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New data shows that in 2013 Arctic ice actually grew rather than retreating as climate change models had predicted. Far from proving climate change is a myth or that ice retreat has ended, as skeptics are now claiming, this reveals something much more interesting about our warming climate.
The research, which was published this month in the science journal Nature, comes as a result of scientists embarking on the first wide scale analysis of the Arctic sea ice’s entire volume. The study, led by researchers at University College London, uses data collected by the European Space Agency’s Cryosat satellite which has enabled scientists to amass over 88 million measurements of the Arctic ice coverage. By analyzing those measurements, the researchers were able to come up with some interesting findings.
Most prominent among those discoveries was that Arctic sea ice actually grew by about a third in 2013 and continued to grow into 2014, partly compensating for the 14 percent drop incurred during the 2010-2012 period. This at first might seem surprising given that we are told that sea ice should be melting–if, that is, climate models are correct. Indeed, many anti-climate science news sites have made a lot out of this finding. The problem is, it isn’t the complete picture.
Highlighting this little factoid without then mentioning the six percent loss the data also showed for the full year of 2014 is incredibly misleading, but that’s precisely what websites like the Daily Mail appear to have done. What’s more, Arctic ice levels are nowhere near restored to the levels seen in the late 1970s when, estimates say, they were around 40 percent higher. Separate data from this year that was obviously not included in this study also appears to show that June 2015 figures saw the satellite record the third lowest Arctic ice volume since the satellite launched in 2010.
Regardless of this though, the question does remain: Why did this small recovery happen?
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Arctic ice image via Shutterstock.
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