Focus on Arctic Sea Ice


Read Transcript		We've been interested in sea ice volume largely because we know that the sea ice has been shrinking. We also know that it's been thinning. From year to year over the past 32 years, we've lost about 280 cubic kilometers of sea ice. How much energy does it take to melt that amount of ice? It happens to be just about as much as the U.S. consumes in energy in any one year.

The Polar Science Center @ APL-UW
Featured here are several of the extraordinary scientists at the Lab's Polar Science Center — a group of about 30 oceanographers, meteorologists, mathematicians, and biologists studying the ice-covered regions of the Earth. Explore all of their current research topics at the PSC website. The dramatic melting of Arctic sea ice over the past several summers has generated great interest and concern in the scientific community and among the public. Here, APL-UW polar scientists present their research on the current state of Arctic sea ice. A long-term, downward trend in sea ice volume is clear.		They also describe how the many observations they gather are used to improve computer simulations of global climate that, in turn, help us to asses the impacts of a future state of diminished sea ice cover in the Arctic. This movie presentation was first seen on the March 2012 edition of UW\|360, the monthly University of Washington Television news magazine.