As you know, and if you don’t NASA and others desperately want you to, Arctic ice is vanishing. Or if not it’s getting younger and thinner, which is good if you’re a person but bad if you’re an ice pack, evidently. So if you were, oh, say, the captain of a ship attempting to squeeze in another voyage or two on Russia’s Northern Sea Route despite the dangerous growing presence of a bunch of hard cold white stuff in the water closing the passage well ahead of schedule, be assured, it can’t be ice. It just looks like it.
The piece about the closing passage comes from gCaptain. And yes, one great thing about the Internet or at least one noteworthy thing is that there’s a publication for everyone including this one that boasts of “Maritime and offshore news trusted by our 110,466 members delivered daily straight to your inbox” not to mention “vibrant discussions”. And actual news for people who need to know if there’s open water not speculation by journalists who don’t depend on it writing for people who won’t get within 2,000 kilometers of it. Such as that one reason it’s coming back fast is that:
“Unlike the last couple of summers when Russia’s Arctic coastal waterways were fully clear of sea ice, residual winter ice persisted in the eastern section this year. This has resulted in the early onset of ice formation especially in the Laptev, East Siberian, and Chukchi Seas.”
As vanishing acts go, this one’s not ready for Broadway, now is it? Although we do appreciate the razzle-dazzle in people insisting that, just as warming causes cooling, so more ice can be proof of less ice.
Still, one swallow does not make a summer nor one icefield a winter. But the piece adds that:
“This year’s early shutdown comes three years after narrowly avoiding a major incident three years ago. In October 2021 Russian authorities reacted too late to begin closing down the NSR as winter sea ice drifted into the main shipping channel and trapped two dozen vessels for more than a month. A 30 centimeter or one foot thick ice layer had formed by the end of October across hundreds of miles of Arctic Ocean.”
Mind you to a person with an ice hammer they all look like fiery nails. So CTV duly reports that:
“A Canadian warship on its first-ever Arctic patrol encountered a Chinese polar research vessel in the Bering Strait off Alaska earlier this month, as the Department of National Defence says global competitors are increasingly probing Canadian infrastructure and gathering intelligence in a warming Arctic.”
They’d better hurry before all that warming shuts down the channels with the white stuff. Even if Canada’s Department of National Defence insists that “Our Arctic is now warming at about four times the global average” because you’re not even slightly cool unless climate is ravaging you these days.
We can add the Arctic Ocean to the long list of places that are warming faster than the global average. It seems to be happening everywhere.
Very well written! Very entertaining as well. In Ely MN there is a family who operates a Boundary Waters canoe trip business, they are also climate zealots who paid Al Gore to visit Ely some years ago. This family set up a summer expedition to the North Coast of Greenland to document the extent of ice melting and the extreme warmth causing it, less than 5 days into the expedition they had to be rescued because they were freezing to death and trapped by ice! Faith is not a principal that should be present in such situations, data is far more important!
And Thomas,we remember a few years ago when that climate expedition sailed to Antarctica to investigate melting ice and disappearing ice.And guess what?They were stuck in unexpected thickness of ice,and had to be rescued!Irony,much?
Drink some more
One swallow may not a summer make, but an ocean frozen does pretty well define winter…