Polar Ice: Going, Going, Gone?

The following can be found in Dot Earth, Andrew Revkin’s environmental blog at the NY Times website:

(from the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco)

On warming in the Arctic Ocean…Arctic
waters near Alaska and Russia were up to 9
degrees Fahrenheit above average

On the reduction of sea-ice:

(courtesy of Don Perovich, of the Army’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory. )

The floating sheath of Arctic sea ice is
smallest in September, the end of summer,
before growing again as the temperatures fall
in fall. In September 1980, the ice covered
almost the entire Arctic Ocean, 7.8 million
square kilometers. That’s about the same
area as the continental United States. In
September this year, the ice sheet shrank to
4.2 million square kilometers. “It’s a
tremendous decrease,” Dr. Perovich said.

The area of ice lost was more than the land
area east of the Mississippi. The previous
lowest area (for the satellite record since
1979) was 5.8 million square kilometers.

On the future for Arctic ice fields at the North Pole:

… former Vice President Al Gore mentioned
in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture, at least one
researcher, Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval
Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.,
foresees a blue Arctic Ocean in summers by
2013.