Invention required as long as ice remains

摘要

For scientists studying summer sea ice in the Arctic, it's not a question of if there will be nearly ice-free summers, but 'when,' and two scientists at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the US recently noted that 'when' is likely to be sooner than previously thought: before 2050 and potentially within the next decade or two. James Overland of NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, and Muyin Wang of the NOAA Joint Institute for the Study of Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington, looked at three methods of predicting when the Arctic will be nearly ice free in the summer. The February report was published in the American Geophysical Union publication Geophysical Research Letters.