Sea Ice Retreats 300 Miles And More From Wainwright, AK - 30 Miles Is Normal Distance - ADN

[hatrack]

The Arctic sea ice in Northwest Alaska is usually within 30 miles of Wainwright in August. Today it's more than 300 miles away, much farther than it's ever been. Wainwright hunters have usually bagged more than 100 walruses by this time in the season. They've bagged fewer than 20 this year.

The ice left Wainwright so quickly in June -- a month earlier than usual -- that Oliver Peetook didn't have the chance to get a walrus. The father of four usually fills the freezer with three or four of them, like most Wainwright families, butchering the animals on the ice where they've been shot. "We were worried," he said.

All over the world experts are talking about global warming. In the village of 600 Inupiat west of Barrow, they're living it. The ice capping the globe is vanishing at a record pace this summer, fueled partly by two weeks of heat beginning in late June when Kansas-sized chunks disappeared daily, according to scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

The Arctic ice sheet has shrunk to its smallest size in recorded history, based on measurements that go back 100 years, said data center scientist Ted Scambos. The disappearing ice has been especially dramatic above Siberia and Northwest Alaska.

EDIT

http://www.adn.com/front/story/9227255p-9143118c.html

[poverlay]

1. Time for the Wainwrights to move north... nt

[Blue_In_AK]

2. Alaska's coastal villages are in a world of hurt

not only from retreating sea ice but from serious erosion. They are the canaries in the coal mine.