In 1817, nearly a century before Roald Amundsen first navigated the long-sought Northwest Passage, the Royal Society in London got word of "new sources of warmth" in the Arctic. The society was the Victorian-era equivalent of NASA, and its president reacted with great enthusiasm to the sudden prospect of discoveries "not only interesting to the advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations."
Times change, as does the climate. New sources of warmth are no longer greeted with such good cheer. Last year's "record" melt of sea ice in the Arctic caused a flood of reporting on the growing threat from global warming. The statistic most tossed about put the area of open water in the Arctic at "six Californias" more than the summer average. The media coverage was mostly characterized by a deep anxiety about the fate of the polar bear. Little prospect for intercourse was seen in its future.
Then came the Arctic winter of 2007-08, described as "colder than average" by NASA researchers in a recent teleconference. The ice recovered remarkably quickly and by March, when it reached its annual maximum, had exceeded the three year average by some 4 percent.
Despite this unusually cold weather, scientists at NASA and elsewhere remain concerned about the state of the Arctic. They point to the loss of multiyear ice, which makes up the thickest sections of the icecap and is therefore more likely to survive the summer melt. Multiyear ice now represents less than
30 percent of overall ice cover, down from as much as 80 percent in the 1980s. They also point to the long-term trend, though long-term may be a misnomer. Reliable records on arctic ice go back only to 1979, when satellites first started to survey the poles. As Richard Lindzen, a prominent global warming skeptic and a professor at MIT, puts it, "this is a primitive field where nobody has much idea of anything."
Still, based on this short record, some scientists predict the Arctic may see ice-free summers as early as 2013. Julienne Stroeve, a researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) who briefed Al Gore on the subject last fall, said she "wouldn't be surprised if that were to happen." Joey Comison, senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, is more cautious, saying only that the Arctic would lose its summer ice cover "within the century." Ignatius G. Rigor, who last year authored a NASA-led study on sea-ice decline, is reluctant to offer any forecast, though he does expect this summer's melt to break last year's record.
Suffice it to say that not everyone agrees the end of the summer sea ice is nigh, but it is the prevailing view. The NSIDC's official projection has the Arctic ice-free in the summer months starting in 2030, and according to Stroeve, there is no way to reverse the process. "I think we are going to lose it," she says.
Which to any layman will raise an obvious question: So what?
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