Arctic sea ice 'to melt by 2015'

Arctic sea ice could completely melt away by the summer of 2015, destroying the natural habitat of animals like polar bears, one of Britain's leading ocean experts has claimed.

Prof Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, said the ice that forms over the Arctic sea is shrinking so rapidly that it could vanish altogether in as little as four years' time.

Although it would reappear again every winter, its absence during the peak of summer would rob polar bears of their summer hunting ground and threaten them with extinction.

The mass of ice between northern Russia, Canada and Greenland waxes and wanes with the seasons, currently reaching a minimum size of about four million square kilometres.

Most models, including the latest estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), track the decline in the area covered by ice in recent years to predict the rate at which it will deteriorate.

But citing research compiled by Dr Wieslaw Maslowski, a researcher from the American Naval Postgraduate School, last year Prof Wadhams said such predictions failed to spot how quickly climate change is causing the ice to thin.

While the IPCC suggests the ice will remain in place until the 2030s, Dr Maslowski's study also takes into account the rate at which it is thinning and calculates that it will vanish much more quickly.

Dr Maslowski's model, along with his claim that the Arctic sea ice is in a "death spiral", were controversial but Prof Wadhams, a leading authority on the polar regions, said the calculations had him "pretty much persuaded."

Prof Wadhams said: "His [model] is the most extreme but he is also the best modeller around.
"It is really showing the fall-off in ice volume is so fast that it is going to bring us to zero very quickly. 2015 is a very serious prediction and I think I am pretty much persuaded that that's when it will happen."

The ice would come back the following winter but its absence in summer would encourage more shipping and oil exploration in the Arctic and could threaten native species, he added.

While polar bears hibernate on land in the winter, they move onto the ice in the spring to hunt.
Prof Wadhams said: "The obvious case that everybody points to is the polar bear, and that obviously would either become extinct or it could be that they will go back to hunting on land.

"It could be that the polar bear will disappear via interbreeding and go back to terrestrial habitats, but something has to happen because its habitat is going to disappear."


By Nick Collins, Science Correspondent
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/8877491/Arctic-sea-ice-to-melt-by-2015.html

For the first time in 75 years, an entire genus of mammal is on the brink of extinction

You're looking at three of the last known hirola on Earth. Since the 1970s, unregulated hunting, habitat destruction and drought linked to climate change have driven the number of these large African antelopes living in Kenya and Somalia from over 14,000 to fewer than 400.

Of course, countless species go extinct every day — even the most conservative estimates show that the world is losing species at a rate 100 times greater than the world has seen in thousands of years.

But these hirola are not only among the last of their species, they're among the last of an entire genus — the taxonomic rank above species and below family. (As a point of reference, if the genus Canis were to go extinct, it would mean the disappearance of the planet's dogs, wolves, coyotes, jackals, and numerous other species.)

If the critically endangered hirola cannot be saved, it will be the first time the Earth has lost an entire genus of mammal in three-quarters of a century. (The death of the last known Tasmanian tiger in 1936 spelled not only the end of the genus Thylacinus, but the family Thylacinidae, as well.)

According to National Geographic, conservation efforts to save the hirola are already well under way; the Ishaqbini Hirola Community Conservancy is in the process of erecting what it claims will be a predator-free sanctuary for the species.

Whether or not hirola should be considered any more important, from a conservation standpoint, than any other animal facing the threat of extinction is obviously a subject for debate. But the more important question raised by the plight of the hirola is whether it heralds the coming of an age where the term "endangered genus" (or even "endangered family") will become as commonplace as "endangered species" is today. With levels of global biodiversity declining as rapidly as they are, such a future is frighteningly easy to envision.

http://io9.com/5857522/for-the-first-time-in-75-years-an-entire-genus-of-mammal-is-on-the-brink-of-extinction