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Scientists Shocked as Arctic Polar Route Revealed
Paladin144 writes "A route unencumbered by perennial sea ice leading directly to the North Pole has been revealed by recent satellite pictures. European scientists indicated their shock as they noted a ship could sail from Europe's northern-most outpost directly to the pole, something that hasn't been possible during most of recorded human history. The rapid thawing of the perennial sea ice has political implications as the U.S., Canada, Russia and the EU jockey for control of the newly opened passages."
This is not quite correct. There is an object in the Arctic ocean which is known as the "Great Siberian Polynya". It is a wide space of open water which is usually open even in mid-winter and starts somewhere in the middle of the icefields above the east end of the Barents sea and goes east-north-east from there. Its actual position and size varies year on year. While it has never been all the way to the north pole its north-eastern edge in some years has been only a few hundred kilometers away from it. Enough for a conventional icebreaker or even a reinforced ship to try to make a break for it. Similarly its south-western edge in some years has been very close to the open waters of the Barents (though not as far west as Spitzbergen).
By the way, Russians have considered using this phenomenon for shipping in the soviet times and even did a few trial runs of convoys lead by Arctica class icebreakers through it (you still have to get to the Polynya and back from it across the ice fields). They abandoned it at the end. While it proved possible to run shipping in the ocean even in midwinter the shipments could not be moved further inland due to the lack of powerfull enough river icebreakers. The project was postponed till the first nuclear river icebreakers come on line. These were complete at about the time when the Soviet union fell apart and at that point nobody cared about centrally operated and organised super-shipping so they are sitting in Murmansk collecting rust.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Your pictures
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Actually there will likely be more.
Warmer water will weaken the edge of the polar icecap, causing it to splinter into icebergs more easily; at the same time, having open water nearer the pole means increased rainfall, which in turn means more ice formation. The circulation of water gets faster with more energy in the system; and iceberg formation is a part of that circulation, so it will intensify as well.
And of course Atlantic storms will get worse too, the rising sealevel will drown out port towns, and the drying farmland means that sailors will starve to death before boarding the ships. Doom and gloom, man, doom and gloom.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I did a Google search[...] ;-) The article with pictures is linked right from ESA's main page.
Just goes to show you that Google is not a crutch for normal brain function.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
Well, according to the Royal Mail, he's in Reindeerland and can be reached using the postcode SAN TA1.
You're thinking _ANTARCTIC_ ice layers, not Arctic. Arctic ice is _sea ice_ and as sea ice, it melts and refreezes and it _moves_ all over the damn place.
You are right, I was thinking of Antarctic ice, sloppy of me. However, there are other ways. We can for instance find geological evidence from lake bed sediment cores.
And ice cores? The ice at the Arctic was 9 feet thick _at its thickest parts_ back in 1958. Just where are you going to get ice cores?
Greenland, for instance. I know they are not the same, but as an indicator of the climate of the area it is an indicator, right?
We can't prove that cracks that these haven't happened before, I agree, but we can prove with some pretty good evidence that the north pole hasn't gone through this amount of change recently (within a couple of hundred thousand years). Even before this latest evidence came, many scientists were warning that the north pole could disappear completely during northern hemisphere summertime before the end of this century. And this is something that hasn't happened for along time. See for instance polar bears who need sea ice to hunt for seals. They evolved probably around 200 000 years ago.
Even the Economist, who have been global warming deniers for years recently admitted that global warming was real and was going to have severe environemental and economic impact. You don't find this alarming?
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM7ZF8LURE_index_1.html
First, the pack ice is full of cracks and crevices, so "rivers" would disappear into them. The ice melts preferentially on the north side of these cracks and ridges, the side facing the sun.
Second, when ice melts in the sun, it tends to form "pinacles" of crunchy ice (presumably a result of variations in the surface resulting in shadows, surface dirt capturing more heat, etc.) Water melts at top, and runs down or falls down into the ice. The heat of the water, and to some degree the kinetic energy of the drops, melts some of the ice further down. If the layer is thick enough, the water forms small pools and re-feezes, thus forming the dense ice that "normally" lasts all year; if enough melts, a hole forms and the water disappears into the sea (or, on land, forms rivers that flow out from the bottom of the glacier.)
Melting from the bottom also obviously has a significant effect, since much of the sea water is obviously warmer than the ice. There is "normally" a state of equilibrium, with water melting at about the same rate snow falls on top, averaged over a few years. Right now, more is melting than freezing.
makes no difference to sea levels.
.103m^3 above the surface of the water (so says the old sailor's adage of icebergs being 9/10ths below water).
.018m^3 more water than we began with. This .018m^3 would spread out over the surface of the ocean, raising the water level ever so slightly. (sorry, your "no difference" myth has just been busted.)
EVERY time this comes up I have to debunk this stuff.
Do you understand why things float in water? Because the mass of water they displace is equal to the mass of the thing floating.
So now you have very dense saltwater, and much less dense freshwater ice (do you understand why ice is freshwater? It forces the salt out as the surface freezes, so the saltwater below it is even saltier and denser) If you have 1kg of ice, it displaces 1kg of saltwater. Simple enough right? Now let's hit it with the math.
Density of fresh water at 0C: 999.9 kg/m^3
Density of ice at 0C: 915.0 kg/m^3
Density of Ocean: We'll take 1020kg/m^3, the minimum on the site, even though at the pole due to the salt concentration noted in the first link the density of the saltwater will be way higher, but any density over 999.9kg/m^3 means that the water level shall rise as I show below:
1 cubic meter of ice (915.0 kg) displaces 915.0kg of saltwater. 915.0kg of saltwater is 0.897m^3 (915kg/(1020kg/m^3)), which means that our 1m^3 of ice has
Now, let's say the ice were to suddenly vanish. There would be a "hole" in the ocean with 0.897m^3 of air in it. Water would of course rush into the "hole" and the water level would drop by 0.897m^3 spread out over the entire surface of the ocean.
But let's say the ice were to melt. Our 915kg of ice would become 915kg of fresh water, which would occupy about 0.915m^3 (915kg/(999.9kg/m^3)). The hole the ice occupied previously was only 0.897m^3 large, which leaves us with
Don't forget that this tiny amount will be joined by water running off of Greenland, Antartica and other polar landmasses with ice on them, 100% of which will raise the water level.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.