The Arctic and the Antarctic play the role of, kind of like an air conditioner for the Earth system
So they’re cold, they have a lot of ice
They reflect a lot of the solar energy, so they stay colder than they otherwise would
They’re more sensitive to climate change
and therefore they’re the regions that we see the biggest effects of climate change so far and the biggest effects of warming
They’re kind of a canary in a coalmine of global warming
This year’s Arctic sea ice minimum is
in about the top ten of the lowest that we’ve seen in the last three and a half decades
As the global temperature has increased
the temperatures in the Arctic
especially in the past decade
have increased by about two to three times the global average
And so what’s happening is as temperatures increase, ice melts
This year in the Antarctic we’ve seen a pretty spectacular maximum extent
The Antarctic sea ice has expanded beyond anything
we’ve seen before and set a new record
The increase that we’re seeing in the Antarctic extent is a little bit of a mystery
We’re seeing overall temperatures warming around the globe
So you would expect to see ice loss
Some people have looked at the Antarctic increasing trend and used that to suggest that global warming isn’t happening
or that the increase in the Antarctic gives offset in the decrease in the Arctic
and that’s simply not true.
If you look at simply the magnitudes in the changes we’re seeing in the winter time
the Arctic is decreasing about twice as fast as what the Antarctic is increasing
It’s important to look at the relationship between the Arctic and Antarctic
because studying those gives us an indication of what changes
we’re going to see around the rest of the globe in the future