi-year ice since 1985, and the post-winter sea ice volume in April 2021 was the lowest since records began in 2010. In addition, the period between October and December in 2020 was the warmest Arctic autumn on record, dating back to 1900, according to the report.

The average surface air temperature over the Arctic in the past year, October 2020 through September 2021, was the seventh-warmest on record, and this is the eighth consecutive year since 2014 that air temperatures were at least one degree Celsius above the long-term average. Recent studies on ocean acidification suggest that it could have implications on the ecosystem of the Arctic Ocean, including effects on algae, zooplankton and fish, according to the report. In the Eurasian Arctic, terrestrial snow cover in June 2021 was the third-lowest since records began in 1967, the report states. In the North American Arctic, snow cover has been below average for 15 consecutive years.