The First-Ever Bulk Freighter To Pass Through The Arctic Was Carrying Coal
Sometime earlier this week a cargo ship passed through the Northwest Passage into Baffin Bay, along Greenland’s southwestern coast, making it the first bulk carrier ever to make the voyage. This journey was completed by the Nordic Orion, a 225-meter, ice-strengthened vessel loaded with coal in Vancouver, British Columbia and headed for Finland.
Long eyed as a commercial route, the Northwest Passage is a channel of waterways through the Arctic Ocean along the northern coast of North America connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans — a shortcut from Europe to Asia through the Canadian Arctic. The Nordic Orion didn’t exactly blaze the trail itself. Smaller vessels have been navigating the channel for about a hundred years, but climate change — which has reduced Arctic pack ice that prevented regular marine shipping for most of the year and made waterways hard to navigate — has made things easier.
more:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/09/26/2683481/northwest-passage-passable-climate-change-arctic/Also:
Arctic Temperatures Reach Highest Levels In 44,000 Years, Study Finds
New research shows that average summer temperatures in the Canadian Arctic over the last century are the highest in the last 44,000 years, and perhaps the highest in 120,000 years.
"The key piece here is just how unprecedented the warming of Arctic Canada is," Gifford Miller, a researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said in a joint statement from the school and the publisher of the journal Geophysical Researcher Letters, in which the study by Miller and his colleagues was published online this week. "This study really says the warming we are seeing is outside any kind of known natural variability, and it has to be due to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."
The study is the first to show that current Arctic warmth exceeds peak heat there in the early Holocene, the name for the current geological period, which began about 11,700 years ago. During this "peak" Arctic warmth, solar radiation was about 9 percent greater than today, according to the study.
more:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/24/arctic-temperatures-highest-44000-years_n_4157863.html
Who says fate doesn't have a sense of irony?
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