Warming rivers play an increasingly important role in melting sea ice and rising air temperatures in the Arctic , according to a new study published in the journal Science Advances . Using complex modeling techniques, a team of international researchers found that heat from rivers melted as much as 10 percent of Arctic sea ice between 1980 and 2015. University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher Igor Polyakov is one of the study’s authors. “Because of increase of surface area temperature over