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3-Man Team Begins Ice-Survey Trek To the North Pole
Hugh Pickens writes "Satellites have shown how the Arctic sea-ice has been shrinking in recent years, but a three-man scientific team making an expedition to the North Pole should give scientists a better idea of how thin the ice is becoming. 'We're making the surface journey because that's the only way we have of gathering these direct observations of how thick the snow and the ice is,' said team leader Pen Hadow, who in 2003 became the first person to trek solo and without support from Canada to the North Pole. 'That's what the scientists really need to know.' There is more at stake for the British team than achieving some invented personal goal: 'The journey's going to be about 700 miles in distance, taking about three months,' said Hadow. 'In the earlier phases, the temperatures are about minus 50 degrees ... And we're towing sledges with our camping equipment and our survey equipment — almost twice our body weights — for most of the distance.'"
"Arctic ice modeler Wieslaw Maslowski, a science adviser to the survey, hopes the data gathered during the journey will enable him to refine his forecast of when the first ice-free summer might arrive. 'According to our studies, it's very likely that if this current trend of ice decline based on the last decade or so continues, or accelerates, the ice might be almost gone in summer sometime between 2010 and 2016.'"
Because if you RTFA, it states that they expect to encounter gaps in the ice.
If that happens, they expect to have to swim "for up to two hours at a time in darkness", all the time still towing their equipment behind them.
The ice is not consistently thick enough to support machines of any sort, and open leads in ice (open water cracks) require full submersion of self (in an immersion suit) to cross. This is not a Top Gear episode, this is a real adventure like back in the day, when there were hardened explorers.
--Maxime Chaya blogging live from the North Pole--
Unlike a car, you don't have to worry about fuel, and you can still cover 50 miles per day. Plus, snowkites have the ability to jump over crevices motorized vehicles can't cross.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Wow. That's a serious why to twist around the facts. If you look at the plot from your link, you'll see that the minimum sea ice extent is small. This is where the news has been. Anyway, ice volume matters more. Notice my article is also from NSIDC and directly contracts the bent in your article on a site dedicated to spreading misinformation about the science behind climate change.
I strongly doubt you can find an article from NSIDC that agrees with what Watts Up With That? claimed they said, but I don't expect you to want to find anything that might change your views.
It's the summer ice extent that matters. It's dark in the winter so any albedo effect is irrelevant.
The ice melts during the summer. So if you've only got 1ft thick ice then it will melt before the winter freeze restarts. If you've got 100ft thick ice then (in the past) the winter freeze restored the thinning due to the summer melt.
That's not happening now. You can argue that summer 2007 was a freak year for ice extent. 2008 wasn't, and yet the summer 2008 minimum was barely more than the 2007 minimum.
That's the problem with single year ice (which also tends to be more salty and so melts at a lower temperature)
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.