Saturday 30 March 2013

The Polar Ice

Breaking: Arctic Ice Breaks Up in Beaufort Sea.


23 March, 2013


For the record—I do not think that any sea ice will survive this summer.


An event unprecedented in human history is today, this very moment, transpiring in the Arctic Ocean.

The cracks in the sea ice that I reported on my Sierra Club Canada blog and elsewhere over the last several days have spread and at this moment the entire sea ice sheet (or about 99 percent of it) covering the Arctic Ocean is on the move. Clockwise. The ice is thin, and slushy, and breaking apart.


This is abrupt climate change in real-time.


Humans have benefited greatly from a stable climate for the last 11,000 years or roughly 400 generations. Not any more. We now face an angry climate. One that we have poked in the eye with our fossil fuel stick and awakened. And now we must deal with the consequences. We must set aside our differences and prepare for what we can no longer avoid. And that is massive disruption to our civilizations.


Satellite imagery from NOAA’s Visualization Lab



The NOAA VisLab uses the imagery from NOAA‘s weather and climate satellites to produce animations that show the dynamic nature of Earth and its environment.





A series of intense storms in the Arctic has caused fracturing of the sea ice around the Beaufort Sea along the northern coasts of Alaska and Canada. High-resolution imagery from the Suomi NPP satellite shows the evolution of the cracks forming in the ice, called leads, from February 17 -- March 18 2013. The general circulation of the area is seen moving the ice westward along the Alaskan coast.


Paul Beckwith is a PhD student with the laboratory for paleoclimatology and climatology, department of geography, University of Ottawa. He teaches second year climatology/meteorology as a part-time professor. His thesis topic is “Abrupt climate change in the past and present.” He holds an M.Sc. in laser physics and a B.Eng. in engineering physics and reached the rank of chess master in a previous life.


4 comments:

  1. So whats going to happen. What should we be doing right now?

    ReplyDelete
  2. What if we all work together globally ... and as individuals, businesses, clubs and organisations we do a little more every day to reduce our carbon footprint, to improve our health and the health of our planet? That's what we're doing at Your Healthy Planet(dot)com ... FREE to join.

    ReplyDelete
  3. what if we dismantle the fossil fuel economy and infrastructure that is killing us all quickly? liberalism says that individual change adds up to social change- but that is not true. the corporations and military forces are busy raping the world while we are trying to unfuck the world, and that just doesn't add up!

    ReplyDelete

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