LONDON (TIP): Arctic sea ice may completely collapse within four years due to global warming, one of the world’s leading ice experts has warned. As the sea area freezes and melts each year, shrinking to its lowest extent ever recorded, professor Peter Wad hams of Cambridge University called it a “global disaster” now unfolding in northern latitudes, the Guardian reported. Wad hams He predicted the imminent break-up of sea ice in summer of 2007, when the previous lowest extent of 4.17 million square kilometers was set. This year, it has plunged a further 5,00,000 sq km to less than 3.5 m sq km.”The main cause is simply global warming: as the climate has warmed there has been less ice growth during the winter and more ice melt during the summer,” he said.”At first this didn’t [get] noticed; the summer ice limits slowly shrank back, at a rate which suggested that the ice would last another 50 years or so. But in the end the summer melt overtook the winter growth,” Wad hams said.”This collapse, I predicted would occur in 2015-16 at which time the summer Arctic (August to September) would become ice-free.”