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Arctic sea ice disappearing: scientist

First-hand evidence gleaned during annual tour

By: Aldo Santin

Posted: 11/28/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

The cold hard facts of the polar meltdown are in, according to a leading researcher from Manitoba, who says it is high time we recognize the way climate change is dramatically altering the Arctic.

Arctic ice expert Dave Barber said first-hand evidence shows Arctic sea ice is disappearing, contrary to what scientists had believed was happening over the past three years.

"It's quite a remarkable difference when you expect to see (ice) that is six metres thick and you find stuff that's less than a metre thick," said Barber, a University of Manitoba professor of environment and geography and a world-acknowledged Arctic sea ice expert.

Barber spent the month of September on his annual tour of the Arctic basin aboard the research vessel Amundsen and his findings have been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal of the American Geophysical Union, the Geophysical Research Letters.

"I think it's important... what this means to us as a society on the planet and what we're going to do with trying to grapple with ... climate change."

Barber said some people were taking comfort from false information gleamed from satellite images that appeared to show Arctic sea ice had been expanding.

But Barber said the satellite imaging technology was actually recording thin, slush ice.

"We thought it (the Arctic sea ice) was recovering and this was a positive thing," Barber said of the commonly-held scientific view. "We found the satellites were mis-classifying the ice that was there.

"We found very little, true multi-year ice at all and it was all this rotten slush ice that we were driving our ship through."

Barber has been conducting research in the Arctic every year since 1981. His findings took him by surprise.

"This is not something we were expecting at all. It was a total surprise to everybody who works in the Arctic -- what does the ice actually look like."

The new findings have implications for development in the Arctic and the ongoing debate over climate change, he said.

"The multi-year sea ice covered the entire Arctic basin in the summer and it did that for the last million years, so the ecosystem that takes advantage of all that ice has been affected by this."

Multi-year ice is a deterrent to ship navigation through the Arctic but this new, slush ice isn't, he said. "The potential for shipping in the Arctic continues to increase and that has many ramifications for marine vessel traffic in the area and development of resources that are there."

Decision-makers in government and industry need to realize that the ice is disappearing and base their decisions on that reality, he said.

"If you don't fully understand what's going on, you can make some wrong decisions."

Barber said the new findings will undermine the climate change sceptics who told him that the satellite images of the Arctic over the past three years were proof the planet was cooling off.

"The evidence from our field project this year is absolutely contradictory to that," he said. "The research we are doing is showing with hard evidence that the rate of reduction of the multi-year sea ice is increasing in speed, not decreasing, and we should all be concerned about that."

�Äaldo.santin@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 28, 2009 C19

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