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Convincing Evidence
One area of the world where signs of a rapidly warming climate are
virtually everywhere is the Arctic Circle. A large body of research
has shown that the entire planet is warming, but the Arctic is heat-
ing up at least twice as fast as the rest of the world. “It has been a
record year so far for global temperatures, but the record high tem-
peratures in the Arctic over the past six months have been even
more extreme,”
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says NASA sea ice scientist Walt Meier. Such
unusually high temperatures in the Arctic have led to widespread
melting of sea ice, glaciers, ice sheets, and ice shelves. Normally,
ice cover in the Arctic Ocean declines by about 50 percent during
the summer, although some of the ice never melts. But because of
rapid Arctic warming, there is less ice cover than usual. Scientists
offer the dire prediction that by the mid-2020s most of the Arctic
Ocean will be completely ice free during the summertime.
In April 2017 scientists from the University of Kansas published
photographic evidence of global warming’s effects on earth’s po-
lar ice formations. They collected photos taken many years ago
and compared them with current photos of the exact same re-
gions. The old photos showed what glaciers used to look like in the
Arctic (specifically, Greenland) and Antarctica, which is the world’s
southernmost polar region. The comparison between old and new
was shocking for the scientists, because the current photos clearly
showed a vast reduction in ice. “We have unretouched photograph-
ic evidence of glaciers melting all around the globe,” says ecologist
Gregory Baker, who led the study. “That includes the ice sheets of
Greenland and Antarctica—they’re reduced in size.” Baker empha-
sizes that these findings were not the result of computer models or
satellite images. “These are simply photos, some taken up to 100
years ago, and my co-authors went back and reacquired photos at
many of these locations,” he says. “So it’s just straightforward proof
of large-scale ice loss around the globe.”
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Arctic Crisis
The rapid, widespread melting of Arctic ice has proved to be dev-
astating for many types of wildlife. One animal that is especially
threatened by the shrinking ice is the polar bear, which lives only
