Shrinking Of Arctic Ice Cap Captured By NASA (Video)

Evidence of climate change can be seen by many. One of the examples is the melting of the ice caps. NASA captured the time-lapse and show how the Arctic ice cap is slowly melting.

The graphic reveals the movement of Arctic sea ice, the large mass of frozen water located in the Arctic Ocean. In the time-lapse that has been captured by NASA, they showed how the Arctic Ice shrinks over the last three decades.

The danger of the shrinking is that when the Arctic Ice loses its mass, the risk of warm water and the warmer atmosphere will take place. Sea ice researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre Walt Meier said that "What we've seen over the years is that the older ice is disappearing," according to RT News.

In a report by The New Daily, Walt Meier added that the older, thicker ice is like the bulwark of sea ice: a warm summer will melt all the young, thin ice away but it can't completely get rid of the older ice. But, the older ice is becoming weaker because there's less of it. The remaining old ice is more broken up and thinner so that bulwark is not as good as it used to be.

The graphic was created by NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio to offer an impression of how much the Arctic sea ice has reduced since 1984. NASA stated that in September 1984 there were 1.8 million square kilometers of ice that was at least five years old at its lowest annual amount. By September 2016, there were just 110,000 square kilometers left.

The animation also reveals how the mass of ice moves around throughout the seasons and years. As the surface, if the sea ice decreases, the older ice also reduces, resulting in the entire ice block to be less sturdy due to the younger ice's thinness.

Walt Meier shared that "the ice age is a good analog for ice thickness because basically, as ice gets older it gets thicker. This is due to the ice generally growing more in the winter than it melts in the summer"