Sea ice and climate change - challenges of the 21st century | ICECLIM21 | Proyecto | Ficha informativa | HORIZON | CORDIS

Objetivo

The ongoing climate change is one of the challenges that human beings, everywhere on earth, are facing and feeling. One of the areas where this change is observable very clearly and rapidly is the Arctic. Here the temperature is rising faster than anywhere on earth and the sea ice cover is retreating. While scientists still do not completely understand what is going on, these changes are so important to be understood - to let human beings react. We need to answer questions like: How does the changing sea ice state in turn affect global climate change - does it accelerate it? How is sea ice interacting with the gulfstream system, and what changes may take place? If the summer sea ice cover may dissappear during following decades - how will this affect Arctic communities, offshore activities and shipping, and related environmental issues? If summer sea ice remains - how will an Arctic with thinner sea ice (1 m
versus 3-4 m in the 20th century) look like? How will this affect weather and ice conditions and the quality of their forecasts? How good can climate models predict all this ? Last, but not least, what does this mean for a global society that has to think of becoming climate neutral?

While there is urgent need for researchers to answer these questions, most people in Europe often barely know them, and teachers are seldom an exception. This is not surprising, as climate science is young and evolving, and scholary textbooks would need to be rewritten every decade. Also as ice and climate research are under steady debate, the state of the art is not easy to understand, not even for the scientists themselves.

The goal of the present project is to bring these urgent questions about sea ice and climate to schools kids, via Researchers Night and Researchers at schools activities. Concise scientific answers are still difficult at the moment yet: The most important thing is to ask and
understand the most important questions.