Shock News : Arctic Has Been Ice Free For Over Five Years, Asia Has Drowned

Polar ice cap melting away in 2008 ?

How low will they go? Putting a date on the melting of the Arctic ice cap has been a popular prediction game among scientists of late; in recent months, we’ve heard estimates ranging from 2030 to as early as 2013.

The latest salvo comes courtesy of Xinhua, which reports that Olav Orheim, the head of the Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat, is placing his money on this summer. Noting that its ice sheet had reached a historical low of 3m sq. km last summer – it covered around 7.5m sq. km as recently as 2000 – Orheim told Xinhua that “if Norway’s average temperature this year equals that in 2007, the ice cap in the Arctic will all melt away.” Barring this disaster, Orheim predicted that excess carbon dioxide emissions and higher average temperatures would unpredictably alter the region’s fragile ecosystems. On a separate note, he said that Asia would likely be hardest hit by rising sea levels, estimating that a one meter rise would affect “nearly 100 million people on an area of 800,000 square km in Asia and direct economic loss will amount to 400 billion U.S. dollars.”

The Norwegian Moose: Polar ice cap melting away in 2008 ?