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" There&amp;#039;s good news and bad news when it comes to the amount of ice in the Arctic. The good news, tepid as it may be, was reported a few weeks ago: The summer minimum of Arctic ice cover, about 1.74 million square miles, wasn&amp;#039;t quite as low as last year&amp;#039;s level of 1.59 million square miles, the lowest ever recorded. But a new study dampens any enthusiasm, reporting that the rate of ice melt this August was 33,000 square miles per day, the fastest that anyone has ever recorded for the month. Joey Comiso, a scientist at NASA&amp;#039;s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, compiled the data by studying satellite pictures. He noted, as climate scientists in the Arctic did at the time, that last winter was a particularly cold one, which allowed the Arctic to recover slightly from last summer&amp;#039;s shocking low. &amp;quot;We didn&amp;#039;t expect the ice to be as bad as last year, when it went catastrophically low,&amp;quot; Comiso told PM. Things looked good for this year until July, he said, but then the ice began to disappear much more quickly, leading to the rapid August meltdown. &amp;quot;It was the fastest decline we&amp;#039;ve seen in the satellite era,&amp;quot; he said. The Arctic never melted quite as much as it did last summer, but by the end of August it was headed that way in a hurry. These figures aren&amp;#039;t just frightening on the surface, for anyone concerned about the effects of climate change--the melting rates are worse than modeling experts expected. &amp;quot;What we see in satellite data is more dramatic than what&amp;#039;s projected by models,&amp;quot; Comiso said. Because climate modelers take many different factors into account, and because they don&amp;#039;t want to overdo it and put out climate predictions that are too dramatic, he said, their numbers are usually a little conservative.  To examine the discrepancy between projections and reality, NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt says he and his colleagues are checking their calculations to see why they might have lowballed the Arctic melting. Specifically, Schmidt told PM, NASA climate scientists are studying the complex physics of sea ice--how it reforms after melting, how it moves and more. For one thing, scientists don&amp;#039;t have a great understanding of how &amp;quot;melt ponds&amp;quot; contribute to the speed of ice melt. These ponds form because ice melts on the surface and leaves pools of water, said Schmidt, who serves on PM&amp;#039;s editorial board of advisers. Water reflects less sunlight than the bright white ice, so the ponds warm up faster.  Climate modelers are always trying to create a more accurate picture of the real world for their computer simulations, Schmidt says, and he hopes that learning more about ice physics will help create more accurate models. It may turn out that new and better models match up with the massive loss of Arctic ice that existing satellites have already seen. Many inside and out of the climate modeling community continue to hope that their earlier figures were correct, and that Earth isn&amp;#039;t heating as fast as the Arctic meltdown would suggest.  RELATED STORIES * PODCAST: Global Warming Experts Discuss Future of Climate Modeling  * TECH WATCH: Climate Engineers Build UAV, Radar for Subzero Mystery  * ARCTIC ICE BLOG: Firsthand Accounts From Last Winter for PM.com  * FROM THE DAILY GREEN: Inside Latest Arctic Sea Ice Research  * COMPLETE COVERAGE: Breaking Environment News &amp;amp;amp; Analysis   (Photograph by nick_russill via Flickr. Some rights reserved.) "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a12215/4285413/>