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David Barber, Manitoba Uni's big frosty boffin, went out looking for multiyear ice, and instead just found rotten, half-metre thick one-year stuff that an ice-capable ship can apparently crank through at thirteen knots. This is navigable. Forget the Northwest Passage, just ice-belt your boat and go for it, chew out a frasilicious sea-lane and make your millions.
1: Investment niche! It's the coming growth area for shipping. It'll take a while for ice-happy oil rigs to get ROI but shipping's faster. Go go gadget exploitation machine. Ah well, it'll be good for Iceland.
2: This is another pile of scary to add to the pile of scary. The exact pattern of melt each year is determined by weather - wind, for example, can pile ice up against land (slowing melt) or push it through straits into the open ocean (accelerating it). In a melty year, though, the single-year ice goes away almost entirely. In a non-warming Arctic some single-year ice persists and is built up; in the warming Arctic (3x global average, as both observed and modeled) it seems to have reached a critical tipping point. This observation correlates well with Pen Haddow's hike'o'hell. Massive Arctic summer melt now looks a lot like a dice-roll for weather each summer.
3: That single-year stuff is crap for polar bears. I has a sad.
I wonder what Northern Hemisphere weather is going to do with all that extra dark absorbing surface and all that extra humidity? Place bets now!
1: Investment niche! It's the coming growth area for shipping. It'll take a while for ice-happy oil rigs to get ROI but shipping's faster. Go go gadget exploitation machine. Ah well, it'll be good for Iceland.
2: This is another pile of scary to add to the pile of scary. The exact pattern of melt each year is determined by weather - wind, for example, can pile ice up against land (slowing melt) or push it through straits into the open ocean (accelerating it). In a melty year, though, the single-year ice goes away almost entirely. In a non-warming Arctic some single-year ice persists and is built up; in the warming Arctic (3x global average, as both observed and modeled) it seems to have reached a critical tipping point. This observation correlates well with Pen Haddow's hike'o'hell. Massive Arctic summer melt now looks a lot like a dice-roll for weather each summer.
3: That single-year stuff is crap for polar bears. I has a sad.
I wonder what Northern Hemisphere weather is going to do with all that extra dark absorbing surface and all that extra humidity? Place bets now!
