Huge hole discovered in Arctic's 'last ice'
By Stephanie Pappas about 7 hours ago
The polynya, or gap in the ice, is a bad sign.
A polynya grows in the Last Ice Area above Canada’s Ellesmere Island. The gap in the ice was open for around two weeks in May 2020 due to strong, anticyclonic winds in the Arctic. (Image credit: NASA EOSDIS Worldview )
A huge hole opened in the Arctic's oldest, thickest ice in May 2020, a new study revealed. Scientists previously thought that this area of ice was the Arctic's most stable, but the giant rift signals that the ancient ice is vulnerable to melt.
The polynya, or area of open water, is the first ever observed north of Ellesmere Island. But in their report on the hole in the ice, published in August in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, researchers deduced from old satellite data that similar polynyas may have opened in 1988 and 2004.
"North of Ellesmere Island it's hard to move the ice around or melt it just because it's thick, and there's quite a bit of it," study lead author Kent Moore, an Arctic researcher at the University of Toronto-Mississauga, said in a statement. "So, we generally haven't seen polynyas form in that region before.
A changing Arctic
The sea ice off the northern coast of Ellesmere Island is typically more than 13 feet (4 meters) thick and has an average age of 5 years. But this "last ice" of the Arctic is proving vulnerable to the rapid warming that's occurring in the northern latitudes. In summer 2020, the Wandel Sea, or the eastern reaches of the "last ice" region, lost half of its overlying ice, a July 2021 study found. Another 2021 study showed that the ice arches that connect the stable sea ice to Greenland are forming later and melting faster each year.
More:
https://www.livescience.com/rift-arctic-oldest-ice.html?utm_source=notification
= new reply since forum marked as read
How about some great big coal-fueled airplanes?
Maybe they could drop coal-bombs on renewable energy states.
be fear of melting ice? Or the effects of the full moon tomorrow? We may never know.
to all...
