蜜芽传媒

This year the summer听thaw of the Arctic sea ice is the most severe since satellite monitoring began thirty years ago. Every summer the Arctic ice melts and retreats but this year the melt has broken all previous records. Scientists are now seriously contemplating the possibility that one summer, not too many years away, there won鈥檛 be any ice in the Arctic at all. The North Pole will simply be a patch of open ocean.

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In this week鈥檚 Science Caf茅 Adam Walton is joined by four scientists to discuss听whether this year鈥檚 record thaw of the Arctic sea ice is just an anomaly or a warning of impending climatic catastrophe:

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• Dr. Tom Rippeth and Ben Lincoln from the School of Ocean Sciences at Bangor University research ocean currents in the Arctic Ocean and North Atlantic. Ben has just returned from several weeks on an ice-breaker in the Canadian Arctic;听
  
• Prof. Peter Wadhams, Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University has recently been quoted as saying that the Arctic ice cap is 鈥渉eading for oblivion鈥�;
  
• Dr. Seymour Laxon is Professor of Climate Physics at University College London and an expert on the measurement of polar ice.
  
  

We also hear from听the 蜜芽传媒鈥檚 Science Editor, David Shukman who has just returned from a Norwegian research station on the island of Svalbard in the Arctic where scientists have been measuring the thickness and are extremely concerned about the decline of the Arctic sea ice.听

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