More nice timing: With Arctic sea ice at its highest extent in nearly a decade, NRC releases a report claiming that "global warming is changing the face of Antarctica and the Arctic faster than expected"

New NRC report on the state of the polar regions | Bits of Science

The U.S. National Research Council has just released a synthesis of reports from thousands of scientists in 60 countries who took part in the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-08, the first in over 50 years to offer a benchmark for environmental conditions and new discoveries in the polar regions.

University of Massachusetts Amherst geosciences researcher and expert in the paleoclimate of the Arctic, Julie Brigham-Grette, co-chaired the NRC report, “Lessons and Legacies of the IPY 2007-08” with leading Antarctic climate scientist Robert Bindschadler of NASA.

Among the major findings is that global warming is changing the face of Antarctica and the Arctic faster than expected. For example, in 2007 scientists documented a 27 percent loss of sea ice in a single year, Brigham-Grette says. Also, ice sheets around the poles are now showing evidence of serious retreat, expected to continue and perhaps accelerate over coming centuries as warm ocean currents melt the ice front faster than anyone had grasped before. Sea level rise from melting polar ice sheets is today slowly affecting every shoreline on the planet.

Flashback to yesterday:  Arctic Shatters More Records | Real Science

Arctic ice extent is the highest in nearly a decade, and has again set the record for both the latest peak and the longest winter. Normally it has been melting for almost a month already.