Scientists monitoring sea ice around the high Arctic and glaciers on the world’s highest mountains are detecting ominous new changes linked to the warming global climate, they reported Tuesday. The Arctic’s thin and salty seasonal sea ice that freezes and thaws in the far north every year actually spread more widely this past winter, but the team of NASA scientists keeping watch over the ice by satellite said the much thicker perennial ice that normally remains throughout the Arctic summer has grown much thinner and some is already melting and drifting southward as winter ends. In a related development, scientists at the World Glacier Monitoring Service, based at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, reported that some 30 major glaciers around the world are shrinking fast, threatening to increase floods in some regions and to decrease precious water supplies in others. The extent of total sea ice – both thick and thin – around the North Pole reached an all-time low last year – nearly 25 percent less than the record low set two years earlier. This winter, the area of short-lived thin seasonal ice increased due to an episode of somewhat colder-than-average sea surface temperatures, but […]