North Pole Becomes An Island

Image: NSIDC/NOAA via London DailyMail

Comment Period Still Open on Climate Change Report

For the first time in recorded history, 125,000 years, the North Pole has melted to the point where it is an island, opening a shipping mecca heretofore only imagined: the Northwest and Northeast Passages open, simultaneously. The London DailyMail quotes Professor Mark Serreze, National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, CO: "The passages are open. It is an historic event." Last month he said that the polar melt shows that "global warming is occurring far earlier than any of us expected."

Ice loss in 2007 totalled more than a million square kilometers, a record. The ice cover will not reach its minimum until mid-September; last week, it was 2 million square miles below the long-term average. In early August, the Guardian reported:

'When we did the first climate change computer models, we thought the Arctic's summer ice cover would last until around 2070,' said Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University. 'It is now clear we did not understand how thin the ice cap had already become - for Arctic ice cover has since been disappearing at ever increasing rates. Every few years we have to revise our estimates downwards. Now the most detailed computer models suggest the Arctic's summer ice is going to last for only a few more years - and given what we have seen happen last week, I think they are probably correct.'

And last month, Serreze told the Guardian:

'The trouble is that sea ice is now disappearing from the Arctic faster than our ability to develop new computer models and to understand what is happening there. We always knew it would be the first region on Earth to feel the impact of climate change, but not at anything like this speed. What is happening now indicates that global warming is occurring far earlier than any of us expected.'

SpiegelOnline notes that European shipping companies would love to be able to go north over the pole rather than south and through the Suez Canal: "From Hamburg to the Japanese port city of Yokohama, for example, the trip using the northern route is just 7,400 nautical miles -- just 40 percent of the 11,500 nautical mile haul through the Suez."

The shrinking icepack puts pressure on the region's polar bears. Last month, a federal survey found nine bears in the sea off Alaska; one was 60 miles from shore. To give you an idea of the magnitued of the change, from 1987 to 2003 (16 years), scientists spotted only 12 polar bears swimming in the open ocean. Period.

In May, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne listed polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The federal Climate Change Science Program released a report on global warming in August; the comment period extends until 25 September.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) is part of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder.