London: The Arctic will be 'ice-free' in
summer within the next two decades, suggests a study that
found a rapid acceleration in the loss of sea ice.
Based on research undertaken by Polar Ocean Physics
Group from Cambridge University, it was suggested that cargo
ships will be able to sail in open water to the North Pole in
the summer of 2020. It will also mean that the Earth will lose
the white cap that can be seen in photographs taken from
space.
The route would be ice-free for several months every
year, cutting more than 3,000 miles from the normal journey
from the Far East to Europe via the Suez canal, The Times
online reported today.
"The North Pole will be exposed in ten years. You
would be able to sail a Japanese car carrier across the North
Pole and out into the Atlantic," Peter Wadhams, Professor of
Ocean Physics at Cambridge, was quoted as saying by British
daily.
He expressed the fear that the ice will retreat to a
zone north of Greenland and Ellesmere Island by 2020 and that
area will be less than half the present summer area. "The
change in the Arctic summer sea ice is the biggest impact
global warming is having on the physical appearance of the
planet," he said.
The Cambridge researchers compared measurements of ice
thickness over the last few years and found that underlying
trend was towards increasingly thin and patchy ice cover.
Earlier this month, the National Snow and Ice Data
Centre, which is part of the University of Colorado, said that
Arctic ice coverage was the third-lowest since satellite
records began in 1979.
Martin Summerkorn, climate change adviser to the WWF
Arctic Programme, said that the loss of sea ice predicted by
the Cambridge study would have profound consequences beyond
the polar region.
Without ice to reflect sunlight, the Arctic Ocean
would warm more quickly, resulting in the release of
greenhouse gases stored in the Arctic permafrost soils. These
soils contain twice as much carbon as is in the atmosphere.
Summerkorn said that the warming of the Arctic surface
waters would accelerate the melting of the Greenland ice
sheet, speeding up the sea level rise.
"This could lead to flooding affecting one quarter of
the world’s population and extreme global weather changes," he
was quoted as saying by Times.
Bureau Report