Melting Arctic Ice Worse Than Thought

Time reports, Melting Arctic Ice: What Satellite Images Don't See.

"Barber was aboard the Canadian research icebreaker Amundsen, checking on ice in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska and Western Canada. The ship was well inside a region the satellites said should be choked with thick, multiyear-old ice. 'That's pretty much a no-go zone for an icebreaker of the Amundsen's size,' says Barber. But the ship kept going, at a brisk 13 knots — its top speed in open water is 13.7 knots — and even when it finally reached thick ice, he says, 'we could still penetrate it easily.'

In short, as Barber and his colleagues explain in a recent paper in Geophysical Review Letters, the analysis of what the satellites were seeing was wrong. Some of what satellites identified as thick, melt-resistant multiyear ice turned out to be, in Barber's words, 'full of holes, like Swiss cheese. We haven't seen this sort of thing before.'"