Photo: Mario Tama / Getty Images
By: EFE
Saturday, October 5
The Arctic Ocean is warming twice as fast as expected, study finds
An international team of researchers has reconstructed the evolution of the warming of the Arctic Ocean and has verified that the waters This fragile ecosystem has been warming since the beginning of the last century , several decades earlier than the records suggested.
The study, published this Wednesday in Science Advances, concludes that the Arctic has been warming due to the entry of warmer water from the Atlantic Ocean, a phenomenon known as Atlantification .
The authors found that the Arctic Ocean began to warm rapidly at the beginning of the last century as warmer and saltier waters flowed from the Atlantic and that this change likely started before warming documented in recent decades.
To carry out the study, the researchers s studied a region called Fram Strait, between Greenland and Svalbard, which is the gateway to the Arctic Ocean, and using geochemical and ecological data from oceanic sediments, reconstructed the variations of the water properties of the last 800 years, as the changes in temperature or salinity .
In the first 800 years, the records were constant but, suddenly, at the beginning of the 20th century, “a change so abrupt that it draws attention” , explains Tesi Tommaso, co-author of the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council of Bologna, Italy.
From 1900, temperature of the ocean has risen by approximately 2 degrees Celsius , while sea ice has receded and salinity has increased.
The study offers the first historical perspective of the atlantization of the Arctic Ocean and reveals a connection with the North Atlantic much stronger than previously thought .
The authors warn that this connection may influence Arctic climate variability and have significant repercussions on ice retreat sea level rise and global sea level rise as polar ice caps continue to melt.
All the world’s oceans are warming due to climate change o, but the The Arctic Ocean, the smallest and shallowest of the world’s oceans, is the one that is warming the fastest of all: “More than double the world average”, points out Francesco Muschitiello, co-author of the study and member of the Department of Geography. Cambridge a.
As the Arctic Ocean warms, polar ice melts, global sea level rises and permafrost , which stores enormous amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas much more harmful than carbon dioxide .
The authors of the study warn that in the future “we could expect a greater Atlanticization of the Arctic in the future due to climate change” and argue that their The results also expose “a possible failure in the climate models, since they do not reproduce this early Atlanticization at the beginning of the last century.”
“The simulations Climate conditions generally do not reproduce this type of warming in the Arctic Ocean, which means that there is an incomplete understanding of the mechanisms that drive Atlantification “, concludes Tommaso.
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