ARE THE POLAR ICE CAPS MELTING?
Snow and ice basically form a cooling, protective sheet over the Arctic. When the sheet thaws out, the earth absorbs more sunlight and gets warmer. Recent studies demonstrate that the rise of global temperatures has hastened the melting of glaciers and ice caps. The average temperature in the Arctic region is shown to rise as fast as in any other place on earth. Evidence supports that the Arctic ice is melting, getting thinner, and falling apart. The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf — which is the largest single block of ice in the Arctic and has been around for 3,000 years — started to crack in 2000. In two years time, the ice totally divided and is now floating into thousands of fragmented icebergs. In 2002, the northern section of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica collapsed; and since 1995 the shelf area of the ice has contracted by forty percent. The Arctic sea coverage of ice held the lowest record in September 2007, with nearly half a million square miles less ice than the record in the
