Arctic Ocean Survey May Reveal Lost World

core plexus writes " A new survey of the depths of the ice-capped Arctic Ocean as reported at Reuters, BBC, and others, could reveal a lost world of living fossils and exotic new species from jellyfish to giant squid, scientists said on Thursday. They speculated that Arctic waters might hide creatures known only from fossils, such as trilobites that flourished 300 million years ago. The international scheme will include probing a 12,470-foot abyss off Canada described by project leaders as the "world's oldest sea water -- a vast, still pool unstirred for millennia, walled by steep ridges and lidded with ice." Bring on the "Jurassic Park" references."

Comments

pandora's box?

[Garion Maki]

considering that that pool is completely sealed from the outside world would mean that anything in it isn't resistant to infections from the outside world or the other way around...

so couldent it be that once humans put a crack in that icy shield that protects the pool, that some human deseases, to which humans have already build a resistance, that these deseases infect the ancient inhabitants of that pool, creating a slaughter among them... or the other way around...

so... altho the stuff they'll find can prove valuble to science, I would aproach with caution if I was them...

Link to a previous expedition

[Internet Ninja]

Canada Basin has already been checked out in a mission in 2002 which you can read about here. I guess this time round it's so they can have a jolly good look. I wonder if they'll find any aluminium cans or plastic bags at the bottom :)

As one reader pointed out, exploring the deep ocean is harder than space. I guess that's why they felt compelled to put a flag at the bottom. :)

Arctic climate change

[dankelley]

One of the big worries about the Arctic is climate change. Much of the ecosystem relies on the presence of ice, and this ice seems to be disappearing. See fig 16.3 of the IPCC report for a timeseries going back 100 years. In the past few decades we have had adequate measurements of wate temperature in the Actic, and it appears to be rising; see the diagrams in a recent essay at the NOAA site, for example.

As ice changes, so does the ecosystem. Polar bears cannot walk on water, for example.

There are also global consequence of Arctic change that worry climate scientists. For one thing, there is a nonlinear feedback loop since ice has a high albedo. Thus, ice reflects solar radiation back to space, which keeps the system cool. But water has a much lower albedo than ice. This yields a nonlinear feedback loop. Melting ice creates open water, which absorbs more heat, which melts more ice. There was a time when USSR scientists suggested we could open up a northwest passage through the Arctic simply by painting the ice black, setting this feedback loop into action. Of course, if the ice melts, navigation will be easier through the Arctic. Traffic may avoid Panama and go through a more direct route. Part of this traffic could be oil tankers, which can run aground, causing great damage to a system already damaged by the climate change.

Re:ah the ocean

[Sique]

You could use a different approach. Consider a geometrical inversion of the world at the surface of the earth, thus the center of the earth gets mapped to infinity, by setting the radius of the earth to 1 and mapping every vector of the length d to a certain point A to the vector in the same direction, but of 1/d length, thus pointing to A'.

For instance the moon is about 50 times the radius of the earth away, so his image would be projected somewhere at 1/50 of the earth's radius, or just 85mls from the center of the earth. You can use other scaling functions but you will always end with a similar discrepancy. If you use 1/sqrt(d), A' will be somewhere at about 700mls from the center of the earth... still far away from everything we reached until now.

There have been men on the moon, but no one deeper than 8mls from the earth's surface. Basicly we barely have scratched the surface of the earth yet, with even the deepest holes ever drilled lurking somewhere at the 7mls point (don't have the current number right here).