New Challenges from the Top of the World (ONE of TWO) ARCHIVE
NOTE: This program begins with two brief news clips from NBC4 and Thom Hartmann as reminder that a most important but underreported news item for September is the status of the sea ice in the Arctic.
With increasing urgency Wadhams is calling attention to the disappearing sea ice of the Arctic. In his most recent book, A Farewell to Ice, he writes: “Our planet has changed color. Today, from space, the top of the world in the northern summer looks blue instead of white. We have created an ocean where there was once an ice sheet.”
In a lecture in Milan, Italy, in May 2015, Peter Wadhams explained how the melting of the Arctic affects the rest of the world. He listed seven major areas, among them sea level rise, emission of methane, and extreme weather events that we already experience.
Peter Wadhams is the UK’s most experienced sea ice scientist. He has made more than 50 expeditions to both polar regions, working from ice camps, icebreakers, and aircraft. He made six submerged voyages to the North Pole on Royal Navy submarines. Wadhams’ research group in Cambridge has been the only UK group with the capacity to carry out field work on sea ice.
In Part ONE Wadhams explains the consequences of the shrinking and thinning sea ice. In Part TWO he covers the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, the loss of snow, the multi-national study on the recent discovery of methane releases from permafrost and shallow water, the link between sea ice loss and extreme weather events, and the deflections of two great global air and water currents, the Jet stream and the thermohaline circulation.
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