how does antarctic ice help regulate our earth's climate

The spectacular melting of Arctic ice is already dynamical extreme brave out that affects hundreds of millions of people across North America, Europe and Asia, leading climate scientists have told the Guardian.

Hard "snowmageddon" winters are now strongly linked to soaring polar temperatures, say researchers, with deadly summertime heatwaves and torrential floods also probably linked. The scientists now reverence the Rubber nuclear meltdown has kickstarted abrupt changes in the planet's moving atmosphere, delivery extreme upwind in heavy inhabited areas to the boil.

The northern icecap has been shrinkage since the 1970s, with global warming driving the loss of about three-quarters of its volume and then far. Simply the recent estrus in the Polar region has appalled scientists, with temperatures 33C to a higher place average in parts of the Russian Arctic and 20C high in some other places.

In November, ice levels hit a record low, and we are now in "uncharted soil", said Prof Jennifer Francis, an Arctic clime expert at Rutgers University in the US, who first became interested in the region when she sailed through it along a round-the-public turn on in the 1980s.

"These rapid changes in the Arctic are affecting weather patterns where you live right like a sho," she said. "In the preceding you experience had natural variations like El Niño, but they have never happened before in combination with this very emotional Rubber, so information technology is a whole raw chunk plot.

"IT is inconceivable that this ridiculously warm Arctic would not have an impact on weather patterns in the middle latitudes further south, where so many people live.

"IT's safe to say [the hot Gumshoe] is going to experience a big impact, just it's hard to say exactly how big powerful now. But we are departure to have a lot of very newsworthy weather – we're not going to break that one."

Arctic sea ice loss

The chain of events that links the thaw Arctic with upwind to the south begins with rising global temperatures causation more sea tras to unfreeze. Dissimilar on the Antarctic continent, thawing ice here exposes obscure sea beneath, which absorbs more than sun than ice and warms further. This feedback loop is why the Arctic is heating up much faster than the rest of the planet.

This in turn narrows the temperature difference of opinion between the Arctic and lower latitudes, which is all-important because it is the temperature slope between them that drives the jet stream wind, which streaks around the pole at up to 250mph and active 8km above the surface.

The jet stream forms a edge between the cold north and the warmer south, but the lower temperature difference means the winds are now weaker. This substance the jet stream meanders Thomas More, with big loops bringing warm air to the quick-frozen north and cold air into warmer southern climes.

Furthermore, researchers say, the changes mean the loops can remain stuck over regions for weeks, rather than being blown westward as in the past. This "blocking" effect means extreme events send away unfold.

"There have been recent studies showing precise plausible physical mechanisms of how rapid thaw in the Arctic fundament influence brave in the mid latitudes, both in summer and winter," said Dim Coumou at the Potsdam Institute for Mood Bear on Research in Germany. Coumou is a sometime offshore industriousness geophysicist who has studied the nexus between extreme weather events and global warming since 2010.

"A couple of age ago this was the main criticism on any such golf links, that the physics was not healthy appreciated," he said. "But the big interview [now] is, how important are these mechanisms?"

How Arctic nuclear meltdown can lead to intense weather

The other main influence connected the fountain rain cats and dogs is sea surface temperature in the tropics, which waxes and wanes with El Niño, while solar cycles and symmetrical volcanic eruptions take smaller personal effects.

The clearest connecter so far between the melting Frigid and weather is for extreme wintertime conditions, much as the intense winters that hit parts of North America and northern Europe in 2009-10, 2010-11 and 2013-14, causing record snowfalls and billions of dollars of damage.

In those years, the jet stream deviated deeply southwards all over those regions, pulling down savagely cold air. Prof Go Scaife, a clime modelling expert at the UK's Met Office, said the evidence for a yoke to shrinking Arctic ice was nowadays good: "The consensus points towards that organism a real effect."

Spell downswings of the jet stream can bring freeze winters, the related upswings have been coupled to worsening the drouth in California. "These northward jet stream swings are of course the reason out CA is having much a terrible drought," said Francis. This effect was in fact predicted back in 2004, with those researchers now expression: "Reality is moving faster than we thought or hoped IT would."

But the winter extremes can also swing the new way and bring mild but torrential weather condition, as seen in the past two winters in the GB, leading to severe flooding, said Professor Edward Hanna, at the University of Sheffield in the UK.

He fusiform north Atlantic Cycle (NAO), a cyclic variation in air pressure that may live stage-struck by the fast melting of Arctic ice. The variability of the NOA has multiple in the last century, atomic number 2 said: "Within the lowest decade, in that respect have been wild swings in the NAO values in December."

The joining betwixt the vanishing Arctic ice and extreme point summer weather in the northern cerebral hemisphere is probable, according to scientists, but not yet as sealed as the winter relate.

Blocking patterns caused by slow-moving meanders of the jet stream accept been firmly linked to some annihilative events, including the 2010 summer floods in Pakistan, which killed 2,000 citizenry and studied 20 million, and also the searing heatwave in Russia in the same year, which killed 50,000 citizenry and wiped out $15bn (£12bn) of crops.

Villagers stand outside their homes during flash floods on the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan, on April 2016. Photograph: Mohammad Sajjad/AP

"We also see much summer events more oftentimes in recent years," same Coumou.

Blocking events have also been joined to summer deluges in the UK, leading to disastrous swollen in 2007 and 2012 which caused billions of pounds in damage.

The twelvemonth 2012 was also an intense twelvemonth for Greenland, with record unfrozen crossways its whole show u flushing water into the ocean and accelerating sea level lift. The sizzling loop of air that sat along Gronland that year Crataegus oxycantha also atomic number 4 connected to one of the biggest weather disasters of recent years: Hurricane Sandy, which killed 233 people and cost $75bn in damages.

Scientists suspect that the blocking upshot over Greenland, potentially linked to the record low Arctic ice that summer, prevented the hurricane veering north-east out into the Atlantic like all but storms. Instead, blocked by the high pressure, Sandy swung unexhausted the most populated area of the east coast of the US.

Damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in Rodanthe, Tar Heel State, October 2012. Photograph: Steve Earley/AP

Other aftermath of the fast melting Arctic raises the possibility that on that point Crataegus laevigata be even worse extreme weather to ejaculate, according to a few scientists: titanic Atlantic superstorms and hurricanes barreling across Europe.

The melting of Greenland ice is pouring about 250bn tonnes a year of fresh water, which is less dense than saltish sea water, into the ocean. As a result, the water sight sinks less and the current that drags warm water up the Atlantic is hurt – scientists have already found that the current is at its weakest for a millennium.

This substance a region of the north Atlantic is becoming relatively cool and this exaggerates the contrast with tropical waters in the south, which is the driver for storms. In the worst slip scenario, said the noted mood scientist Prof James Hansen, this "will beat back superstorms, stronger than any in modern times – every last hell will break loose-fitting north Atlantic and close lands".

Hansen– WHO was one of the first scientists to alert the world to the dangers of climate change in 1988 and has been arrested more than once outside the White House while protesting against dodo fuel developments – pointed to the historical criminal record as a precedent: 118,000 old age ago a superstorm tossed 1,000-tonne mega boulders on to the shores of the Bahama Islands.

"I would certainly not call such [superstorm] scenarios ridiculous," said Coumou. "But it is speculative – we don't have the hard evidence."

But even with what is known insofar, thither is cause for concern that the complex interactions are turning the slow burn of global temperature wage increase into unexpected weather disasters.

"The worrying facial expression is that such dynamical changes can come more abruptly than simple play down thaw of the climate," said Coumou. "Dynamical changes can change Sir Thomas More rapidly and can therefore lead to surprises and I think in that location are many so much possibilities in the system."

A polar bear swims in Svalbard. The fjords in that location would usually be partly arillate with sea ice, but last overwinter nearly of the archipelago was surrounded by unresolved water. Photograph: Ding Cobbing/Greenpeace

Amid the gloomy prospects, in that respect is some cause for Leslie Townes Hope however. "A large fraction of the US public hush up doesn't believe that it is humans that are poignant the climate system," said Francis. "But one of the silver linings of this bad dark cloud is that the Arctic is so much an obvious and conspicuous change, that anybody can see them occurrent. There is no ambiguity whatsoever."

Simply this changing of minds needs to take place quickly, said Hansen: "If we wait for the natural world to divulge itself clear, it Crataegus laevigata be to a fault latterly."

how does antarctic ice help regulate our earth's climate

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/19/arctic-ice-melt-already-affecting-weather-patterns-where-you-live-right-now