Scientists Astonished by New 100 Kilometer Ice Crack in Arctic
by Stacy Feldman - Jan 18th, 2008
Giant slabs of ice have peeled away from the Arctic’s Beaufort ice pack, leaving massive fractures of up to 100 kilometers wide and open stretches of water. The meltdown took about five weeks. (The satellite image attached is of the fissures, courtesy of the Canadian Ice Service.)
Scientists are stunned, naturally. Reports the Canwest News Service:
"It's shocking to see," says David Barber, a climate specialist at the University of Manitoba. "The fractures are huge…We drove our ship down of one of them and you couldn't see the sides of it.".
Barber is heading an international project, involving more than 200 researchers from 15 countries, on the Amundsen, a Canadian Coast Guard ship over-wintering in the Beaufort. Says Barber:
That means Arctic summer ice, which has capped the planet for more than a million years, might be gone by 2010.
That also means that the whole world could be thrown into a weather nightmare:
The northern ice plays a critical role in controlling Earth's thermostat. Arctic ice reflects close to the 95 per cent of solar radiation that hits it. Once the ice melts away, seawater absorbs the heat instead, later releasing it back to the atmosphere, a process that will speed global warming.
Barber said he has never seen such large fractures and so much open water in December and January.
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