meltwater from ice cap on norway

Oceans and ice are absorbing the brunt of climate change

The latest report from the IPCC highlights the dramatic toll warming has taken on the world's water.

Meltwater gushes from an ice cap on the island of Nordaustlandet, in Norway's Svalbard archipelago. The Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet, and the ice in the region is melting fast.

Photograph by Paul Nicklen, SeaLegacy

Climate change is here, heating the oceans and crumbling the planet’s ice sheets, a new report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lays out.

On Wednesday, the IPCC released a major report on the state of the planet's oceans and ice. The 900-page report, which compiles the findings from thousands of scientific studies, outlines the damage climate change has already done to the planet’s vast oceans and fragile ice sheets and forecasts the future for these crucial parts of the climate system.

Climate change’s impacts, the report says, are already readily visible from the top of the highest mountain to the very bottom of the ocean—and tangible for every human on the planet.

The problems aren’t theoretical, the report stresses:

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