[R-G] Arctic summer ice could vanish by 2013, expert says

[Anthony Fenton]

Arctic summer ice could vanish by 2013, expert says
  http://www.canada.com/news/national/Arctic+summer+could+vanish+2013+expert+says/1357287/story.html

By David Ljunggren , ReutersMarch 5, 2009Compliments of TD Waterhouse


The shifting polar ice created crevasses as well as towering ice  
ridges as it shifted across the Arctic Ocean.

The shifting polar ice created crevasses as well as towering ice  
ridges as it shifted across the Arctic Ocean.
Photograph by: Handout, Bill Donner

OTTAWA - The Arctic is warming up so quickly that the region's sea ice  
cover in summer could vanish as early as 2013, decades earlier than  
some had predicted, a leading polar expert said Thursday.

Warwick Vincent, director of the Centre for Northern Studies at Laval  
University in Quebec, said recent data on the ice cover "appear to be  
tracking the most pessimistic of the models", which call for an ice  
free summer in 2013.

The year "2013 is starting to look as though it is a lot more  
reasonable as a prediction. But each year we've been wrong — each year  
we're finding that it's a little bit faster than expected," he told  
Reuters.

The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world and  
the sea ice cover shrank to a record low in 2007 before growing  
slightly in 2008.

In 2004 a major international panel forecast the cover could vanish by  
2100. Last December, some experts said the summer ice could go in the  
next 10 or 20 years.

If the ice cover disappears, it could have major consequences.  
Shipping companies are already musing about short cuts through the  
Arctic, which also contains enormous reserves of oil and natural gas.

Vincent's scientific team has spent the last 10 summers on Ward Hunt  
Island, a remote spot some 4,000 kilometres northwest of Ottawa.

"I was astounded as to how fast the changes are taking place. The  
extent of open water is something that we haven't experienced in the  
10 years that I've been working up there," he said after making a  
presentation in the Canadian Parliament.

"We're losing, irreversibly, major features of the Canadian ice scape  
and that suggests that these more pessimistic models are really much  
closer to reality."

In 2008 the maximum summer temperature on Ward Hunt hit 20 C compared  
to the usual 5 degrees. Last summer alone the five ice shelves along  
Ellesmere Island in Canada's Far North, which are more than 4,000  
years old, shrunk by 23 per cent.

Vincent told Reuters last September that it was clear some of the  
damage would be permanent and that the warming in the Arctic was a  
sign of what the rest of the world could expect. He struck a similarly  
gloomy note in his presentation.

"Some of this is unstoppable. We're in a train of events at the moment  
where there are changes taking place that we are unable to reverse,  
the loss of these ice shelves, for example," he said.

"But what we can do is slow down this process and we have to slow down  
this process because we need to buy more time. We simply don't have  
the technologies as a civilization to deal with this level of  
instability that is ahead of us."