As readers of this blog know, I’ve spent a lot of time studying the Arctic Pack Ice, since I was hired as a post-doc to somehow calculate the wind and water stress on the ice for the entire ice pack in 1971. We measured the winds and currents for a year at the Arctic Ice Dynamics Joint Experiment site in the midst of the ice pack in 1974-5.
Measurements since then have shown a decreasing extent to the pack ice, and a rapidly increasing rate of decrease. It could be gone before 2020, much faster than any models forecast.
A new study result verifies this: “An international team of experts brought together by ESA and NASA has produced the most accurate assessment of ice losses from Antarctica and Greenland to date. The new estimates are a vast improvement – more than twice as accurate – thanks to the inclusion of more satellite data, and confirm that both Antarctica and Greenland are losing ice.”
There’s nothing like good data to verify a scientific hypothesis.