Friday, 27 June 2008 00:00 | and posted in Environment
For the first time in history, Scientists are warning that there's a 50:50 chance the North Pole will be completely devoid of ice this summer. This would enable people to sail on open water directly to the North Pole, a point previously only reachable on foot.
"The issue is that, for the first time that I am aware of, the NorthPole is covered with extensive first-year ice - ice that formed last autumn and winter. I'd say it's even-odds whether the North Pole melts out," says Dr Serreze of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado.
First-year ice is the name given to the thin ice that forms during the winter freeze each year and which is prone to melting during the summer. This thin first-year ice now represents 70% of the sea-ice in the arctic due to the amount of ice lost in recent summers, particularly the summers of 2005 and 2007.
Thicker, multi-year ice has been pushed against the Canadian continental shelf by a combination of the weather and the earth's rotation and will survive the summer. Therefore, if the first-year ice melts over the North Pole this summer it will be mostly symbolic, but this would still represent the most dramatic example so far of the impact of global warming upon our world.
The other concern for the North Pole this summer is a commercial one. If the ice does melt at the North Pole this summer then the five countries with Arctic coast line, Canada, Russia, the U.S. (Alaska), Norway and Denmark (Greenland), may seek to exploit the potentially oil and mineral rich polar sea floor. The thick ice normally makes such extraction impossible.