Arctic Melt Unnerves the Experts

[mcscajun]

It amazed me to finally see an environmental story prominently displayed on the Times' website (it's stuffed down in a corner on the paper edition's front page). Do check the Interactive graphic on the website; it will blow you away.

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.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/02/science/earth/02arct.html