First time in human history:Arctic becomes an island as ice melts

[n2doc]

By Auslan Cramb
Last Updated: 4:01pm BST 31/08/2008



The North Pole has become an island for the first time in human history as climate change has made it possible to circumnavigate the Arctic ice cap.


The historic development was revealed by satellite images taken last week showing that both the north-west and north-east passages have been opened by melting ice.

Prof Mark Serreze, a sea ice specialist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in the US said the images suggested the Arctic may have entered a "death spiral" caused by global warming.

Shipping companies are already planning to exploit the first simultaneous opening of the routes since the beginning of the last Ice Age 125,000 years ago. The Beluga Group in Germany says it will send the first ship through the north-east passage, around Russia, next year, cutting 4,000 miles off the voyage from Germany to Japan.

Meanwhile, Stephen Harper, Canada's Prime Minister, has announced that ships entering the north-west passage should first report to his government. The routes have previously opened at different times, with the western route opening last year, and the eastern route opening in 2005.

The satellite images gathered by Nasa show that the north-west passage opened last weekend and the final blockage on the east side of the ice cap, an area of sea ice stretching to Siberia, dissolved a few days later.
more:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/08/31/eaarctic131.xml

[liberal N proud]

1. Finally, the Northwest Passage has been found

EXTREME :sarcasm:

[The Croquist]

6. Don't you mean re-discovered?

It was first discovered and navigated over 100 years ago.

Seriously this article is crap. I'm dot denying that there is less ice today then 30 years ago but to claim that this is the "first simultaneous opening of the routes since the beginning of the last Ice Age 125,000 years ago." is absurd. How do they know what it looked like 100 years ago let alone 125,000 years ago? They used satellites last week but not 125,000 years ago. The "human history" they are talking about goes back 30 stinking years.

[Barrett808]

15. Perennial ice cover age is estimated by coccolithophores in sediment cores

Consensus is that the central Arctic hasn't been ice-free for at least 700,000 years, but debate continues on how much older Arctic sea ice cover may be. Estimates range as high as 4 million years.

"There is no paleoclimatic evidence for a seasonally ice-free Arctic during the last 800 millenia."

Overpeck, Jonathan T. (2005-08-23). "Arctic System on Trajectory to New, Seasonally Ice-Free State" (pdf). Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union 86 (34): 309–316.
http://atoc.colorado.edu/~dcn/reprints/Overpeck_etal_EOS2005.pdf

[The Croquist]

20. The key word is estimate

I'm sorry but my PC won't open .pdf files. I'm not sure why but I recently had virus issues. I read a little bit in an .html version but it was an abstract not the whole paper.

So much data about long term climate is estimated with processes that are difficult or impossible to verify. It's not the fault of the scientists it's just the way it is. Too often the scientist assign high confidence levels to things that are just guess work and that is their fault. Carbon 14 dating is a good example of this in a non-climate change estimating system.

I'm looking at the last 30 years of monthly Arctic Sea Ice Extent numbers and more specifically the annual changes. I'm ignoring 2008 because we don't know if we've reached minimum yet so we've got a total of 28 years. The average change (absolute value) is 8% but it varies from 0% (1983, 1987, 1988) to 30% (1996). I would love to see how coccolithophores estimates compare to the actual data on a year to year basis.

[Barrett808]

21. Recovering paleoceanographic data from ancient sediments is tricky business, for sure

Especially with diagenesis, which makes life interesting for paleoceanographers.

Still, I'm satisfied that science has mastered the various techniques for recovering meaningful measurements of ancient climate states.

[tinrobot]

19. Found? Created.

[Arctic Dave]

2. Just think of the damaged if it becomes mobile.

All that mass floating around and crushing whatever is in its way. Can you say bye-bye island or port.

[joshcryer]

5. I don't think it can due to rotational forces. But it sure is dang scary.

I mean the idea that this passage is now ... open.

[Gregorian]

3. And no change in sight.

I go to bed at night thinking about how we can change. So many people think it's just something we can engineer our way out of.

Also, in order to push our way past equilibrium, we had to go far beyond it. I feel strongly that we're in much greater trouble than we realize. I have a friend who works with the USGS, and the scientists he's talking to are saying that they're literally not talking about how much worse it is for fear that it's just too frightening for the public.

It's little things like changes in venue of a court case. It sounds benign. But what it means is that a lawyer has to get on a plane and fly across the country just to be in the proper courtroom. It's these seemingly tiny things that all add up. Billions of people doing benign things all add up to a monstrous phenomenon.

So it's not going to change. Prius, compact fluorescent bulbs and all.

And I might add I'm pretty damned angry about it. I tried. Even my dad tried. I remember him riding his bike to work. Ten miles each way. Every day. I used to commute by bike over ten miles per day. Oh well.

[Karl_Bonner_1982]

4. If only we knew how to engineer a COLDER climate...

...to at least partially offset our own damages!

[GliderGuider]

7. Ice scientists say all they are discovering is positive feedback loops.

The only negative feedback loop that has been discovered to my knowledge is the reduction of atmospheric soot due to improved scrubbing of coal power plants. Theoretically, the lower amounts of soot being deposited on polar ice raises its albedo and slows its melting. Unfortunately, this effect appears to be much weaker that the positive feedbacks we have put in motion -- for instance the lower albedo of expanding summer melt-water pools swamps the effect.

[The Croquist]

8. Maybe they should try looking for negative feedbacks

If there were nothing but positive feedbacks the ocean's would have boiled billions of years ago.

[GliderGuider]

9. There are plenty of natural negative feedback loops.

That's a requirement for a system to exhibit anything approaching equilibrium. The problem is that there seem to be no negative feedback loops we can easily engineer our way into, they way we inadvertently did with the positive feedback of CO2 driving albedo changes. All the suggestions I've seen for creating negative feedbacks involve geo-engineering on a very large scale through pathways we don't understand very well from a system perspective. That strikes me as being potentially riskier than the situation we currently face.

I'm in the camp that says humans should adapt to the circumstances that exist, while doing whatever low-risk actions we can think of to keep things from getting worse. I think we'll adapt successfully, but I have a very loose definition of "success". I don't think we'll keep from making things worse, based on our history and my understanding of human behavioural drivers.

[NickB79]

17. There are negative feedbacks, but many probably won't kick in the timeframe we want

In past episodes of warming, CO2 concentrations have gone as high as 1000+ ppm (Eocene warming period) before negative feedback mechanisms kicked in to bring the temperatures back down.

Nature is under no contract to keep the planet in a state that is optimal for human life. If the climate heated up to the point that human civilization were knocked back to pre-industrial eras and the planet were allowed to recover, grasslands and forest to begin re-sequestering carbon again, that would technically be a negative feedback.

[phantom power]

10. I have a plan.

My plan involves many, many cubic kilometers of white packing peanuts.

And a fan.

[GliderGuider]

11. Now THAT's thinking outside the (cardboard) box!

If you can get a bit of static charge on them, they'll stick wherever they land, too!
Finally, something to do with the cubic kilometer of the damn things that has piled up in my back yard.
Nice thinking! :toast:

[phantom power]

12. I'm down to about 95% joking with that idea.

I wonder how I'll think about it 20 years from now. In principle, not very different than that high-atmosphere sulfur scheme.

[Karl_Bonner_1982]

13. White packing peanuts? Because of the albedo?

That would be an interesting thing to try someday: paint an entire city white to reduce the heat island effect. I wonder how big the total impact would be?

Here's another one to ponder: the heat originates from solar energy. When it hits a lifeless surface nearly all the energy is either reflected or absorbed as heat. Green leaves, however, absorb the energy in a form other than heat (photosynthesis) while at the same time removing some of the CO2 from the air. What is a human invention that absorbs solar energy in a form other than heat? Think VERY carefully about this, students...

[XemaSab]

14. Pot!

:smoke:

[Karl_Bonner_1982]

18. Uhh...humans didn't invent pot. NT

[wtmusic]

23. The problem is not immediate absorption of the sun's energy

but the inability to radiate that energy away from earth.

You can trap it as heat, electricity, whatever. The energy is conserved. If it cannot eventually be radiated away from the earth in sufficient quantities because of greenhouse gases, the planet gets warmer.

[oldhippie]

16. No, it's not an island .......

There is no "land" there. The polar ice cap is a floating mass of ice, in some few places anchored to small land masses above sea level.

Journalists, especially scientific journalists, really should keep their terms straight. The illiteracy of the media is downright embarrassing.

[wtmusic]

22. Republican-style arrogance will be the end of us.

Take credit for everything good and responsibility for nothing bad.