A group of scientists known as Polarstern team spent the last year drifting through the arctic. “The disappearance of summer sea ice in the Arctic is one of the first landmines in this minefield, one of the tipping points that we set off first when we push warming too far,” Markus Rex (one of the 300 scientists from 20 countries) said. “And one can essentially ask if we haven’t already stepped on this mine and already set off the beginning of the explosion. Arctic Ocean ice had retreated faster in the spring of 2020 than since the beginning of records. The spread of the sea ice in the summer was only half as large as decades ago. Only evaluation in the coming years will allow us to determine if we can still save the year-round Arctic sea ice through forceful climate protection or whether we have already passed this important tipping point in the climate system.”
Al Jazeera reports, “Stefanie Arndt, who specialises in sea ice physics, said it was ‘painful to know that we are possibly the last generation who can experience an Arctic which still has a sea ice cover in the summer.”‘