31 Aug 2008
The North Pole has become an island for the first time in human history as climate change has made it possible to circumnavigate the Arctic ice cap.
The historic development was revealed by satellite images taken last week showing that both the north-west and north-east passages have been opened by melting ice.
Prof Mark Serreze, a sea ice specialist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in the US said the images suggested the Arctic may have entered a “death spiral” caused by global warming.
Shipping companies are already planning to exploit the first simultaneous opening of the routes since the beginning of the last Ice Age 125,000 years ago. The Beluga Group in Germany says it will send the first ship through the north-east passage, around Russia, next year, cutting 4,000 miles off the voyage from Germany to Japan.
Meier
July 14, 2010
“Examination of several proxy records (e.g., sediment cores) of sea ice indicate ice-free or near ice-free summer conditions for at least some time during the period of 15,000 to 5,000 years ago”
Good to see that arctic sea ice recovering as predicted by some in recent years.
I wonder what Meier might have to say about periods like the early 20’s and late 50’s.
“The combined sea ice data suggest that the seasonal Arctic sea ice cover was strongly reduced during most of the early Holocene and there appear to have been periods of ice free summers in the central Arctic Ocean. This has important consequences for our understanding of the recent trend of declining sea ice, and calls for further research on causal links between Arctic climate and sea ice.”
http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/envs501/downloads/Jakobsson%20et%20al.%202010.pdf
The “Serreze” name looked familiar to me, so I threw it into a search in my vast pile of stuff about the smear of skeptic scientists, and it popped right up with the Union of Concerned Scientists – folks here might remember the “snow” job UCS teleconference Serreze had with our friend Jeff Masters earlier in March that Joe D’Aleo described here: http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/scientists_pull_a_snow_job_on_reporters_in_teleconference/