Breaking News

The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E), a high-resolution passive microwave Instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite shows the state of Arctic sea ice on September 10 in this image released September 16, 2008.

OTTAWA (Reuters) – The Arctic is warming up so quickly that the region’s sea ice cover in summer could vanish as early as 2013, decades earlier than some had predicted, a leading polar expert said on Thursday.

Warwick Vincent, director of the Center for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec, said recent data on the ice cover “appear to be tracking the most pessimistic of the models”, which call for an ice free summer in 2013.

The year “2013 is starting to look as though it is a lot more reasonable as a prediction. But each year we’ve been wrong — each year we’re finding that it’s a little bit faster than expected,” he told Reuters.

The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world and the sea ice cover shrank to a record low in 2007 before growing slightly in 2008.

In 2004 a major international panel forecast the cover could vanish by 2100. Last December, some experts said the summer ice could go in the next 10 or 20 years.

If the ice cover disappears, it could have major consequences. Shipping companies are already musing about short cuts through the Arctic, which also contains enormous reserves of oil and natural gas.

Vincent’s scientific team has spent the last 10 summers on Ward Hunt Island, a remote spot some 2,500 miles northwest of Ottawa.

“I was astounded as to how fast the changes are taking place. The extent of open water is something that we haven’t experienced in the 10 years that I’ve been working up there,” he said after making a presentation in the Canadian Parliament.

“We’re losing, irreversibly, major features of the Canadian ice scape and that suggests that these more pessimistic models are really much closer to reality.”

In 2008 the maximum summer temperature on Ward Hunt hit 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to the usual 5 degrees. Last summer alone the five ice shelves along Ellesmere Island in Canada’s Far North, which are more than 4,000 years old, shrunk by 23 percent.

Vincent told Reuters last September that it was clear some of the damage would be permanent and that the warming in the Arctic was a sign of what the rest of the world could expect. He struck a similarly gloomy note in his presentation.

“Some of this is unstoppable. We’re in a train of events at the moment where there are changes taking place that we are unable to reverse, the loss of these ice shelves, for example,” he said.

“But what we can do is slow down this process and we have to slow down this process because we need to buy more time. We simply don’t have the technologies as a civilization to deal with this level of instability that is ahead of us.”

NASA launches a rocket from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base on Tuesday.

(CNN) — A NASA satellite crashed back to Earth about three minutes after launch early Tuesday, officials said. “We could not make orbit,” NASA program manager John Brunschwyler said. “Initial indications are the vehicle did not have enough [force] to reach orbit and landed just short of Antarctica in the ocean.”

“Certainly for the science community, it’s a huge disappointment.”

The satellite, which would have monitored greenhouse gases to study how they affect the Earth’s climate, was launched on a Taurus XL rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 1:55 a.m. PT (4:55 a.m. ET).

But the payload fairing — a clamshell-shaped structure that allows the satellite to travel through space — failed to separate from the rocket, NASA officials said.  The weight of the fairing caused the rocket and the satellite to come crashing down to Earth about three minutes later. A team of investigators will look into what caused the payload fairing to fail to separate.

“We’ll get back to flying at a pace that allows us to do so successfully,” said Chuck Dovale, NASA Launch Director, at a press briefing after the failed launch.

The $273 million satellite, called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, would have collected global measurements of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere to help better forecast changes in carbon-dioxide levels and their effect on the Earth’s climate.

Carbon dioxide is considered a greenhouse gas because it traps heat, which scientists believe contributes to the warming of the planet. Carbon dioxide also absorbs wavelengths of light, and the NASA observatory would have measured levels of the gas partly by using instruments to analyze light reflected off the Earth.
advertisement

The OCO also would have provided information about CO2 “sinks” — areas, like oceans or landfills, that absorb and store carbon dioxide. NASA officials said all measurements would be combined with the findings of ground observation stations, providing a more complete account of the human and natural sources of CO2.

The OCO project took eight years to develop, said Michael Frelich, director of the NASA Earth Science Division. Its failure is a great loss for the science community, he said.

A New Zealand frigate patrols past the Ross Ice Shelf in the Southern Ocean in Antarctica.

Professor David Vaughan has an infectious enthusiasm, even when he’s issuing dire warnings about the future of Antarctica. That’s where he is right now, at the Rothera Research Station. He’s just returned from a flight to the Wilkins Ice Shelf – which juts out of the western tip of the Continent. It will probably be his last.

An Englishman whose home is among the dreaming spires of Cambridge, where the British Antarctic Survey has its headquarters, Professor Vaughan has been visiting the world’s coldest places for twenty years. He was surprised to find that the Wilkins Ice Shelf, which began disintegrating a decade ago, hasn’t yet disappeared. But he says it’s in its death throes.

Last year, AC360° reported the Survey’s finding that a slice the size of Manhattan had broken off the ice shelf. Vaughan says the whole shelf is now connected to the rest of Antarctica by a strip of ice just a few hundred meters wide. It’s like looking at an hour glass. This huge slab of ice –11,000 square kilometres (the size of Jamaica) – is about to collapse into the sea. Maybe within weeks, maybe later in the year, says Vaughan.

In the last year, a sequence of images taken by NASA and the European Space Agency has shown fissures opening up – like fault-lines across the ice. I asked Vaughan what they looked like – close-up. “Huge, absolutely huge,” he says. “The cracks in the Wilkins ice shelf and the chunks of ice that are splitting away from the ice-shelf….they’re kind of shopping mall chunks of ice and some are floating off into the ocean.”

In what could irreparably change our global map, the WILKINS ICE SHELF in, Antarctica is about to collapse. Holding on by a sliver of ice, it could be the latest casualty of Global Warming.

Scientists have a clearer view than even a few years ago about the rate of climate change in the Antarctic Peninsula, which stretches north like a thin finger into the south Atlantic. In the last fifty years, average temperatures there have risen more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit – faster than anywhere else in the southern hemisphere. Vaughan says the evidence is now “quite strong” that emissions of greenhouse gases have influenced the Antarctic climate, just as CFCs (Chlorofluorocarbons) have damaged the ozone layer. The process may have been further accelerated by the warming of the sea – gently cooking the underside of the ice-shelf.  Wilkins is not the first to collapse. “It s about the ninth in the series that s been lost,” says Vaughan…”and at least one of those ice shelves that’s been lost had been there continuously for 10,000 years.”

The collapse of the ice shelves does not in itself much influence sea-levels, but many of them play an important role in holding back the huge Antarctic glaciers. Were they to accelerate toward the ocean, melting on contact, there would be an impact on sea levels. Vaughan has a scientist’s caution in peering into the future. “ The big ice sheets – Greenland and Antarctica – are now the major sources of uncertainty in predicting sea level rise in the future. What’s happening on Wilkins and deeper in the Antarctic continent are major concerns for us.”

A new study published in ‘Nature’ magazine suggests that other parts of Antarctic – far from the Wilkins Ice Shelf – have also been warming, though less fast. U.S. scientists reviewed a half century of satellite and weather records for Antarctica, which showed that temperatures had risen by nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit. The study concluded the process was “difficult to explain” without linking it to greenhouse gases.

Vaughan is a member of the United Nations Panel on Climate Change which predicted that sea levels could rise anywhere between 18 and 59 centimetres (7 to 23 inches) over the next century. Now, as he contemplates the gradually warming Antarctic summer, he wonders whether that assessment was too conservative.