Posted on 05/25/2008 1:25:21 PM PDT by PROCON
Here's the good news: this summer's Arctic ice melt means an early start to the Hudson Bay shipping season.
Forecasts show Coast Guard icebreakers will no longer be necessary for shipping to Churchill after July 16.
That's 15 days earlier than the average ice-free shipping date of July 31, which means re-supply barges should able to reach communities in Nunavut's Kivalliq and Kitikmeot regions that much earlier.
But the down side to the retreat of the Arctic's thin ice cover is a 50-50 chance that the North Pole will become ice-free this September - for the first time in more than 100,000 years.
(Excerpt) Read more at nunatsiaq.com ...
And this is bad because?
Or paddle the kyak. Whatever.
Of course, there is no way they would have known weather or not there was no ice at the pole even 500 years ago, let alone 100,000.
If their prediction comes true, they will say “see! global warming”
If it doesn’t come true, we will near nothing more of it.
Woo hoo. I’ll get my water ski’s and you bring the beers.
Good thing the North Pole has never moved in the last 100,000 years...
Someone screwed up. This is a short term forecast. Usually the forecasts are 30+ years. This is one to check back on, email the writer to ask what happened and if she’ll make a retraction, and post the response.
Did somebody mentions thickness?
I just saw that Victoria Australia just reported the lowest temperature for the month of May where it got down to -13C (7F) a couple of days ago.
That's true. The dinosaurs killed wooly mammoths and used them for coats.
I’m glad to see someone caught the inference.
The sea ice is usually melts by mid-July in Hudson Bay so again, there is nothing to report here. It returns by mid-December so it is not exactly a long shipping season.
In ‘84 I was on an exploratory well in the Beaufort Sea, (50 miles off Milne Point in Prudhoe Bay area,) It was drilled from a man-made island. (Mukluk Island)
It was and still is the most expensive well ever drilled. (1.7 Billion $) It was a dry hole. It broke Diamond Shamrock and hurt Exxon so badly, they sold out their interest on the North Slope to Standard Oil. (SAPC)
There is some directional drilling and concrete floater drilling near the shore line, but most of the oil is inland.
The difficulty to drill offshore there, mainly because of the pack ice, will put a halt to any optimism or effort.
But if the ice at the North Pole melts then would it be doable?
Saw the idea that the north pole has not been ice free for that long and then on further readings of the sentence saw that they meant this is the first 50-50 chance in 100,000 years. How they know this is not known, since none of them are over 30.
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