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Politics : The Exxon Free Environmental Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (5361)	5/13/2010 11:58:38 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 48974

whale Message 26530156 "I thought the sea Ice might beat the 2007 record." I think it will. The 2 years were running fairly close together, until there was a late freeze in March. In the last week, since the last time I looked, 2010 has been crashing. It's got a pretty steep slope. From the post B4 the graph, It looks like 2009 was at or perhaps below 2008 volume levels. It’s too early to say for 2010, but as the NSIDC reported last week: An image from NASA’s Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer — Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) sensor from April 19 reveals numerous polynyas, or areas of open water in the pack ice in the Bering Sea, and broad areas of more scattered ice cover in the Sea of Okhotsk, Barents Sea, and Hudson Bay. Such conditions usually indicate that ice is about to retreat rapidly. And guess what, that appears to be happening now, according to the NSIDC data reported in the top figure. Stay tuned. I still like my odds on a 90% ice free Arctic by 2020 (see “Another big climate bet — Of Ice and Men“). climateprogress.org

To: koan who wrote (5361)	5/18/2010 1:10:41 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 48974

Arctic team reports unusual conditions near Pole From: David Ljunggren, Reuters Published May 18, 2010 06:19 AM A group of British explorers just back from a 60-day trip to the North Pole said Monday they had encountered unusual conditions, including ice sheets that drifted far faster than they had expected. The three-member team walked across the frozen Arctic Ocean to study the impact of increased carbon dioxide absorption by the sea, which could make the water more acidic and put crucial food chains under pressure. Expedition leader Ann Daniels said the ice drifted so much that they eventually covered 500 nautical miles (576 miles) rather than the 268 nautical miles initially envisaged. One possible reason for the rapid drift was a lack of ice, she suggested. Satellite imagery reveals rapidly melting ice sheets in the Arctic, a region which is heating up three times more quickly than the rest of the Earth. The first day the team was dropped off the ice moved so quickly to the south that it took the trio 10 days to make it back to their starting point. "None of us had ever experienced that amount of southerly drift on our previous expeditions, and it continued for such a long period of time. We kept expecting it to stop, we began to pray it would stop," Daniels said. "At the end of the expedition we were losing three nautical miles a night ... it was quite a major factor," she told a news conference in Ottawa. Many scientists link the higher Arctic temperatures to the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming. Martin Hartley, a member of the team, said the condition of the ice was unpleasantly bad. "We spent a couple of days walking on ice that was three or four inches thick with no other thicker ice around, which was a big surprise to us," he told the news conference. Article continues: reuters.com