In 2009, David Barber at the University of Manitoba declared that multi-year ice was gone from the Arctic
OTTAWA | Thu Oct 29, 2009 12:01pm EDT (Reuters) –
The multiyear ice covering the Arctic Ocean has effectively vanished, a startling development that will make it easier to open up polar shipping routes, an Arctic expert said on Thursday.
David Barber, Canada’s Research Chair in Arctic System Science at the University of Manitoba, said the ice was melting at an extraordinarily fast rate.
“We are almost out of multiyear sea ice in the northern hemisphere,” he said in a presentation in Parliament. The little that remains is jammed up against Canada’s Arctic archipelago, far from potential shipping routes.
The latest map from the University of Colorado shows that about two-thirds of the Arctic Basin is covered with the vanished multiyear ice.










