Arctic sea ice is on pace for a record-setting retreat this summer, which would be the sixth straight year for a major meltdown far in excess of the historical average.
The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), the leading monitor of the state of the Arctic Ocean’s ice cover, has released new data showing the still-frozen portion of the polar sea has shrunk to an end-of-June low of about 10 million square kilometres.
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Last year, reporting on what may have been an ecological first since the end of the last Ice Age some 10,000 years ago, a team of Danish and American scientists documented how bowhead whales from the separate Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Ocean populations had crossed paths in the Canadian Arctic.
The researchers described the phenomenon as one of the clearest signs yet that reduced ice cover in the Northwest Passage is opening a long-closed corridor and re-connecting two of the Northern Hemisphere’s biological solitudes.
I’m not a committed believer in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, in fact I incline towards skepticism; but as I’ve said before, something is happening, even if it’s not clear what or why.
