Environment

Canadian Arctic Expected to be gone this Summer

by LilHoody | May 22, 2009 at 11:35 pm

150 views | 26 Recommendations | 3 comments

It is public - We can expect arctic ice to be gone this summer. The ramifications for our Earth will be enormous. This will cause an extremely violent reaction to the Planet where it is real that Methane will be realized into the atmosphere. The consequences - unimaginable.
Three British explorers of the Catlin Arctic Survey team have returned from 73 days in the Canadian Arctic, where they say they found more signs of climate change and its toll on the world’s ice.

The Northwest Passage is a sea route that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. In the past the Northwest Passage has been virtually impassable because it is covered by thick, year-round sea ice. However, satellite and other monitoring confirm that the Arctic sea ice is declining in both thickness and extent.

After making 1,500 measurements, from which they had been expecting to find older ice measuring three meters in thickness, instead they found only thin, first-year ice about half that thick, which is likely to melt in the summer.

The 2007 retreat in ice was the largest on record, allowing clear navigation of the Northwest Passage for the first time in human memory.
In another surprising development, satellite images taken last July showed a slab of ice measuring four square kilometres had broken away from the Ward Hunt Island Ice Shelf in Nunavut.
Canadian and U.S. researchers who studied the fracture said it was more evidence of accelerated climate change in the northern polar region.

And so here we are, left with a thin layer of ice, that if melts (and it is predicted to do so this year) we will be in for one ride that we will not want to be a part of.

In a year when the Arctic ice cap has shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded, a new analysis from Seattle scientists says global warming will accelerate future melting much more than previously expected.

"This is a major change," Overland said. "This is actually moving the threshold up."

The solution - stop eating meat. Stop contributing to the leading factor in global warming - factory farming - the Livestock industry. This has been reported in the United Nations report, and more recently in the Guardian Newspaper in the UK. Time is against us, we must act swiftly, we must act diligently.For all of you who want to continue to eat meat, and think this is farce. Will, you are daming yourselves.

FOR Arctic peoples, global warming is not just transforming their land, it is also poisoning their food. Mercury levels in seals and beluga whales eaten by Inuit in northern Canada have reached levels that would be considered unsafe in fish. Now, Gary Stern of Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and colleagues have found that seal meat contains more mercury in low-ice years, suggesting the problem will only get worse.