Climate change is impacting every corner of our planet. While remote from heavily populated areas, the Arctic is one of the fastest-warming regions.
“In the summer, the Arctic has always had a retreat of sea ice. But that retreat is now just massive in terms of the areal extent, the thickness of the ice, and the quality of the ice,” says Professor Jim Thomson, Senior Principal Oceanographer at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab and a Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering.
What happens in the Arctic doesn’t necessarily stay in the Arctic.
“It’s pretty conclusive now that what’s happening in the Arctic is affecting global weather patterns,” Thomson says, highlighting how New York has been experiencing some frigid winters as a result of changes to the jet stream, mediated by warming in the Arctic. For climate modeling, “it’s becoming obvious that we have to get the Arctic right to get the global climate right, and it’s really about knowing what the ice is doing,” says Thomson….
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