Three years ago, David Barber told us that all of the multi-year ice had melted.
November 27, 2009
One of Canada’s top northern researchers says the permanent Arctic sea ice that is home to the world’s polar bears and usually survives the summer has all but disappeared.
Experts around the world believed the ice was recovering because satellite images showed it expanding. But David Barber says the thick, multiyear frozen sheets crucial to the northern ecosystem have been replaced by thin “rotten” ice which can’t support the weight of the bears.
“It caught us all by surprise because we were expecting there to be multiyear sea ice – the whole world thought it was multiyear sea ice,” said Dr. Barber, who just returned from an expedition to the Beaufort Sea.
“Unfortunately what we found was that the multiyear [ice]has all but disappeared. What’s left is this remnant, rotten ice.”
Arctic sea ice has nearly vanished, expert fears – The Globe and Mail
He is repeating the same story again this year. Like Peter Wadhams who tells us every five years that all of the ice will be melted in five years.
SEPTEMBER 22, 2012
“The multi-year ice, what’s left of it, is so heavily decayed that it’s really no longer a barrier to transportation,” he says, explaining how melt ponds have left much of the ice looking like Swiss cheese.
“You could have taken a ship right across the North Pole this year,” says Barber, whose research team was involved in a 36-day research cruise in the Beaufort on a Canadian Coast Guard ship.
Scientists warn of ‘planetary emergency’
There can be little doubt that soft ice near the North Pole is unprecedented – and threatens all of our day to day activities.
April 1923
Is the North Pole going to melt entirely?
Are the Arctic regions warming up, with prospect of a great climatic change in that part of the world?
Science (says “Popular Science”) is asking these questions. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters, and explorers who sail the seas around Spitzbergen and the eastern Arctic all point to a radical change in climatic conditions, with hitherto unheard of high temperatures on that part of the earth’s surface.

16 Apr 1923 – THE NORTH POLE CAUSES OF CHANGE OF CLIMATE.