Arctic Ocean Ice Will Melt Massively

Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, the North Pole, will likely set a new record with a shrink to the smallest size ever. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) United States predicted that clusters of ice in the Arctic Ocean it will continue to shrink next week.

"This is a new journal that will likely take place in late August," Ted Scambos said, the lead scientist at the data center, which monitors ice in the Arctic and other parts of the world, as quoted by Reuters, August 20, 2012.

The volume of ice in the Arctic is very important because this region has the potential to affect global weather. Some effects of melting Arctic ice in 2012 was the hot weather and drought in the northern hemisphere, particularly in the United States.

This summer Arctic ice shrinks even to less than 1.5 square miles. This is a record that has never happened before. Previous record of glacial ice occurred in 2007, when the ice cover of the Arctic to melt to 1.66 million square miles.

In 2012, Scambos said that Arctic ice melting period begins 10 days-2 weeks earlier than usual in some critical areas that count, such as Northern Europe and Siberia. If the melting Arctic ice break records this August, it will be too too early considering the low point last year glacial ice occurred on 9 September 2011.

Overall, the shrinking Arctic ice clusters occurring faster than projected by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last five years. Scambos confirmed, this is a clear sign that climate change induced by human activity, mainly due to the effects of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, including the carbon dioxide. "Everything about it has the same points, we have made the earth warmer," Scambos said.

It also appears on the melting of Greenland ice layer in large volumes this summer. NASA image shows for a few days in July, 97 percent of the surface ice in Greenland has melted.

Not only that, last July iceberg twice the size of Manhattan were also seen off Greenland's Petermann Glacier. "What you see in the Arctic today are more open ocean, no longer filled with ice cluster. It does not look like the Arctic Ocean, "Scambos said.