Environmental Glance
Vital Arctic sea ice shrank to tie its lowest measured level for the winter, the season when ice grows, as a warming Earth shattered records across the continents.
Arctic sea ice levels, especially in the summer, are crucial to Earth’s climate because without the ice reflecting sunlight, more heat energy goes into the oceans. Ice of all kinds around the poles acts as Earth’s refrigerator. Wildlife, such as polar bears ahttps://apnews.com/article/arctic-sea-ice-record-shattering-warming-86a91afa7be96d8821c7bbfed9e5a623nd seals, also depend on sea ice. Lack of sea ice in the Arctic creates new shipping routes and in doing so causes geopolitical disruptions, making once-ignored places such as Greenland, more desirable.
The shrinking Arctic sea ice was announced Thursday as temperatures broke March heat records across the United States, all over Mexico, in Australia, across Northern Africa and through parts of Northern Europe. Climatologist and weather historian Maximiliano Herrera, who tracks extreme temperatures, called the extreme March temperatures “by far the most extreme heat event in world climatic history” and said on social media that the next few days would be “much worse.”https://apnews.com/article/arctic-sea-ice-record-shattering-warming-86a91afa7be96d8821c7bbfed9e5a623
Sixteen states broke March temperature records in the past week or so, said weather historian Christ Burt. Twenty-seven locations had temperatures in the past week high enough to tie or surpass the hottest April day on record, including St. Louis, meteorologists said. Mexico has had thousands of records shattered, some of them warmer than the hottest May temperatures, but that’s nothing compared with what’s happening in Asia, where “dozens of thousands of monthly records” were smashed by 30 to 35 degrees (17 to 19 degrees Celsius) margins, Herrera said.
As the calendar soon turns to April, it appears that we can finally shed all talk of the polar vortex until next winter as milder weather takes hold across much of the eastern U.S. and a cool-down ends the western heat wave.
Towering flash floods and an imminent dam failure in the northern part of Oahu triggered evacuation warnings in Hawaii on Friday, as the state continued contending with a powerful storm this week.
States across the US south-west recorded blistering temperatures at the tail end of winter, including some of the hottest March temperatures ever recorded in the US, with forecasts indicating hotter days are still to come.
Rain continued falling in Hawaii on Sunday where a strong storm brought flash flooding, blizzard conditions and landslides to the islands as residents reported collapsed roads and one home washing away in rising waters.
