TORONTO --
A new study has discovered that warm pockets of Pacific water, referred to as 'heat bombs,' are migrating to the Arctic Ocean and accelerating the sea ice melt.
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, detail findings from a team of oceanographers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.
The study examines how the migrating warm pockets of Pacific water are thawing mass amounts of sea ice by flowing through the Bering Strait, up the Pacific Ocean and into the Arctic. The Pacific water is warmer and saltier than its Arctic counterpart, so it travels under cool surface waters in the Beaufort Gyre ocean current.