Posted on 11/27/2009 5:15:40 PM PST by Shermy
WINNIPEG — One of Canada's top northern researchers says the permanent Arctic sea ice that is home to the world's polar bears and usually survives the summer has all but disappeared.
Experts around the world believed the ice was recovering because satellite images showed it expanding. But David Barber says the thick, multi-year frozen sheets crucial to the northern ecosystem have been replaced by thin "rotten" ice which can't support the weight of the bears.
"It caught us all by surprise because we were expecting there to be multi-year sea ice - the whole world thought it was multi-year sea ice," said Barber, who just returned from an expedition to the Beaufort Sea.
"Unfortunately what we found was that the multi-year (ice) has all but disappeared. What's left is this remnant, rotten ice."
Permanent ice, which is normally up to 10 metres thick, was easily pierced by the research ship, said Barber, who holds the Canada research chair in Arctic science at the University of Manitoba.
The team finally reached what it thought was stable ice, only to watch a crack appear just as researchers were preparing to descend onto the floe.
"As I watched, over the course of five minutes, the entire multi-year ice floe broke up into pieces," Barber said. "This floe was 10 miles across. Something that's twice the size of Winnipeg, it just broke up right in front of our eyes."
The ice is unable to withstand battering waves and storms because global warming is rapidly melting it at a rate of 70,000 square kilometres each year, he said.
Multi-year sea ice used to cover 90 per cent of the Arctic basin, Barber said. It now covers roughly 19 per cent. Where it used to be up to 10 metres thick, it's now twometres at most.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
The Daily Wah-Wahh. Honestly, The Sky is Falling!!
Well, I say, The Emperor Has No Clothes.
Was this data peer reviewed by the East Anglia CRU?
We’re going to be bombarded with this stuff.
2 meters of ice could support an Abrams Tank at 70 tons!
Nice photo. Thanks.
How did the polar bears survive the medievel warming period, when the summer ice not only shrank, but literally disappeared?
Thank you in advance for your prompt and erudite reply.
This science fiction is timed to influence Copenhagen.
This screwball Barber told National Geographic in 2008:
“We’re actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time [in history],” David Barber, of the University of Manitoba, told National Geographic News aboard the C.C.G.S. Amundsen, a Canadian research icebreaker.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/06/080620-north-pole.html
You can drive around the local lakes in January and see Dominos Pizza delivery trucks taking pizza to people out ice fishing in their little ice houses.
Cheers!
They won’t be able to find new data as it gets colder so they will have to use the summer data for years now.
That's right, for a mere ______ ( insert monetary unit here) , per household, you'll be doing what's needed to combat the scourge of rotten ice.
Several weeks ago, I was sailing back to St. Petersburg on a dark and stormy moonless night after a very long affair at my cousin's restaurant in Tampa and we kept bumping into what must have been the rotting carcasses of dead polar bears every damned foot of the way.
The energy sources (Green, of course) for this harrowing voyage were ethanol and wind power, and I did stay at a Holiday Inn, so I know what I am talking about, ecologically speaking.
If so, then he merely found out that ice formed within the previous year can't be multi-year ice.
Fixed it. ;-)
It seems to after watching ice road truckers, that the ice they drive on is not all that thick
Just looked it up. Ice roads 4ft thick support 70 ton rigs/loads. And 6 six ft can’t support a polar bear?
Aha! Here’s the problem... He and his fellow “scientists” were off Hilton Head SC near BEAUFORT, SC!!!! No wonder it seemed warmer than usual. Oh, these nutty “scientists”. Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
So they ram their ship into the ice and go in until they think they are on stable ice and then whine because a crack opens up right before their eyes and continues to crack up 10 miles of an ice sheet? Well ya know the cracks were probably in the ice to start with and when they began to ram through it they started opening those cracks again, and once started ice can break up fast (were they born yesterday?)
My conclusion is the dumb dumbs who had to ram through the mutiyear ice to see if it would hold up ruined the hugh ice sheet for the polar bears. Exactly when did they try going out on this ice sheet, during the winter or during the summer/spring when ice does melt and weaken.
As already pointed out on this thread, Barber's a known AGW promoter. He could have seen the so-called 'rotten' (single-year) ice in an area where this and last year's satellite pictures show that there was only single-year ice. We don't know the location, nor was it specified in the article.
I say "might," because I fear that due to AGW-caused rising sea-levels, Hilton Head Island may be under water by now. Has anyone checked? Is Columbia now on the beach?
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