Advertisements
Polar ice cap melting away in 2008 ?
How low will they go? Putting a date on the melting of the Arctic ice cap has been a popular prediction game among scientists of late; in recent months, we’ve heard estimates ranging from 2030 to as early as 2013.
The latest salvo comes courtesy of Xinhua, which reports that Olav Orheim, the head of the Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat, is placing his money on this summer. Noting that its ice sheet had reached a historical low of 3m sq. km last summer – it covered around 7.5m sq. km as recently as 2000 – Orheim told Xinhua that “if Norway’s average temperature this year equals that in 2007, the ice cap in the Arctic will all melt away.”
Advertisements