Transcripts of Comiso_2012_sea_ice_interview_youtube_hq

This year the ice cover during the month of August is unusually low. At this level it's already lower than what it was in 2007. And 2007 was the year when we had a dramatic decline in the ice cover. The key factor is actually the fact that the thick ice cover has been declining rapidly. By thick ice cover I refer to the perennial ice that is the ice that survives the summer. These are the thick component of the Arctic ice cover and the normal survive because they're so thick, even the whole melt season during the summer is not enough to melt them altogether. This thick ice cover has been observed to be declining rapidly as far back as in the year 2000. And in the year 2007 there was a dramatic decline as I indicated previously. And this multi-year ice is declining even faster than the perennial ice. In fact in a recent report, was declining at 17 percent per decade, compared to 15 percent per decade for perennial ice. The, the fact that the multiyear ice is just as low as 2007 if not lower, during the winter, means that we are losing all this thick component of the ice cover, and if you lose the thick component of the ice cover then the ice in the summer becomes very vulnerable. At the start of the melt season the ice extent was actually unusually high almost as high as in the 1980s. And then in dropped down to the level of the 1990s up to June. And in June, that's when a lot of ice gets melted in the central Arctic, it dropped down to the level of 2007 and 2011 which are the two previous years with unusually low ice cover and it stayed at the same level as 2007 and 2011 until August when we had this storm in early August. In August a storm started forming near Alaska and moved into the central Arctic and by became very strong in August 6th. During this time the storm was so strong it broke up the ice and caused the ice to disperse and get pushed to the southern side of the Arctic region where the water is warmer and this made them very vulnerable to melt. So the storm persisted for about three days, and during this three days, a lot of ice actually melted. I think the storm is a big contributing factor but not the only cause for the melt. We already know that by monitoring the ice, multi-year ice in the winter the ice cover in the summer would be expected to be low because the exent of the multi-year ice in the winter was actually lower than that in 2007 so from that you would infer that the perennial ice would be almost as low if not lower than 2007. The Arctic has been known as an ice-covered region even during the summer because of the multi-year ice The reason for that of course is because they are so thick that a long summer is not usually enough to melt them all together. Multi-year ice has been shown to be declining quite more than the perennial ice, which is the ice that survive the summer and in 2012 the multi-year ice cover in the Arctic was actually a record low but comparable to that of 2007. So from that information alone we would expect that in 2012 the perennial ice, or the ice that survive this coming this summer will be as low if not lower than that of 2007.