Eight months after the return of the international mission carried out for one year in the Arctic, Markus Rex, the leader of the expedition estimated that “only the evaluation of the next years will make it possible to determine if we can still save the Arctic sea ice present all the time. year through consistent climate protection, or whether we've already passed that important tipping point in the climate system.
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According to him, "the disappearance of summer ice floes in the Arctic is one of the first mines in the minefield, one of the tipping points that we trigger first when we push warming too far."
However, for the climatologist and scientific physicist, "one can really wonder if we have not already walked on this mine and already triggered the start of the explosion", he insisted.
As soon as the icebreaker Polarstern returned to its home port of Bremerhaven, in northwestern Germany, on October 12, it had already sounded a cry of alarm about the pack ice, claiming that it was melting in "A dramatic speed."
According to him, if this tipping point has already been crossed, it can trigger harmful "cascading" effects and "further aggravate warming such as the disappearance of the Greenland ice sheet or the thawing of ever larger areas of the Arctic permafrost. "
The threat also hangs over the old glaciers.
To argue his conclusions, Markus Rex relies on data collected over a year by international teams when the ship drifted in the ice of the North Pole.
For 389 days, the mission studied the atmosphere, the ocean, the sea ice and the ecosystem to collect data assessing the impact of climate change on the region and the whole world.
