Arctic ice grows after near-record summer thaw
OSLO, Sept 17 (Reuters) – Ice on the Arctic Ocean has started to expand after a summer thaw to the third smallest area on record allowed ships to test a new sea route past north Russia.
“It looks like we have passed the minimum ice area this year,” Ola Johannessen, head of the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Norway, told Reuters on Thursday based on satellite images indicating a tiny increase in ice area.
Many scientists say shrinking Arctic ice in recent years has been among the strongest signs of global warming. World leaders will meet at U.N. headquarters in New York on Sept. 22 to discuss a U.N. climate treaty due to be agreed in December.
At the end of the Arctic summer in September 2007, the ice contracted to the smallest area since satellites made monitoring possible in the late 1970s. The 2009 minimum is third smallest behind 2008 at just under 5 million sq kms (1.93 mln sq miles).
“It’s recuperated a bit from the past two years but it’s still far below the average in recent decades,” he said.
“The minimum has probably been reached in the last couple of days,” said Peter Wadhams, professor of Ocean Physics at Cambridge University studying ice thickness aboard the Greenpeace vessel Arctic Sunrise between Greenland and Svalbard.
“The cause is mainly climate change,” he said by satellite phone of shrinking of the ice in recent decades. Thinning ice in the Arctic Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, for instance, had made it more vulnerable to being broken up by winds and waves.
The melt enabled commercial ships to test the route along the coast of Russia for the first time. Two German ships delivered industrial equipment from South Korea to the Siberian port of Yamburg last week.
STEEL
“Both the ships are now in Arkhangelsk (in north Russia),” said Verena Beckhusen of Beluga Shipping GmbH. “They are loading steel parts for delivery to Nigeria.”
The northern sea route trims 4,000 nautical miles (7,400 km) off the usual 11,000-mile journey from Europe to the Far East via the Suez Canal — yielding savings in carbon dioxide emissions and fuel. Risks include icebergs or a sudden freeze.
“The ships were undamaged, no scratches,” Beckhusen said. She said the company was planning a new trip next year, with bigger vessels.
The route has been a graveyard for ships in past centuries, along with a rival ice-clogged passage north of Canada.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said this month the Arctic Ocean could be largely ice free by 2030, decades earlier than projected by the U.N. panel of climate scientists just two years ago.
The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, which monitors the ice, says the last time scientists are confident that the Arctic was free of summertime ice was 125,000 years ago during a warm period known as the Eemian. (For Reuters latest environment blogs click on: blogs.reuters.com/environment/ (Editing by Janet Lawrence)
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
REUTERS
