Help Me! I'm Melting! (Part Two)

Scientists note stunning loss of Arctic ice, snow
Last Updated Fri, 19 May 2006 13:36:09 EDT
CBC News
Climatologists studying satellite weather maps say they're amazed and alarmed by how quickly spring is coming to the Arctic this year.

Record warm temperatures have significantly reduced ice cover in Canada's Arctic waters and snow cover on land.

"I've never seen it so wide open this time of year," said Environment Canada's David Phillips, referring to the body of water between Baffin Island and mainland Quebec. "It's just blue, blue as the bluest sky."

Phillips said snow cover is also fast disappearing across Nunavut. In Cape Dorset, there is typically 50 centimetres of snow on the ground in May. Now there's just two centimetres. And in Iqaluit, bare ground is exposed everywhere, when there would normally still be 20 centimetres of snow cover.

Phillips, a senior climatologist with the federal weather agency, says temperatures were four to five degrees warmer than usual this past winter. The higher temperatures come on the heels of dramatic losses in sea ice last summer, Phillips says, and so the natural cycle hasn't had a chance to recover.

"There has been no rebounding back," he said. "The ice just hasn't had a chance to bounce back, to grow during the winter, during the cold season of the year.

"Essentially what's happening is there's been so much warm weather, week after week, month after month, season after season, the environment is just not behaving the way it should," said Phillips.

Ice cover has now dropped to a record low for the winter period, attracting the attention of Mark Serreze, a senior research scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.

Serreze said April is generally the month with the maximum ice cover over the Arctic Ocean, and the loss this year is shocking.

"If we compare this April with all previous Aprils, there's hundreds of thousands of square kilometres less ice," he said.

Climatologists, biologists and people living in the area fear the shifting ice patterns are a sign of even deeper changes that will disrupt age-old cycles of plant and animal life, and even global weather patterns.

Serreze says researchers will be watching ice cover data carefully this summer, and many are already predicting the shrinkage in September will largely surpass last year's record high.

Serreze says sea ice loss has been the greatest along the coasts of Siberia and Alaska. This winter a ship could have travelled northeast from London along Russia's Arctic Ocean coastline and down through the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska to Tokyo, he says.

Meanwhile, Phillips says people in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories can expect the balmy weather to continue through the summer.

We're DOOMED! DOOOOMED!