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andygatesDavid 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!
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Date: 2009-10-29 11:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 09:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-30 02:20 pm (UTC)Make for some good surf and good powder over the Alps? Sorry about the bear though.
Oil's where it's at. Loads of the stuff still to be found. Peak oil my arse.
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Date: 2009-10-30 02:54 pm (UTC)Alps? I was thinking Cairngorms.