Recent advances in QCLs, high finesse optical cavities and robotic instrumentation: Addressing climate change with new experimental strategies

Te key irrefutable evidence for irreversible change in the Earth´s climate structure lies in the high Arctic. Specifcally, the observed loss of permanent foating ice in the Arctic Ocean, which has decreased from 16 × 10³ km³ in 1979 to 3 × 10³ km³ in 2012, represents an onset of climate change that was not predicted to occur at anything like the observed rate - even as late as the 2007 IPCC report. Te rapid loss of permanent ice is still not quantitatively understood in terms of the mechanisms controlling the fow of thermal energy into the system, yet both the rate of loss and the increasing rate of that loss place the time scale for the loss of all permanent foating ice to be within this decade. Te remarkable consistency of the quantitative loss in ice volume, as thermal energy fowed into the ice structure, is demonstrated by both the absolute volume as a function of time and the steepening curvature in the time dependence of volumetric loss as shown in Figure 1. Tis increasing curvature is a clear refection of the feedbacks that are accelerating further loss as the Arctic Ocean foating ice recedes.