Pen Hadow Team Surprised By Lack Of Thick, Multi-Year Ice In Trek Across Arctic Basin - Reuters

[hatrack]

OTTAWA - The head of a British team walking to the North Pole on a mission to gauge how fast Arctic ice sheets are melting said on Friday he was surprised by how little permanent ice he had found so far. Pen Hadow and two other adventurers set off in early March on a 1,000-km (620-mile) trek from Canada's Arctic to the North Pole. The team was set down in an area where scientists had been sure there would be permanent multiyear ice.

But so far, the average depth of the ice has been just under 1.8 metres (6 feet), suggesting they are finding predominantly new first-year ice that is likely to melt in summer months.

"My surprise is guided by the scientific community's expectations of what the ice should be here," Hadow told Reuters via satellite phone from about 620 km from the North Pole. "In the opening section of the (journey), most would have anticipated multiyear ice, ice certainly more than 2 metres and really more than 3.5 metres thick." The team said in a statement that the findings pointed to an ever-smaller summer ice covering around the Pole this year.

EDIT

Hadow, saying he did not know what had caused the ice to be so thin, said possible reasons included warmer air and ocean temperatures as well as stronger winds that were blowing the ice out of position. He also found that the snow cover on top of the ice was much thinner than the 35 cm (14 inches) he had expected. "Thinner ice has less snow on it so the two measures support each other. It's not as though we have some weird anomaly going on," he said.

EDIT

http://planetark.org/enviro-news/item/52513

[Nihil]

1. "But so far, the average depth of the ice has been just under 1.8 metres (6 feet)"

K&R for :scared: