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Climate Change May Open Up the Northwest Passage

By voltagegate on September 17, 2007.

About a century and a half too late for John Franklin, I'm afraid.

The fact that the sea ice is melting in and around the NW Passage is not news; scientists have been following that progression for many years now, which according to this PR from ScienceDaily has been measured at a average rate of 100,000 square kilometers lost per year. The big news here is that the very latest results are in: the Passage has lost one million square kilometers of sea ice cover just last year. It is currently at its lowest level since the original satellite assessment in the 1970's.

According to a spokesman from the Danish National Space Centre:

The strong reduction in just one year certainly raises flags that the ice (in summer) may disappear much sooner than expected and that we urgently need to understand better the processes involved.

The folks who organized International Polar Year are listening. They have declared this September 21st an International Polar Day focusing on sea ice. They provide a huge list of links to educational information and current participating projects on their website. Also, the National Snow and Ice Data Center will be providing daily updates on the sea ice conditions up north in the first part of October this year.

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Climate
environment

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I can't pass up a chance to say something about John Rae - the guy who really ought to be talked about not the ill-fated and arrogant Franklin and his family. Rae never lost a team member, talked and learned from the Inuit and treated them as equals, used 10 people instead of 50, mapped and travelled 1000's of miles more than Franklin, discovered where Franklin had died, just to name a few things. Of course he was treated badly by the British establishment since he was not of the class like Franklin.