Krabill noted that while some internal areas of Greenland show slight ice thickening, most areas along the coast show significant thinning. NASA's ICESat spacecraft, which is scheduled for launch in 2001, will allow us to make similar measurements routinely and keep an eye on both Antarctica and Greenland. The Arctic ice layer is melting faster than expected and could disappear entirely sometime this century, threatening native cultures and Polar species. The ice melt is, according to the researchers, due to the warming of both the waters of the North Atlantic and air temperatures in the region. Gulf Stream Could Shut Down Peter Wadhams, of the Scott Polar Research Institute in the UK, said that for the fifth winter in the last seven years, a huge tongue of shelf ice had failed to form in the Greenland sea.
Arctic ice is both thinning and dwindling.
The Gulf stream flows north from the Caribbean, keeping Britain at least 5C warmer than expected at its latitude. It merges with the north Atlantic current and the encounter of this giant, warm surface river with the Arctic winter ice is a powerful part of the convection machine which keeps the ocean swirling. Ice is fresh water - so the sea that remains is increasingly cold, salty and dense. But the Arctic ice cover is in retreat - shrinking by an area the size of the Netherlands every year. The loss of a large ice mass over the northern polar region would have a dramatic impact on the global climate system.