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Arctic ice loss: Northwest Passage now open, says space agency
Paris (AFP) Sept 14, 2007 The Northwest Passage, the dreamed-of yet historically impassable maritime shortcut between Europe and Asia, has now fully opened up due to record shrinkage of Arctic sea ice, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Friday. It released a mosaic of images, taken in early September by a radar aboard its Envisat satellite, which showed that ice retreat in the Arctic had reached record levels since satellite monitoring began in 1978. "We have seen the ice-covered area drop to just around three million square kilometres (1.158 million square miles), which is about one million square kilometres (386,000 sq. miles) less than the previous minima of 2005 and 2006," said Leif Toudal Pedersen of the Danish National Space Centre. "There has been a reduction of the ice cover over the last 10 years of about 100 000 sq. km. (38,600 sq. miles) per year on average, so a drop of one million sq. km. (386,000 sq. miles) in just one year is extreme." The most direct route of the Northwest Passage across northern Canada is "fully navigable", while the so-called Northeast Passage along the Siberian coast "remains only partially blocked," ESA said in a press release. The previous record low was in 2005 when the Arctic area covered by sea ice was four million sq. km. (1.54 million sq. miles). Even then, the most direct Northwest Passage did not become fully open, ESA said. On August 10, US Arctic specialist William Chapman of the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana said that Arctic sea ice cover had already plunged to the lowest levels measured, 30 days before the normal point of the annual minimum. Scientists under the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have warned that the Arctic is one of the most vulnerable areas for global warming. In its 4th Assessment Report issued this year, the IPCC predicted the Arctic would be virtually ice-free by mid-2070; other experts believe this could happen as soon as 2040, driven by a phenomenon called albedo. Albedo is the reflectivity of light. Because sea ice has a bright surface, the majority of solar energy that strikes it is reflected back into space. When sea ice melts, the dark-coloured ocean surface is exposed. Solar energy is then absorbed by the sea rather than reflected, so the oceans get warmer and temperatures rise, thus making it difficult for new ice to form. The dramatic loss of sea ice over the past few years has prompted jockeying among countries bordering the Arctic Ocean over navigation routes and the rights to its mineral-rich seabed. Related Links Beyond the Ice Age
Ice fjords, lifeblood for polar species, at risk in melting Arctic
Longyearbyen, Norway (AFP) Aug 31, 2007The Svalbard archipelago near the North Pole is already seeing the dramatic effects of global warming: the mercury is rising twice as fast as elsewhere on the planet, posing a serious threat to the ecosystem. |
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