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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."
I would think this will open up lots of new trade opportunities between Russia and North America. I don't know what that could mean, but it is certainly interesting. What kind of manufacturing prowess does Russia have that has been heretofore underutilized because they could not as efficiently get goods to North American ports? Or is this all a bunch of hooey?
(I thought of this because I remember reading this article about Pat Broe, which may or may not have been slashdotted, but it is about an investor in the Canadian port of Churchill, Manitoba, which could well profit from an opened northern passage.)
By the way, I live in Manhattan, and I think it's about time to move...to some city somewhere that's 20 or 30 miles inland.
gameDB
Screw that! What about Santa!? I want my pressies damnit!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I think it's safe to say that humankind is a temporary feature.
I should buy some cement.
And in other news, Santa's workshop is nowhere to be found.
Yeah. I read somewhere that he was bought out by Wallmart, and then dismantled.
- John
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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You mean we'll be spared of a Titanic 2? Hooray for global warming!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There was technology throughout most of human history that recorded Arctic ice cover? Until aircraft, nuclear submarines, nuclear icebreakers, and satellites were invented, nobody was able to say with certainty whether the Northwest Passage existed or not, which was previously the domain of people like Henry Hudson. Indeed, until the technology existed, nobody could really map the icepack with any decent accuracy.
We can extract ice cores and easily date the layers.
The rest of your post is just "it may have happened before" handwaving. Ok, but it hasn't happened in a LONG time, the rate of change is unprecedented, and the possible economical consequences are enormous.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Too small to mention, heh? I'll let you know we've never lost a single war against Russia nor the U.S... and we seriously intend to keep the record perfect!
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
It has been predicted that half of the Netherlands (my homeland) will dissapear gradually during the next 100 years, unless we build better and higher dams all around the sea. Offcourse, parts of the NL are already under sea-level ("polders") but not nearly half of it.
Luckily, I live in the area which will be unaffected, so all I have to do to get rich is buy massive amounts of land here. Still, the implications would be enormous.
The more I think of it, the more I believe we should act, and act quick. But I'm not certain as to act upon WHAT exactly.
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
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
So a huge fuck-off crack appears in the pole and the first response is not hey! how do we fix it, no, it's hey I want dibbs on trade routes.
This! This! is why I want to vote communist!
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
Well, according to the Royal Mail, he's in Reindeerland and can be reached using the postcode SAN TA1.
In fact, we build our houses out of bricks, while Americans rebuild their wooden houses every year after the hurricane season!
You don't need to invade, all you'd need is one dam-busting bomb.
It doesn't matter which ape activates the Monolith
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
They said we were daft, trying to build a country in a swamp
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.
YEA! Now we can burn MORE oil, and that will melt MORE ice, letting us get to MORE OIL!!! WHOOOHOOOO!
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
What the hell? This is the INTERNET, nobody concedes a point! Challenge his math, mock his sentence structure, insult his mother, threaten to have your lawyer contact him... without enough flames the tubes may cool!
Now? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances.