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But top U.S. institute still prophesies 'extreme' melting Despite predictions from a top U.S. polar institute that the Arctic Ocean's overall ice cover is headed for another "extreme" meltdown by mid-September, the Environment Canada agency monitoring our northern waters says an unusual combination of factors is making navigation more difficult in the Northwest Passage this year after two straight summers of virtually clear sailing. In both the wider, deep-water northern corridor and the narrower, shallower southern branches of the passage, the Canadian Ice Service says pockets of more extensive winter freezing and concentrations of thicker, older ice at several key...

OTTAWA: Canada is stepping up its military alertness along its northern frontier in response to Russia’s “testing” of its boundaries and recent Arctic grab, the prime minister said yesterday. “We are concerned about not just Russia’s claims through the international process, but Russia’s testing of Canadian airspace and other indications ... (of) some desire to work outside of the international framework,” said Prime Minister Stephen Harper. “That is obviously why we are taking a range of measures, including military measures, to strengthen our sovereignty in the North,” he said, highlighting a new sensor net, navy patrols and a military training...

WASHINGTON - Crucial Arctic sea ice this summer shrank to its second lowest level on record, continuing an alarming trend, scientists said Tuesday. ADVERTISEMENT The ice covered 1.74 million square miles on Friday, marking a low point for this summer, according to NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. Last summer, the sea ice covered only 1.59 million square miles, the lowest since record-keeping began in 1979. Arctic sea ice, which floats on the ocean, expands in winter and retreats in summer. In recent years it hasn't been as thick in winter. Sea ice is...

WASHINGTON - Crucial Arctic sea ice this summer shrank to its second lowest level on record, continuing an alarming trend, scientists said Tuesday. ADVERTISEMENT The ice covered 1.74 million square miles on Friday, marking a low point for this summer, according to NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. Last summer, the sea ice covered only 1.59 million square miles, the lowest since record-keeping began in 1979. Arctic sea ice, which floats on the ocean, expands in winter and retreats in summer. In recent years it hasn't been as thick in winter. Sea ice is...

Ever since Russia planted a flag under the North Pole last year, the issue of sovereign rights under an increasingly slushy arctic has tensed. In a race to claim ownership of some of the arctic seabed, a two-ship caravan of Canadian and U.S. scientists is sailing around the Arctic Ocean right now. Their mission, which will last from September 6th to October 1st, is to measure the seabed and the continental margins in an attempt to solidify our possible rights over the far north—an area that will become accessible to oil drilling and mining as the earth warms and arctic...

Alarm over sea ice loss is misplaced. Recent short-term gains in Arctic ice coverage indicate nothing about the eventual state of the Arctic. Answers to the long-term status of the region lie in the realm of a scientific branch known as paleoclimatology. What does it tell us? The Earth is currently in the geologic epoch known as the Holocene. This began nearly 12,000 years ago when the last ice age (more precisely, the Weichsal glacial) ended. Temperatures warmed, glaciers began to retreat, and the Arctic began to melt. This began what is called an interglacial: a warmer period between glaciation....

Arctic ice second-lowest ever; polar bears affected 27 Aug 2008 17:23:48 GMT Source: Reuters By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent WASHINGTON, Aug 27 (Reuters) - Arctic sea ice shrank to its second-lowest level ever, U.S. scientists said on Wednesday, with particular melting in the Chukchi Sea, where polar bears were recently seen swimming far off the Alaskan coast. This year's Arctic ice melt could surpass the extraordinary 2007 record low in the coming weeks. Last year's minimum ice level was reached on Sept. 16, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Even if no records are broken this year,...

August 26, 2008 Arctic sea ice now second-lowest on record Sign up for the Arctic Sea Ice News RSS feed for automatic notification of analysis updates. Sea ice extent has fallen below the 2005 minimum, previously the second-lowest extent recorded since the dawn of the satellite era. Will 2008 also break the standing record low, set in 2007? We will know in the next several weeks, when the melt season comes to a close. The bottom line, however, is that the strong negative trend in summertime ice extent characterizing the past decade continues.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 25, 2008 – The Coast Guard is testing and compiling initial lessons learned from its ongoing Arctic operations, a senior officer said last week. “It became obvious to me 18 months to two years ago that with the retreat of the multiyear polar sea ice, the Coast Guard was going to have to do more than it had in the past to provide maritime safety and security to northern and western Alaska, the Arctic Ocean and the Beaufort Sea,” Coast Guard Rear Adm. Arthur E. Brooks, commander of the 17th Coast Guard District, told bloggers and online journalists...

Unexpected partnerships are forming among nations vying to extend their Arctic undersea territories as they join to counter Russia's aggressive Arctic claims. A United States coastguard icebreaker left port in Alaska last week to join a Canadian icebreaker to conduct a seismic survey of the Beaufort seabed north of the Yukon-Alaska border. Both countries are gathering research to support their claim to Arctic territories that may hold vast natural resources and potential new shipping routes. Canada and the US say a past land dispute over 12,000 sq km of seabed elsewhere in the Beaufort Sea is being put aside in...

Ice at the North Pole melted at an unprecedented rate last week, with leading scientists warning that the Arctic could be ice-free in summer by 2013. Satellite images show that ice caps started to disintegrate dramatically several days ago as storms over Alaska's Beaufort Sea began sucking streams of warm air into the Arctic. As a result, scientists say that the disappearance of sea ice at the North Pole could exceed last year's record loss. More than a million square kilometres melted over the summer of 2007 as global warming tightened its grip on the Arctic. But such destruction could...

There's something rotten north of Denmark Just a few weeks ago, predictions of Arctic ice collapse were buzzing all over the internet. Some scientists were predicting that the "North Pole may be ice-free for first time this summer". Others predicted that the entire "polar ice cap would disappear this summer". The Arctic melt season is nearly done for this year. The sun is now very low above the horizon and will set for the winter at the North Pole in five weeks. And none of these dire predictions have come to pass. Yet there is, however, something odd going on...

The Canadian military is sending a long-range Aurora aircraft to investigate reports of a mysterious explosion along Canada's Northwest Passage that may have killed several whales. The drama apparently began in the early-morning hours of July 31, when an Inuit hunting party at an outpost camp at Borden Peninsula on northeastern Baffin Island was alerted to the sound of an explosion, followed by a cloud of black smoke. An Inuit member of the Canadian Rangers, a military reservist unit stationed in the far North, reported the incident, and said a hunter at the camp saw several dead whales on shore...

Please use links to images rather than images on this thread. Continues www.climateaudit.org/?p=3229

There has been a lot of hype this year citing data which is suggesting that we’ll be able to navigate the Northwest Passage and some even so bold as to suggest a completely ice free Arctic Sea. You could say: “A picture is always worth 1000 data points.” I’d say “impassable” fits this picture pretty well: [Click link for photo - I don't know how to post it]

Research funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution suggests underwater volcanoes up to a mile in diameter have erupted violently in the past decade beneath the Arctic ice cap. The eruptions coincided with growing hysteria over the unprovable theory that civilization is causing runaway global warming (which among other things is supposedly melting the ice cap), and with research irrefutably confirming that the Antarctic ice cap is growing and that the planet has cooled 1 F in the last decade. Scientists used to think deep-sea volcanoes dribbled lava because of the weight of the...

Character from climatescience.com on Fox now. Warns that the North Pole may (50-50 chance) COMPLETELY MELT this summer because of "global warning." This will, he says, create an ever accelerating melt of the Arctic that will be unstoppable. This sounds like good news for shipping and oil drilling to me.

(CNN) -- The North Pole may be briefly ice-free by September as global warming melts away Arctic sea ice, according to scientists from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. It's a 50-50 bet that the thin Arctic sea ice, which was frozen last autumn, will completely melt away at the geographic North Pole, Serreze said. Serreze said it's "just another indicator of the disappearing Arctic sea ice cover" but that it is happening so soon is "just astounding to me." "Five years ago, to think that we'd even be talking about the possibility of the North...

After a 2007 polar meltdown that sparked global concern, experts say the stage is set for another record-setting retreat of Arctic Ocean ice - with a top Canadian climate scientist already bracing for the once-unthinkable: open water at the North Pole. "The North Pole may be free of ice for the first time in history," University of Manitoba polar specialist David Barber told Canwest News Service on Monday.

PARIS (AFP) - Recent massive volcanoes have risen from the ocean floor deep under the Arctic ice cap, spewing plumes of fragmented magma into the sea, scientists who filmed the aftermath reported Wednesday. The eruptions -- as big as the one that buried Pompei -- took place in 1999 along the Gakkel Ridge, an underwater mountain chain snaking 1,800 kilometres (1,100 miles) from the northern tip of Greenland to Siberia. Scientists suspected even at the time that a simultaneous series of earthquakes were linked to these volcanic spasms. But when a team led of scientists led by Robert Sohn of...