Posted on 10/02/2007 1:50:53 AM PDT by neverdem
The Arctic ice cap shrank so much this summer that waves briefly lapped along two long-imagined Arctic shipping routes, the Northwest Passage over Canada and the Northern Sea Route over Russia.
Over all, the floating ice dwindled to an extent unparalleled in a century or more, by several estimates.
Now the six-month dark season has returned to the North Pole. In the deepening chill, new ice is already spreading over vast stretches of the Arctic Ocean. Astonished by the summer’s changes, scientists are studying the forces that exposed one million square miles of open water — six Californias — beyond the average since satellites started measurements in 1979.
At a recent gathering of sea-ice experts at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, Hajo Eicken, a geophysicist, summarized it this way: “Our stock in trade seems to be going away.”
Scientists are also unnerved by the summer’s implications for the future, and their ability to predict it.
Complicating the picture, the striking Arctic change was as much a result of ice moving as melting, many say. A new study, led by Son Nghiem at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and appearing this week in Geophysical Research Letters, used satellites and buoys to show that winds since 2000 had pushed huge amounts of thick old ice out...
--snip--
Still, many of those scientists said they were becoming convinced that the system is heading toward a new, more watery state, and that human-caused global warming is playing a significant role.
--snip--
In essence, Arctic waters may be behaving more like those around Antarctica, where a broad fringe of sea ice builds each austral winter and nearly disappears in the summer. (Reflecting the different geography and dynamics at the two poles, there has been a slight increase in sea-ice area around Antarctica in recent decades.)
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
What's the going pay for being a sea-ice expert?
Female polar bears and their cubs to suffer most.
ping
Immigrant minority female polar bears...
Uh, it's at an ALL TIME HIGH! Sound the global cooling alarm.
You figured it out!
Intestinal gas!
Methane is a Green House Gas
Stop Global Warming eat Your Horse
< / Sarcasm >
"In the Far North, Marco Polo sailed along a waterway that was later known as the Northwest Passage. He traveled as far as Baffin Island. It was in this region between the Magnetic Pole (red triangle) and the Geographic North Pole where he described a peculiar phenomenon called “Magnetic Compass Declination.” He observed that the Pole Star appeared to be situated south by compass bearing. " The only place that is true is near Hudson Bay. http://marcopolovoyages.com/LibCongressPapers/GunnarThompson2.html
I had the time to look this up for you ... in the following post, that map is linked:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1878574/posts?page=22#22
Ice that melts in the summer and returns in the winter. Wow, who’da thunk it?
Where is the sea level rise associated with all this melting ice?
They can't even tell me if it's going to rain this Saturday.
Please, Sherm.....no facts. Can't you see we're dealing with feeeeeeeelings here?
In cold cash or frozen assets?
Saw a show recently about the HUGE waves that form in the Bering Sea and travel across the ocean (much like tsunamis) and hit the ice shelf very hard, causing it to eventually break. I was surprised that this show made it past the global warming sensors. It was on Discovery or NGC or one of those networks.
One aspect of Global Warming is the continual bias to news that supports it. As was famously said, by someone famous enough that I cannot call his name, that it only takes one contrary fact to destroy even the most elaborate theory.
In 1942, during WW II, a P-38 fighter airplane being ferried to England was forced to land on Greenland’s glacier. The pilot was rescued but the aircraft was abandoned.
In 1992 a team of explorers and aviation buffs set about recovering this aircraft. Over the last 50 years, it had become buried in 300 feet of ice and snow.
See:
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/06/22/america/NA-GEN-US-Glacier-Plane.php
Now stop and consider that little fact: in the last 50 years, when advocates of Global Warming (a change of the climate that should, well, be observed globally, meaning everywhere) insist humanity has put the most CO2 in the atmosphere and should have experienced the most warming, that this area of Greenland enjoyed the accumuation of an additional 300 FEET of frozen precipiation.
Further consider that if the entire arctic is melting, as these sincere advocates of Global Warming insist, that such warming would be observed globally of course. Yet, we would have to see the melting of 300 FEET of ice to return to the level of the ice back in 1942.
If I am wrong here, please correct me.
It seems that the story of the recovery of this aircraft becomes one of the many contrary facts to the present theories (being assumed to be entirely true) about climate change.
Climate changes. It always has. Why is this so dofficult for liberals to grasp? Sometime in the next 5,000-20,000 years, New York City will be completely wiped off the map. All buildings will be swept into the sea by glaciers. There is nothing we can do about it. We have no way to oppose a force so massive it CREATED Long Island just from sediment from glacial “scraping” of the coast. The Earth’s forces dwarf us. And then there is the power of the Sun. Whatever we do is rendered irrelevant by these massive forces.
And Bangladesh disappeared.
Let's remember they called Greenland "Greenland", and apparently had farms in the parts they settled. And, while the Arctic sea ice is melting a lot more the past few years than it has lately (or perhaps since the 'Age of Exploration'), not only is the Antarctic continental ice sheet at record thickness, so is the Greenland ice sheet.
But, but, but it's a CRISIS! There hasn't been this much melting since, uh, er, 1979......
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