Wegener Scientists - "There Was Loose Ice Everywhere We Went" - Ice Thickness Cut In Half In 6 Years

[hatrack]

OSLO (Reuters) - Large tracts of ice on the Arctic Ocean have halved in thickness to just 1 meter (3 ft) since 2001, making the region more accessible to ships, a researcher said on Tuesday. "There was loose ice everywhere we went," Ursula Schauer, leader of a scientific expedition aboard the Polarstern ice-breaker, told Reuters by telephone from the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia.

"All of these areas have previously had two meters of ice," said Schauer, who works at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, of a trip from Norway around the North Pole and back towards Russia. The last major survey was in 2001. A summer trend of increased ice melting -- widely linked to human emissions of greenhouse gases -- may also threaten the livelihoods of Arctic peoples and wildlife such as polar bears.

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"The Northeast Passage seems ice-free north of Siberia except a little part between the mainland and (the island of) Severnaya Zemlya," she said. The thinning adds to evidence from satellites of a shrinking of the Arctic summer ice extent to record lows. Some experts say summer ice might vanish within decades, earlier than around the end of the century projected by the U.N. climate panel.

The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said on Monday that Arctic sea ice had shrunk to a record low 4.14 million sq km (1.6 million sq mile), more than 1.2 million sq km -- or the size of South Africa -- less than the previous low in 2005. A Russian ice-breaker, the Akademik Fedorov, had to abandon a plan to deploy a manned station on the ice where scientists had intended to spend the winter because the ice was too thin, Schauer said.

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http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/23158

[XemaSab]

1. I am still utterly baffled

at how they can say "The ice is half as thick as it was 6 years ago," and "Summer ice might vanish within decades," in the same breath.

Like, what about "Summer ice might vanish in 6 years?"

Is that WAY too much to say? :shrug:

We are SO past the point of no return. :(