Scientists Focus On Fate Of Arctic Ice This Summer, Tracking Weather Patterns For Rerun Of 2007

[hatrack]

EDIT

Barber, the Canada Research Chair in Arctic System Science, has just returned from a spring research trip in the Beaufort Sea aboard the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Amundsen. He says last year's extreme retreat of Arctic ice has left the ocean with a much higher proportion first-year ice - a thinner, more fragile and fast-moving ocean cover that is expected to break up and disappear rapidly as temperatures in Canada's far north rise throughout July and August.

Significantly, he says, wind, wave and warming patterns over the past year have left the pole itself covered with first-year ice rather than the hardier, multi-year ice that traditionally blankets the central Arctic Ocean.

That presents the "unique" prospect, Barber says, of clear sailing at the North Pole before the region begins cooling again in September - another potential first to be added to a growing list of Arctic shockers that includes last summer's unfrozen Northwest Passage. "The Arctic is changing much more rapidly than we thought it would," Barber says, adding that key "feedback" mechanisms - such as more dark, open water retaining more solar heat and thus melting more ice - suggest the Arctic is "on a trajectory now that looks like it will be difficult to reverse."

In 2007, the Arctic ice retreated to a record-setting minimum area of about 4.3 million square kilometres by mid-September - a 10.4-million-sq.-km decline from the mid-March maximum, or an area of lost ice bigger than all of Canada.

EDIT

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=3f16c255-7c20-4024-a02d-6a93d8aca59c

[gasperc]

1. It would seem it's close to ripping apart

I have this vision that the force of Ocean currents and the thinness of the ice are accelerating to the point that the artic pole will soon become a series of large Ice islands. I think before we see an 'ice free' artic, we will dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of iceburgs. Each year the number slowly increasing. Well not so slowly, I mean to go from no Northwest passage to a bunch of ice islands in 15 years is, well, a disaster.

[XemaSab]

2. .