New Delhi: The National Centre of Polar and Ocean Research (NCPOR) has found a dramatic decline in the Arctic sea ice due to global warming and said that the largest decline took place in July 2019.
The decline of sea ice has led to localized increase in evaporation, air humidity, cloud cover, and rainfall. The Arctic sea ice is a sensitive indicator of climate change and has strong retaliatory effects on other components of the climate system.
In its observations, NCPOR noted that the largest decline in Arctic sea ice in the past 41 years happened in July 2019. Between 1979 and 2018, the sea ice has been declining at a rate of - 4.7 per cent per decade, while its rate was found to be -13 per cent in July 2019.
"The sea-ice loss at this rate, concerning all the lives on earth, can have a catastrophic impact due to rising global air temperature and slowing down of global ocean water circulation," Avinash Kumar, a senior scientist at NCPOR, who is involved in the research, said.
With the help of satellite data collected from 1979 to 2019, NCPOR has tried to understand the rate of surface warming and the changes in global atmospheric circulation.
The study has also pointed out that the decrease of the Arctic sea ice area and the increase in the duration of summer and autumn seasons have affected the local weather and climate over the Arctic Ocean and its marginal seas.
"If this trend continues, there would be no ice left in the Arctic sea by 2050, which would be dangerous for humanity and the entire environment," said the research institute.
Being a sensitive indicator of climate change, the loss of ice cover in the Arctic sea has had strong feedback effects on other components of the climate system such as prevention or reduction of heat and momentum, water vapour, and other material exchange between the atmosphere and the sea.
The worrying element to note is that the volume of ice formation during winters is unable to keep pace with the volume of ice loss during summers.
