STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- NASA is studying an unusual arctic winter event as temperatures are getting warmer.
Winter temperatures have been warmer for the fourth winter in a row. The ice in the Arctic is supposed to be thick and strong, but the above-freezing temperatures have caused it to break, exposing the open sea.
"We have seen winter warming events before, but they're becoming more frequent and more intense," Alek Petty, a sea ice researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a NASA report.
The heat, accompanied by moist air, is entering the Arctic through the sector of the North Atlantic Ocean that lies between Greenland and Europe, and also from the North Pacific through the Bering Strait.
Scientists are waiting to see how the heat wave will impact the wintertime sea ice, which has been shrinking and hit record lows each of the past three years.
The ice levels are already at record lows or near-record lows in several areas of the Arctic.
The sea ice cover north of Greenland opened up, releasing heat from the ocean to the atmosphere and making the ice more vulnerable to further melting.
"This is a region where we have the thickest multi-year sea ice and expect it to not be mobile, to be resilient," Petty said in the report. "But now this ice is moving pretty quickly, pushed by strong southerly winds and probably affected by the warm temperatures, too."
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