Arctic Ice

(Image from This National Geographic Article... there's a cool video there too. I can't help but think my husband should have been an field scientist in the arctic.)

I'm writing this about two days before you'll read it and it's snowing here, so when I started thinking about environmental science, the arctic came to mind. I wondered how things are going up there. Well, it turns out about like I thought, things aren't going all that well for the arctic and it's ice.

How do we know? Two ways, really. First we have all the satellite images taken over time and they tell a story of the ice growing and shrinking every year. Some years it's more than others but the overall trend is that the ice is shrinking a lot more than it's growing. Second, people actually go there and drill holes in the ice and check its thickness. All the scientific predictions seem to point to ice free summers up there in the not too distant future. Predictions vary quite a bit and nobody knows exactly when this might happen but some say it could be as soon as twenty years from now... and that hasn't happened for more than five thousand years.

Not everybody is all that upset about the ice going away. Shipping companies look forward to an ice free north and cheaper routes from Asia to Europe. While it's still not routine, one shipping company has managed to make the journey, battling the ice that's still there along the way. Remember that northwest passage we learned about in early American History? Someday there will probably be one that's regularly used.

Links:

Want to know how the arctic ice is doing right now? This is the place.

Curious about ice all over the world? This is the place.

NY Times article about the shipping company that made the NE passage.

The shipping company's story at their own web site.

Word of the Day

Cryosphere: All of the ice (aside from in people's freezers) on the planet.