Arctic Multi-Year Ice Effectively Gone
According to a Reuters report published 29.10.2009, the multi-year ice covering the Arctic Ocean has effectively vanished.
This is important news for several reasons:
- *It is some of the best (or worst?) evidence yet of the rapidity and severity of Arctic warming (and by extension the globe).
*It is many years ahead of what modelers were predicting just a few short years ago.
*It potentially is the start of accelerated Arctic warming (runaway warming) due the loss of the albedo effect and activation of positive feedback loops (like permafrost thawing).
*It opens the Arctic up to shipping, exploration, drilling and other forms of environmentally-questionable activity.
The report describes how Canadian scientist David Barber (Research Chair in Arctic System Science at the University of Manitoba) went searching for multi-year pack ice and found very little. “We are almost out of multiyear sea ice in the northern hemisphere,” he said in a recent presentation to the Canadian Parliament.
Reuters says that Barber spoke shortly after returning from an expedition that sought (and largely failed to find) a huge multiyear ice pack that should have been in the Beaufort Sea off the Canadian coastal town of Tuktoyaktuk.
This type of ice can be tens of metres thick and to date has been the barrier closing the fabled Northwest Passage:
Vast sheets of impenetrable multiyear ice, which can reach up to 80 meters (260 feet) thick, have for centuries blocked the path of ships seeking a quick short cut through the fabled Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They also ruled out the idea of sailing across the top of the world.
Barber also said that the Arctic is now, from a practical perspective, almost seasonally ice-free. The scale and rapidity of the changes astounded Barber. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my 30 years of working in the high Arctic … it was very dramatic,” he said.
An increasing number of experts feel the North Pole will be ice free in summer by 2030 at the latest, for the first time in a million years.
The Arctic is an early indicator of what we can expect at the global scale as we move through the next few decades … So we should be paying attention to this very carefully, according to Barber
