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The thinner this mixed layer becomes, the easier the ocean gets warmer. The new work could explain recent extreme marine heatwaves and point at a future of more frequent and destructive ocean warming events as global temperatures continue to climb. Marine heatwaves will be more intense and happen more often in the future, said Dillon Amaya, a CIRES Visiting Fellow and lead author on the study out this week in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society s Explaining Extreme Events. And we now understand the mechanics of why. When the mixed layer is thin, it takes less heat to warm the ocean more.
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According to a new study published in the journal The Cryosphere, the annual melt rate has jumped 57 percent in the past three decades, the research found, from 800 billion metric tons per year in the 1990s to 1.2 trillion tons today. It was a surprise to see such a large increase in just 30 years, lead author Thomas Slater, a glaciologist at Leeds University in Britain, told Reuters.
Slater and his colleagues estimated the following ice losses from 1994 to 2017: 7.6 trillion metric tons of Arctic sea ice, 6.5 trillion tons from Antarctic ice shelves, 6.1 trillion tons from mountain glaciers, 3.8 trillion tons from the Greenland ice sheet, 2.5 trillion tons from the Antarctic ice sheet, and 900 billion tons from Southern Ocean sea ice. Some 58 percent of the ice loss occurred in the Northern Hemisphere and 42 percent in the Southern.