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To: pater tenebrarum who wrote (12469)	8/21/2000 12:57:01 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

Wanted to make sure you guys didn't miss this - from the Saturday New York Times - the North Pole is melting. >>Ages-Old Polar Icecap Is Melting, Scientists Find By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD The North Pole is melting. The thick ice that has for ages covered the Arctic Ocean at the pole has turned to water, recent visitors there reported yesterday. At least for the time being, an ice-free patch of ocean about a mile wide has opened at the very top of the world, something that has presumably never before been seen by humans and is more evidence that global warming may be real and already affecting climate. The last time scientists can be certain the pole was awash in water was more than 50 million years ago. "It was totally unexpected," said Dr. James J. McCarthy, an oceanographer, director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and the co-leader of a group working for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is sponsored by the United Nations. The panel is studying the potential environmental and economic consequences of marked climate change. Dr. McCarthy was a lecturer on a tourist cruise in the Arctic aboard a Russian icebreaker earlier this month. On a similar cruise six years ago, he recalled, the icebreaker plowed through an icecap six to nine feet thick at the North Pole. This time, ice was generally so thin that sunlight could penetrate and support concentrations of plankton growing under the ice. Dr. McCarthy said the icebreaker's Russian captain, who has made the voyage 10 times in recent years, said he had never before encountered open water at the pole. Another lecturer, Dr. Malcolm C. McKenna, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, said the ship, the Yamal, crunched through miles of unusually thin ice and intermittent open water on the approach from Spitsbergen, Norway, to the pole. When the ship reached the pole -- which Dr. McKenna and his wife, Priscilla, confirmed with a hand-held Global Positioning System Priscilla, confirmed with a hand-held Global Positioning System navigation device -- water lapped its bow. "I don't know if anybody in history ever got to 90 degrees north to be greeted by water, not ice," Dr. McKenna said in an interview. He instantly snapped pictures to document the phenomenon in photographs. The Yamal eventually had to steam six miles away to find ice thick enough for the 100 passengers to get out and be able to say they had stood on the North Pole, or close to it. They saw ivory gulls flying overhead, the first time ornithologists said they had ever been sighted at the pole.<< nytimes.com