Director of the Museum of the Arctic, Antarctic Viktor Ilyich Boyarsky: “Now we are in the interglacial period. But, nevertheless, the average temperature is lower than the temperature that was in the previous period. The Arctic is actually quite cold. I go there every time, and those people who proclaim that it is warmer there now, I invite with great pleasure to see how everything is going on there
It is simply a matter of changing the dynamics of ice movement and changing the processes of ice growth, which leads to a reduction in the area of drifting ice and a decrease in the average thickness.
The issue of construction of an artificial drifting ice floe is being considered. On the one hand, it became more difficult to find more adequate ice floes that would allow the station to operate for more than 1 year. Previously, it was easier, because there was more perennial ice in percentage terms. But there is an alternative to creating a reusable research station on ships, which could work a little in a semi-active mode, and would resume work at the end of the drift, go out, and then again freeze into the ice and work.
As for Antarctica, ice degradation is underway in West Antarctica, glaciers are collapsing there. In the East - a cold snap. And there is no need to make some platforms. There is hardened ice, strong enough, you can exist, live and work on it for a very long time"
Deputy Director for Research of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute Alexander Ivanovich Danilov: “2011 was the warmest year in the Arctic in the last 50 years. The anomaly is 3-4 degrees. In the world, in general, 2011 is somewhere around 11-12, but in the Arctic it is abnormally warm. I will not talk about the consequences. In fact, they are already visible, they are. What will happen next - we'll see. Therefore it gets warmer, warmer and warmer. The Arctic is a special region of the globe.
In Antarctica, this is not entirely true, there are much less trends. But if we look from the 56th year to our time, there are weak warming trends. Of course it is getting warmer."
Director of the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences Vladimir Mikhailovich Kotlyakov: With all the warming that is now observed on Earth, the Antarctic ice sheet, most of it, is growing, that is, the mass of ice is increasing. This is a huge boon to humanity because it slows down the rise in sea levels. If the ice mass in Antarctica decreased, the ocean level would rise much faster. And this is a tragedy, because a third of humanity - two billion people - lives on the shores of the ocean now on Earth.
In Antarctica, precipitation falls in the form of snow, it does not rain there. And the snow does not melt, because the temperature there is average in summer - minus 30 approximately. Above almost never happens. Antarctica is growing, and this is very noticeable by our research"
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