Study shows warm water sliding into Beaufort Sea
May 5th 10:19 pm |
Alice Bailey, For the Arctic Sounder
A new study provides the first high-resolution observations of warm, northbound water sliding beneath the surface of the cold Beaufort Sea.
The research, published in Nature Communications, adds to evidence that polar ice may be melting faster than models predict.
"The rate of accelerating sea ice melt in the Arctic has been hard to predict accurately, in part because of all of the complex local feedbacks between ice, ocean and atmosphere; this work showcases the large role in warming that ocean water plays as part of those feedbacks," said Jennifer MacKinnon, a physical oceanographer at the University of California San Diego's Scripps Institute of Oceanography and lead author of the paper.