csmonitor.com: Key portions of Earth’s cryosphere are in deep trouble. So far this summer, Arctic Ocean sea ice has shrunk to its second-lowest extent on record as ice shelves along Canada’s northernmost islands are disintegrating at a rapid pace. A new report from the United Nations Environment Program and the World Glacier Monitoring Service notes that the melt rate for glaciers the service uses as reference sites appears to have doubled since 2000. The resulting increase in open water is expected to have a wide-ranging impact on global warming. “These are huge areas that are changing,” says Luke Copland, who heads the Laboratory for Cryospheric Research at the University of Ottawa, referring to the ice declines in the Arctic. People can debate the causes behind what’s happening in the Arctic, he says, “but what we can’t debate is the fact that things are changing, and they’re changing really fast.” Moreover, the changes are irreversible under today’s climate regime, adds Derek Mueller, a polar scientist at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. | read more |