2,000 pound Walrus being supported by three inches of rotten ice
Expert Says Arctic Ocean Will Soon Be an Open Sea – New York Times, 1969
The thick ice that has for ages covered the Arctic Ocean at the pole has turned to water, recent visitors there reported yesterday. At least for the time being, an ice-free patch of ocean about a mile wide has opened at the very top of the world, something that has presumably never before been seen by humans and is more evidence that global warming may be real and already affecting climate. The last time scientists can be certain the pole was awash in water was more than 50 million years ago. – New York Times, 2000
“The reason so much (of the Arctic ice) went suddenly is that it is hitting a tipping point that we have been warning about for the past few years.” James Hansen, 2007
The Arctic Ocean could be free of ice in the summer as soon as 2010 or 2015 – something that hasn’t happened for more than a million years, according to a leading polar researcher. – Louis Fortier, 2007
Arctic summers ice-free ‘by 2013’ – Wieslaw Maslowski, 2007
The polar cap in the Arctic may well disappear this summer due to the global warming, Dr. Olav Orheim, head of the Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat, said on Friday. Olav Orheim, 2008
“There is this thin first-year ice even at the North Pole at the moment,” says Serreze. “This raises the spectre – the possibility that you could become ice free at the North Pole this year.” – Mark Sereeze, 2008
POLAR ice is melting faster than previously believed and could have reached a “tipping point” beyond which it may not be able to recover, a report warns today. – WWF, 2008
The North Pole becomes an ‘island’ for the first time in history – Mark Serreze, 2008
Barber says an ice-free summer may be just three or four years away, when icebreakers will no longer be needed to navigate the region. “The ice pack looks like Swiss cheese,” agreed Mark Serreze, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado. – Barber and Serreze, 2010
Antarctic Ice Sheet Is Melting Rapidly – Juliet Eilperin, 2006
…if you lose the summer sea ice, there are phenomena that could lead you not so very long thereafter to lose the winter sea ice as well. And if you lose that sea ice year round, it’s going to mean drastic climatic change all over the hemisphere. – John Holdren, 2010