Free Republic

Climate Change: As a Colorado Rockies playoff game is snowed out, scientists report that Arctic sea ice is thickening and Antarctic snow melt is the lowest in three decades. Whatever happened to global warming? Al Gore wasn't there to throw out the first snowball, er, baseball, so he might not have noticed that Saturday's playoff game between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies was snowed out — in early October. The field should have been snow-free just as the North Pole was to be ice-free this year. It seems that ice at both poles hasn't been paying attention to...

Stansted Airport in Essex has renamed its 3,000m (9,750ft) runway because the position of the Earth's magnetic North Pole has moved. The runway was known by pilots and air traffic controllers as 23/05 because of its location and compass heading. The magnetic North Pole drifts naturally, and every 50 years its position alters significantly. Managers at Stansted decided they must call the runway 22/04 to reflect the new position and bearing. Trevor Waldock, head of airside operations, said: "We've had to make this change due to the Magnetic North Pole slowly drifting on the Earth's surface but our runway remains...

Three British explorers trying to ski to the North Pole to measure the thickness of sea ice only have one day's food left as bad weather hampers supply flights, the mission said Tuesday. Project director and ice team leader Pen Hadow and his colleagues Martin Hartley and Ann Daniels are now down to half rations and fighting to survive in brutal sub-zero weather conditions. ---snip--- During the past 17 days temperatures have consistently dropped below minus 40 degrees Celsius (-40 degrees Fahrenheit), and have been accompanied by strong winds increasing the chill factor. Bad weather has forced three attempts to...

-43 Degree Temps Recorded In North Dakota Much of the country is in winter's icy grip and forecasters said it won't be letting go anytime soon. In Pollock, S.D., temperatures fell to a record-setting 47 below zero Thursday. Todd Moser works at a gas station where he said it took about 10 minutes to get the pumps working. Record to near record lows were set all over the Midwest, including Aberdeen, S.D., at -42 degrees; Dubuque, Iowa, at -26 degrees; Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at -29 degrees. The -29 degrees at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was the coldest temperature ever recorded there...

DES MOINES, Iowa --A blast of arctic air settling in over Iowa on Wednesday could bring the Des Moines area's lowest temperatures in 12 years, said KCCI meteorologist Kurtis Gertz. Temperatures could dip to -15 degrees tonight, a low not touched since 1996.

Somebody start the stopwatch and remind us in 5 years to see if the ice cap is still there.

The Goracle spoke to an audience in Germany this week where he told them that "the entire North Polarized cap will disappear in 5 years." By 2013?... This guy is insane.

While the North Pole’s landscape may evoke images of igloos and barren snow fields, the crescent moon and minaret will soon vie for their place in Norway’s Arctic thanks to a Saudi businessman’s donation to build the region’s first mosque. A Saudi businessman has donated 20 million Krone ($2.78 million) to build the first mosque in the Arctic region, near the northern part of Norway, according to a news report published by a local Saudi newspaper. In April the Muslim association in the Arctic town of Inuvik, Canada raised $40,000 to purchase land for a mosque two degrees above the...

Ever since Russia planted a flag under the North Pole last year, the issue of sovereign rights under an increasingly slushy arctic has tensed. In a race to claim ownership of some of the arctic seabed, a two-ship caravan of Canadian and U.S. scientists is sailing around the Arctic Ocean right now. Their mission, which will last from September 6th to October 1st, is to measure the seabed and the continental margins in an attempt to solidify our possible rights over the far north—an area that will become accessible to oil drilling and mining as the earth warms and arctic...

With another hurricane bearing down on the Gulf Coast, the so-called “bridge to nowhere,” championed by Alaska’s Congressional delegation on behalf of the people of Ketchikan, just won’t go away. Three years ago, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the plan to spend hundreds of millions to connect Ketchikan with its airport on Gravina Island became a national symbol of Congressional excess, much to the dismay of Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young. Sen. John McCain has made it a habit to ridicule the bridge project during his presidential campaign. McCain has promised to veto any bill sent to...

New British map outlines potential lines of argument in battle for future energy resources. In a survey that could both help resolve and fuel the international dispute over energy resources in the Arctic, British researchers have concluded that both Denmark and Russia can claim the right to expand their sea borders to the North Pole. Five countries – Canada, Norway, the United States as well as Denmark and Russia – have territory within the Arctic Circle and, under international conventions, enjoy the right to economic zones within 200 nautical miles of their shores. These zones can, however, be expanded to...

How to be dishonest without actually lying A lesson from the mainstream media in dishonestyBy Mark Pfister The Independent recently published an article exclaiming, “Exclusive: No ice at the North Pole"! The subtitle was "Polar scientists reveal dramatic new evidence of climate change".Upon first glance this sounds pretty crazy; no ice at the North Pole?! Global warming (climate change) is getting serious now; maybe those people denying man-made global warming (climate change) really are as bad as Ahmadinejad and all those crazy holocaust deniers. Before we even get into the article let’s consider one thing. As a result of the...

Climate Change: While the media scream that man-made global warming is making the North Pole ice-free, another possible cause is as old as the Earth itself. They just have to look deeper.To the delight of Al Gore and the rest of the Gaia groupies, scientists at the National Snow & Ice Data Center in Colorado are predicting that the North Pole will be completely free of ice this summer. The apocalyptic headlines already are starting to appear. "From the viewpoint of science, the North Pole is just another point on the globe, but symbolically it is hugely important," says the...

Over the past few days, a plethora of articles have been published saying that Arctic ice is melting at a faster rate than last year, which was a recent historical record, and the North Pole will soon be ice free. The graphic below and link to this thread show the opposite: Compare (Arctic) Daily Sea IceAssociated web page:The Cryosphere Today As for the North Pole being ice free, there are openings in the sea ice that don't mean the entire surrounding area is free of ice:The Top of the World: Is the North Pole Turning to Water?

It's been proclaimed by scientists: Santa's doomed. The North Pole will have melted by the end of the summer. To which I say, let's wait and see (literally)! Global Warming alarmists are getting desperate, throwing terrorism and Santa's home into the mix to scare us. So, my humble radio show/podcast website now features a "North Pole Global Warming Cam". Link to the story in question, and audio, is available there. Freep on!

Character from climatescience.com on Fox now. Warns that the North Pole may (50-50 chance) COMPLETELY MELT this summer because of "global warning." This will, he says, create an ever accelerating melt of the Arctic that will be unstoppable. This sounds like good news for shipping and oil drilling to me.

PARIS (AFP) - Recent massive volcanoes have risen from the ocean floor deep under the Arctic ice cap, spewing plumes of fragmented magma into the sea, scientists who filmed the aftermath reported Wednesday. The eruptions -- as big as the one that buried Pompei -- took place in 1999 along the Gakkel Ridge, an underwater mountain chain snaking 1,800 kilometres (1,100 miles) from the northern tip of Greenland to Siberia. Scientists suspected even at the time that a simultaneous series of earthquakes were linked to these volcanic spasms. But when a team led of scientists led by Robert Sohn of...

(CNN) -- The North Pole may be briefly ice-free by September as global warming melts away Arctic sea ice, according to scientists from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. It's a 50-50 bet that the thin Arctic sea ice, which was frozen last autumn, will completely melt away at the geographic North Pole, Serreze said. Serreze said it's "just another indicator of the disappearing Arctic sea ice cover" but that it is happening so soon is "just astounding to me." "Five years ago, to think that we'd even be talking about the possibility of the North...

Study finds Arctic seabed afire with lava-spewing volcanoes The Arctic seabed is as explosive geologically as it is politically judging by the "fountains" of gas and molten lava that have been blasting out of underwater volcanoes near the North Pole. "Explosive volatile discharge has clearly been a widespread, and ongoing, process," according to an international team that sent unmanned probes to the strange fiery world beneath the Arctic ice. They returned with images and data showing that red-hot magma has been rising from deep inside the earth and blown the tops off dozens of submarine volcanoes, four kilometres below the...

After a 2007 polar meltdown that sparked global concern, experts say the stage is set for another record-setting retreat of Arctic Ocean ice - with a top Canadian climate scientist already bracing for the once-unthinkable: open water at the North Pole. "The North Pole may be free of ice for the first time in history," University of Manitoba polar specialist David Barber told Canwest News Service on Monday.

SYDNEY: A reversal of the Earth's magnetic poles could happen sooner than we think, according to Dutch scientists who report that the planet's magnetic field is becoming gradually less stable. A reversal could affect everything from navigation and communications equipment to the composition of the atmosphere, say experts. The report, published today in the U.K. journal Nature Geoscience, found that reversals have been far more common in the last 200 million years than they were deep in the planet's history. Wandering polesResearchers, led by Andrew Biggin of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, made the discovery by analysing rocks...

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...

ON THE NBC nightly news there was a heart-throb report of an attractive British teen-ager who had skied across the North Pole with her father to demonstrate how the Arctic ice pack is receding in the face of global warming. Oh, horror. Oh, how terrible. The pictures were beautiful: Her pretty face, her gentle smile, her soft voice, her snow-crusted parka, the blue skies, the brilliant white ice, the cascading chunks of ice calving from glaciers, the two penguins standing on an ice flow. Wait a minute. Penguins? At the North Pole? Not that we ever heard of. So much...

You know when climate change is biting hard when instead of a vast expanse of snow the North Pole is a vast expanse of water. This year, for the first time, Arctic scientists are preparing for that possibility. "The set-up for this summer is disturbing," says Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). A number of factors have this year led to most of the Arctic ice being thin and vulnerable as it enters its summer melting season. In September 2007, Arctic sea ice reached a record low, opening up the fabled North-West passage that...

Seattle - In an open letter to Santa last week and a speech to children at Seattle’s Annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony at Westlake Center, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels last week offered a Grinch-like tone, grumbling about climate change threatening Santa, telling kids “I hope the reindeer can swim,” and blaming them and their energy-sucking video games for melting Arctic ice. As Nickels spoke, his assistants handed out stickers admonishing the crowd to “Save Santa.”

BERLIN, Oct. 1 (UPI) -- What may turn into a Cold War-like resource conflict started quietly, with a vehicle called "Peace 1" some 2,500 miles below the North Pole. The Mir 1 miniature submarine, manned with three Russian scientists, on Aug. 2 planted a titanium capsule with a Russian flag into the seabed -- a symbol for Russia’s controversial claim of the vast resources that are believed to be stored below it. For the Russians and other states surrounding the North Pole, global warming may yet mean a financial blessing. U.S. scientist published a piece in Science that foresees record...

The Russian Natural Resources Ministry says samples of earth taken from where their navy planted a flag on the seabed below the North Pole show beyond doubt that the Arctic is Russian. “Extensive testing has shown that these soils are thoroughly permeated with the DNA of Russian prisoners who perished in the Gulags,” said Josef Zhukovsky, spokesman for the Ministry. “It is incontrovertible that Russians got there first. This precedence proves our claim to this land.” Apparently, the thousands of corpses thrown into the northerly flowing rivers that ran past the numerous concentration camps that served to house opponents of...

Russian bombers fly Alaska, Canada coastsPosted : Fri, 21 Sep 2007 15:08:47 GMT MOSCOW, Sept. 21 Russia resumed long-range military flights along the coasts of Alaska and Canada after a 17-year hiatus. The two Russian Tu-95MS strategic bombers participated in scheduled exercise drills that began Tuesday and were to end Friday, Itar-Tass reported. The bombers, monitored on their flights by NATO planes, returned to their home airfield Thursday via the North Pole, Col. Alexander Drobyshevsky told Itar-Tass. Russia resumed long-range flights to remote areas on order from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has said the flights are a security precaution...

Russia recently planted a flag under the North Pole. (Reuters: Reuters Television) Norway has called on countries with land bordering the Arctic region to stop the race to claim sovereignty over the region's vast mineral resources. Two weeks ago, a Russian mission to the North Pole planted a Russian flag on the Arctic sea-bed, while Denmark and the United States have sent expeditions to the region. But Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere says there are established procedures to deal with the issue. "If anybody is under the belief that we solve this by racing up there with flags or...

Swedish researchers have joined Danish colleagues in an attempt to establish Denmark's claims to parts of the Arctic region. The expedition follows the planting of a flag on the underwater Lomonosov Ridge by a Russian expedition last week. The expedition, led by Swedish icebreaker Oden, set off from Norway on Sunday. It is being led jointly by Martin Jakobsson of Stockholm University and Christian Marcussen of the Geological Survey of Denmark. The Danes claim that the ridge is on the same continental shelf as Greenland, which is a Danish territory. They hope that the expedition will prove the country's claim...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. Coast Guard cutter is headed to the Arctic this week on a mapping mission to determine whether part of this area can be considered U.S. territory, after recent polar forays by Russia and Canada. The four-week cruise of the Coast Guard Cutter Healy starts Friday and aims to map the sea floor on the northern Chukchi Cap, an underwater plateau that extends from Alaska's North Slope some 500 miles northward. This is the third such U.S. Arctic mapping cruise -- others were in 2003 and 2004 -- and is not a response to a Russian...

CANADA has said it will build two new military bases in its far north as the battle for claims over Arctic Ocean resources heats up. Prime Minister Stephen Harper made the announcement during a tour of Canada's northern territories. It comes as a Danish mission prepares to sail to the North Pole to map the seabed under the ice. Last week, a Russian expedition planted the country's flag on the floor of the Arctic Ocean under the North Pole. Mr Harper said a cold-weather army training base would be set up at Resolute Bay and an existing port at a...

News agency Reuters has been forced to admit that footage it released last week purportedly showing Russian submersibles on the seabed of the North Pole actually came from the movie Titanic. The images were reproduced around the world - including by the Guardian and Guardian Unlimited - alongside the story of Russia planting its flag below the North Pole on Thursday last week. Titanic error: Reuters issued this film still with a story about the Russian flag being planted beneath the North Pole. Photograph: Reuters

"By now most people have heard of Russia’s planting of its flag beneath the North Pole, in an effort to gain control of the vast amounts of minerals, oil, and natural gas located there. This latest Russian “research expedition” was merely a stunt to bolster the Russians claims to the territory." "This is a dangerous game of brinksmanship that Russia is playing, and the outcome has the very real possibility of ending in military conflict. Already there are reports that Canada is opening a new deep water military port in its most northern reaches to protect its sovereignty in the...

OTTAWA (AFP) - Canada dismissed Russia's flag-planting at the North Pole on Thursday as a "15th century" stunt that does not bolster its disputed claim to the resource-rich Arctic. "Look, this isn't the 15th century. You can't go around the world and plant flags and say, 'We're claiming this territory,'" Foreign Minister Peter MacKay told broadcaster CTV. Earlier, a Russian mini-submarine reached the bottom of the Arctic Ocean under the North Pole at a depth of 4,261 meters (13,980 feet), to carry out scientific tests and leave a Russian flag. The dive is believed to be the first of its...

After claiming the Pole, Russia looks south By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow Last Updated: 2:47am BST 04/08/2007 Russia stirred memories of the Cold War yesterday when the country's senior admiral called for the establishment of a permanent naval base in the Mediterranean for the first time since the Soviet era. Russia planted its national flag under the North Pole claiming sovereignty over the Artic territory Coming a day after an audacious mission to the North Pole to bolster Russia's territorial claims in the Arctic, Moscow's renewed naval ambitions are likely to spread further unease in Nato capitals. "The Mediterranean Sea...

Russia criticised for planting Arctic flag Last Updated: 1:42am BST 03/08/2007 Russia has been condemned for planting its flag on the seabed at the North Pole in a symbolic bid to stake a claim to the vast mineral wealth of the Arctic. Explorers from the country descended 14,000ft in a mini-submarine to place the titanium flag in an area that is home to a quarter of the world's untapped energy reserves. Russia also used the expedition, disclosed in The Daily Telegraph , to gather samples to substantiate its claim that the Lomonosov Ridge, a shelf that runs through the Arctic,...

Russian sub plants flag under North Pole By Guy Faulconbridge Russian explorers dived deep below the North Pole in a submersible on Thursday and planted a national flag on the seabed to stake a symbolic claim to the energy riches of the Arctic. A mechanical arm dropped a specially made rust-proof titanium flag onto the Arctic seabed at a depth of 4,261 meters (13,980 ft), Itar-Tass news agency quoted expedition officials as saying. Russia wants to extend right up to the North Pole the territory it controls in the Arctic, believed to hold vast reserves of untapped oil and natural...

via translation - Both Russian corruption reached the bottom of the Arctic Ocean at the North Pole Moscow. August 2. Interfax-Russia says "Mir-1 and Mir 2, safely reached the bottom of the Arctic Ocean near the North Pole. As the program "Vesti-24", says the Russian "Mir-1" slipped to a depth of 4261 meters and reached the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, and the second says "Mir-2" continues to fall to the ocean bottom. Sinking a record depth began with a half behind schedule and should take several hours. To launch vehicles was chosen polynya size 10 by 25 metres. As...

MOSCOW, Russia (AP) -- An expedition aimed at strengthening Russia's claim to much of the oil and gas wealth beneath the Arctic Ocean reached the North Pole on Wednesday, and preparations immediately began for two mini-submarines to drop a capsule containing a Russian flag to the sea floor.

Imperialism: Russia's tinhorn "conquest" of the North Pole Monday was a little comic, except for what it says about a vainglorious regime seeking to grab more energy resources to use coercively. It should be rebuffed. If there was ever an unnecessary voyage to be made, it was probably Russia's dispatch of a naval submarine armada to the frigid waters of the far north on Thursday to symbolically drop a capsule with a Russian flag under the North Pole. Mimicking the language of the 1969 U.S. lunar landing, Russia would have the world believe its feat was mainly a technical achievement,...

Excerpt - MOSCOW: An expedition aimed at strengthening Russia's claim to much of the Arctic Ocean region reached the North Pole on Wednesday afternoon and immediately began preparations for unloading two mini-submarines that will mark the sea floor with a capsule carrying Russian flag. The Rossiya atomic icebreaker had plowed a path to the pole through a sheet of multiyear ice, clearing the way for the Akademik Fedorov research ship to follow, said Sergei Balyasnikov a spokesman for the Arctic and Antarctic research institute that prepared the expedition. The voyage, led by polar explorer and Russian legislator Artur Chilingarov, has...

Two Russian deep-sea submersibles made a test dive in polar waters on Sunday ahead of a mission to be the first to reach the seabed under the North Pole, Itar-Tass news agency said. Tass said it took an hour for Mir-1 and Mir-2, each carrying one pilot, to reach the seabed at a depth of 1,311 meters (4,301 feet), 47 nautical miles north of Russia's northernmost archipelago, Franz Josef Land in the Barents Sea. Tass said Mir-1 resurfaced at around 1030 GMT after five hours underwater while Mir-2 spent some more time on the seabed collecting samples. "It was the...

Excerpt - MOSCOW - Russian scientists hope to plunge to the seabed beneath the North Pole in the next few days in a miniature sub and plant a titanium capsule containing the Russian flag, symbolically claiming much of the Arctic Ocean floor for Moscow. Thick sea ice threatens to thwart the expedition, an engineer with Russia's premier polar research institute said Friday. But if the effort succeeds, it could mark the official start of a very cold diplomatic war for the Arctic, one of the Earth's last energy frontiers. A convoy consisting of a research vessel and an icebreaker, and...

Russian expedition sets sail to claim Arctic for the Kremlin Craig Offman, National Post Published: Tuesday, July 24, 2007 Two weeks after Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Canada's plans to assert itself more vigorously in the Arctic, a Russian expedition sailed Tuesday for the North Pole, where it plans to send a mini-submarine crew to plant a flag on the seabed and symbolically claim the Arctic for the Kremlin. The mission is part of a race to assert rights over the Lomonosov Ridge, a barren but energy-rich wasteland that stretches across 11 time zones. Scientists estimate the glassy icescape is...

Russian leader Vladimir Putin has made an astonishing bid to grab a vast chunk of the Arctic, giving himself claim to its vast potential oil, gas and mineral wealth. His audacious argument that an underwater Russian ridge is linked to the North Pole is likely to lead to an international outcry. Some commentators have already observed it is further evidence of growing Russian assertiveness under its authoritarian president. The Russian media trumpeted the findings of a Moscow scientific mission to the region which boasts "sensational" geological discoveries enabling the Kremlin to make the territorial claim. Populist newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda -...

One of two Coast Guard divers who mysteriously died during a training dive in the Arctic last summer sank uncontrollably as far as 190 feet below the icy surface and suffocated, according to an autopsy summary obtained by The Associated Press on Tuesday. The divers had slipped into a patch of open water near the ship's bow and were planning to dive to a maximum depth of 20 feet, said William Hill Jr., whose daughter Lt. Jessica Hill, along with Boatswain's Mate Steven Duque, died Aug. 17, 500 miles north of Alaska. A support team supposedly held ropes attached to...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17, 2006 -- Military children interested in helping Santa this year have until Nov. 21 to submit their application to participate in the first “Top of the World Toy Summit” at the North Pole. America Supports You and Operation Homefront, with the support of Wal-Mart, are facilitating this “meeting of the minds” Nov. 29, to help Santa ensure kids around the world have a fun-filled holiday season. Operation Homefront will select 20 servicemembers’ children from applications received through its Web site to serve as “ambassadors of fun” during the summit to be held in North Pole, Alaska,...

North Pole's Ancient Past Holds Lessons For Future Global Warming Detailed information on greenhouse gasses and a subtropical heat wave at the North Pole 55 million years ago is providing information about the Earth's past as well as a portent for its future, according to reports in the June 1 issue of Nature. An expedition to the Artic Ocean in 2004 by a team of scientists aboard a fleet of icebreakers collected samples by drilling into the floor of the ocean. The project was part of an international research effort, the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, which explores the Earth's history...

Arctic's tropical past uncovered By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC News The cores contain layers of fossils and minerals Fifty-five million years ago the North Pole was an ice-free zone with tropical temperatures, according to research. A sediment core excavated from 400m (1,300ft) below the seabed of the Arctic Ocean has enabled scientists to delve far back into the region's past. An international team has been able to pin-point the changes that occurred as the Arctic transformed from green house to ice house. The findings are revealed in a trio of papers published in the journal Nature. Unlocked secrets...