The Arctic Could Go Ice-Free In Summer By 2030

Antarctica is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean (also known as the Antarctic Ocean), it contains the geographic South Pole. Antarctica is the fifth-largest continent, being about 40% larger than Europe, and has an area of 14,200,000 km2 (5,500,000 sq mi). Most of Antarctica is covered by the Antarctic ice sheet, with an average thickness of 1.9 km

If the world keeps increasing greenhouse gas emissions at its current speed, all sea ice in the Arctic will disappear in the 2030s, an event that could at best be postponed until the 2050s should emissions be somehow reduced. The prediction is a decade earlier than what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has projected: an ice-free Arctic by the 2040s.

A possible ice-free Arctic in the 2030-2050s was projected regardless of humanity's efforts to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by Professor Seung-Ki Min and Research Professor Yeon-Hee Kim from the Division of Environmental Science and Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) and a joint team of researchers from the Environment Climate Change Canada and Universität Hamburg, Germany. The research was published in the international journal, Nature Communications.