University of Cambridge > Talks.cam > Cambridge Society for the Application of Research (CSAR) > Impacts of a Disappearing Artic Sea Cover

  Browse A-Z

Log in

Cambridge users (raven)details Other usersdetails No account?details

Information on

Subscribing to talksdetails Finding a talkdetails Adding a talkdetails Disseminating talksdetails Help and Documentationdetails

Impacts of a Disappearing Artic Sea Cover

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Nigel Bennee.

Professor Wadhams will explain how the sea ice cover of the Arctic Ocean has been undergoing significant changes in recent years, culminating in the virtual collapse during this past summer when its area shrank to the lowest level ever recorded. This thinning of the ice layers in the Arctic, which began in 1950, has been monitored by various techniques, including satellites and upward-looking sonar from submarines and unmanned vehicles in the area. The volume of the polar ice cover in summer is now less than 30 percent of its value in the 1980s. The reduction of the summer sea ice cover will have some advantages, such as easing polar navigation and oil exploration. However, its overwhelming impact is to accelerate global warming, perhaps by a large factor. This occurs because of the albedo feedback effect by which bright, reflective surface is replaced by a dark absorptive one. This is accompanied by a further, potentially more disastrous effect whereby methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, is released in significant amounts from the seabed as offshore permafrost melts due to the warmer sea temperatures which are now made possible by the reduction of the sea ice cover.

This talk is part of the Cambridge Society for the Application of Research (CSAR) series.

Tell a friend about this talk:

This talk is included in these lists:

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.

Other lists

Cambridge University Geographical Society Testing & Verification For Computational Science Marr Club

Other talks

A new proposal for the mechanism of protein translocation Public innovation: can innovation methods help solve social challenges? Adaptive Stochastic Galerkin Finite Element Approximation for Elliptic PDEs with Random Coefficients Determining structures in situ using cryo-electron tomography:enveloped viruses and coated vesicles Visual Analytics for High-Dimensional Data Exploration and Engineering Design Structural basis for human mitochondrial DNA replication, repair and antiviral drug toxicity Cambridge-Lausanne Workshop 2018 - Day 1 Cambridge-Lausanne Workshop 2018 - Day 2 Networks, resilience and complexity "Mechanosensitive regulation of cancer epigenetics and pluripotency" Simulating Electricity Prices: negative prices and auto-correlation
 

© 2006-2025 Talks.cam, University of Cambridge. Contact Us | Help and Documentation | Privacy and Publicity