Local communities have been noticing profound changes in the Arctic sea ice environment for several decades.
This past summer, the Arctic sea ice dwindled to its second lowest level.
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As in previous years the Arctic Sea is opening up on the Atlantic side, north of Scandinavian countries and Russia.
The Arctic sea ice area is expected to continue decreasing until September.
Each year, the Arctic sea ice reaches its minimum extent in September.
Charles pointed out that mankind had caused the Arctic sea ice to thin and rainforests to shrink by a third since the 1950s.
Ann Daniels from Whimple and Pen Hadow from Dartmoor will be studying the Arctic sea ice to help scientists understand more about climate change.
At stake were lucrative new oil and gas fields -- by some estimates ten billion tons of oil -- on the Arctic sea floor.
The Arctic sea ice is constantly moving, breaking open and reforming into different shapes - which means we can end up moving several kilometres in any direction while we are asleep in our tents.
One-hundred-and-two holes have been dug so far and 1, 100 measurements have been made of ice thickness, snow density and other features - data deemed vital by scientists evaluating the future of the Arctic sea-ice.
The rapid melting of the Arctic sea ice, then, illuminates the difficulty of modelling the climate but not in a way that brings much comfort to those who hope that fears about the future climate might prove exaggerated.
The best hope lies in trying to identify the broader changes under way - for example with the retreat of the Arctic sea-ice or the cycle of warming in the Pacific Ocean with El Nino and La Nina.
Thanks to data collected and disseminated by the Arctic Regional Ocean Observing System (Arctic ROOS) and by national observing efforts, information about the extent of the Arctic sea ice is reported every few days, providing an early warning of changing conditions in the Arctic Ocean.
Meanwhile, the Russian navy has in recent days been engaged in what it has presented as a dramatic anti-piracy mission: apprehending, off the Cape Verde islands, eight people on board a Russian-owned cargo ship called the Arctic Sea, whose crew claimed to have been hijacked, at least briefly, in the Baltic in late July.
"This suggests that current model projections may in fact provide a conservative estimate of future Arctic change, and that the summer Arctic sea ice may disappear considerably earlier than IPCC projections, " said NSIDC's Julienne Stroeve who led the study.
As far as current global observations are concerned, Hansen cites both the decline of Arctic sea ice and the worldwide retreat of mountain glaciers as causes for major concern.
The amount of the Arctic covered by sea ice fell in late August to the lowest point since satellite observations began in 1979, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported.
The remaining make-up of newly elected Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's government further hints at the strategic importance he places on the future of the Arctic region and the Barents Sea.
For instance, sea ice is predicted to increasingly shrink as a result of climate change: the late-summer Arctic sea ice may vanish almost entirely by the middle of the century, triggering unprecedented maritime challenges, with an increase in shipping and oil and gas exploration in high-latitude waters previously covered in ice.
The extent of Arctic sea ice extent fell to 4.10 million square kilometers on August 26, 2012.
The loss of Arctic sea ice is "big news", according to University of Alaska, Fairbanks, researcher Larry Hinzman.
"The time when Arctic sea ice is going to disappear is open to a lot of debate, " he said.
Icelanders are also keen to co-operate with Russia, Canada, and Norway in the Barents Sea and in the Arctic region.
Compared to September conditions in the 1980s and 1990s, this represents a 45 percent reduction in the area of the Arctic covered by sea ice.
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Most of the commission's members are not particularly friendly to the U.S. This time around, they could overlook the lack of scientific merit to the latest Russian claim and allocate most, if not all, of the Arctic's sea beds to a newly and aggressively resurgent Kremlin.
In the past decade, Arctic sea ice volumes have declined 36% during autumn and 9% during the winter, according to findings to be published in Geophysical Research Letters.
And in February 2009 it was discovered that scientists had previously been underestimating the re-growth of Arctic sea ice by an area larger than the state of California (twice as large as New Zealand).
The year also saw Arctic sea ice hit a record low in more than 30 years of satellite observations and studies that found the world's major ice sheets have been shrinking at an increasing rate.
Other Fossil Fuel companies on a divestment strategy are BP who are selling their stakes in fields in the North Sea, Russia, the Arctic and the Gulf to name but a few and not even batting an eyelid about being refused license to buy future assets in the Gulf.
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