Beam Me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 11/28/2009, 1:15:40 AM by Shermy
WINNIPEG — One of Canada's top northern researchers says the permanent Arctic sea ice that is home to the world's polar bears and usually survives the summer has all but disappeared.
Experts around the world believed the ice was recovering because satellite images showed it expanding. But David Barber says the thick, multi-year frozen sheets crucial to the northern ecosystem have been replaced by thin "rotten" ice which can't support the weight of the bears.
"It caught us all by surprise because we were expecting there to be multi-year sea ice - the whole world thought it was multi-year sea ice," said Barber, who just returned from an expedition to the Beaufort Sea.
"Unfortunately what we found was that the multi-year (ice) has all but disappeared. What's left is this remnant, rotten ice."
Permanent ice, which is normally up to 10 metres thick, was easily pierced by the research ship, said Barber, who holds the Canada research chair in Arctic science at the University of Manitoba.
The team finally reached what it thought was stable ice, only to watch a crack appear just as researchers were preparing to descend onto the floe.
"As I watched, over the course of five minutes, the entire multi-year ice floe broke up into pieces," Barber said. "This floe was 10 miles across. Something that's twice the size of Winnipeg, it just broke up right in front of our eyes."
The ice is unable to withstand battering waves and storms because global warming is rapidly melting it at a rate of 70,000 square kilometres each year, he said.
Multi-year sea ice used to cover 90 per cent of the Arctic basin, Barber said. It now covers roughly 19 per cent. Where it used to be up to 10 metres thick, it's now twometres at most.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
If there was a problem yo I’ll solve it
Check out the hook while Shay revolves it
Ice ice baby, etc.
if i was a polar bear
who dance-ed like nijinsky
i would have a ballet wrote
by igor i. stravinsky
Two meter thick ice will not support a polar bear?
I call bull crap on that one.
“Rotten ice”. A product of “rotten science”.
Earth’s Cycles Suck.....and especially when shysters try to make money on them!
In previous periods of ACTUAL warming — real warming with really no arctic ice — there are polar bear fossils, plenty of them. The bears survived periods of ACTUAL no ice in the past. They will survive this current period of MEDIA PRETEND no ice.
I second your bull crap. Two meters is close to 6 feet. Snowmobiles will EASILY navigate ice that's only 5" thick.
What the H is “rotten” ice? Past its expiration date? Ice with freezer burn? This is science?
Why am I suddenly skeptical about what “researchers”, “experts”, and “scientists” say when it comes to things like arctic ice and whatnot?
The article is a pile of crap. The ice is back. Next year it will be 3-4 meters thick, and the time will come when it will be 15 meters thick, we are now in a cooling trend courtesy of old sol.
“opening the Arctic to international shipping could have an impact on the ecosystem”
the hook
About ten years ago I recall a news clip from the 1930s or 1940s showing the same region’s ice breaking up. Apparently there is a mult-decade long cycle of ice thinning in that region but today the explanation is Global Warming.
I will try to find that news clip the next time I stop in at the periodicals section of the U.
Rotten ice, when did they make that up; yesterday? It is also the beginning of winter so I think it is safe to assume it will get thicker in the months to come.
This guy obviously is a eco-freak. First the bears can swim. If they don’t swim enough they will get fat and burst through any thickness of ice. Secondly, they may then get diabetes. If their legs have to be amputated, how then will they even swim? My logic is irrefutable. I proclaim my self to be an expert of this topic.
Remember the good old days when arctic ice was thick and strong, back when polar bears were so numerous you couldn’t breathe because polar bear-created methane made you choke? No longer. Nowadays you get this cheap, foreign made, low quality arctic ice, not good enough to qualify a frost in you broken-down refrigerator.
Apparently, they've adopted the "if you're going to tell a lie, make it a whopper" rule. I have personally driven SUV's and PU trucks on ice that was 12-14" - A LOT. I'm not a scientist, but I'm pretty confident that a Ford Explorer weighs more than the world's biggest polar bear.
The bears are gonna come down from the hills and beat the hell out of everyone for this.
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