Published on Saturday, December 13, 2008 by Inter Press Service
Climate Change: ‘Things Happen Much Faster in the Arctic’
by Stephen Leahy
QUEBEC CITY, Canada-In just a few summers from now, the Arctic Ocean will lose its protective cover of ice for the first time in a million years, according to some experts attending the International Arctic Change conference here.
‘Things are happening much faster in the Arctic. I think it will be summer ice-free by 2015,’ said David Barber, an Arctic climatologist at the University of Manitoba.
Such a ‘dramatic and serious loss of sea ice will affect everyone on the planet,’ Barber told IPS.
Barber spent much of last winter on a Canadian research icebreaker, the Amundsen, in the Arctic Ocean as leader of a 40-million-dollar ice research project. Scientists expected the Amundsen to be frozen in place for many months during the harsh Arctic winter, when there is no sunlight and temperatures plunge to -50 degrees C. Instead the ship stayed mobile as the normally impenetrable ice was thin and weak.
