This extraordinary picture from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has many scientists worried as the latest sign of climate change. These are estimated 35,000 pacific walrus ashore on a beach in north-west Alaska. As mammals, walrus cannot swim indefinitely so they use their tusks to “haul out,” or pull themselves onto an ice floe or rocks. However, the loss of sea ice has left them effectively stranded.
The photo was taken five miles north of Point Lay, an Inupiat Eskimo village 300 miles southwest of Barrow and 700 miles northwest of Anchorage. It was taken on September 27th as researchers traced walrus. Female walrus give birth on sea ice and use ice as a diving platform to reach snails, clams and worms on the shallow continental shelf.
As temperatures warm in summer, the edge of the sea ice recedes north. Females and their offspring ride the edge of the sea ice into the Chukchi Sea. However, sea ice has receded now beyond shallow continental shelf waters and into Arctic Ocean water. The problem is that depths at that location exceeds two miles — a depth that walrus cannot dive to the bottom.
The World Wildlife Fund’s head of Arctic programs Margaret Williams says that the gathering show extreme environmental changes occurring wit the loss of sea ice. The comparison is with the plight of polar bears in the changing Arctic.
Source: Independent
I’ve been waiting for a Paul McCartney joke. Very disappointing.
Max, LOL!
Does Vince McMahon still head the WWF?
Fear sells ad space on TV. Fear sells to get votes. Fear is a great motivator, but being a negative emotion, it is short lived and eventually implodes. Same w/ hate. We have a hater imploding here before our eyes.
Fiver
Sarah Palin would have seen them coming from her front porch… Don’tcha know (wink)!
Not just the Aral Sea. California Lakes as well.
http://www.vox.com/2014/8/27/6074221/california-drought-lake-oroville-before-after-photos
Apparently those “Soviet” engineers have a long reach.
Joe Blow
Yes Dredd you are right but there was much less in 1987 when three U S Navy Submarines where able to surface at the North Pole …
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If ice extent (sq. miles) has nothing to do with volume (cubic miles) how can you say there was less or more by it?
We have a satellite orbiting the poles with one and only one mission … to measure ice volume:
(How Fifth Graders Calculate Ice Volume – 4).
Bunny,
I’m not the one “late to the party”…
@ Max-1
Wrong thread. You are late to the party 🙂 We discussed the Aral Sea in this post.
http://jonathanturley.org/2014/10/01/the-quiet-chernobyl-nasa-releases-shocking-pictures-of-the-loss-of-the-aral-sea/
The loss of the Aral Sea is due to diversion of the water by Soviet engineers.
Joe Blow
As early as 1959 …
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Industrial civilization which was built upon the Industrial Revolution began two hundred years before that circa 1750.
So, that date, 1959, was two centuries into the pollution of the atmosphere with green house gases.
These developments are cumulative.
Just since 1970 half of the vertibrates have been murdered (link above to Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch).
https://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/517493091151122433
For example, one crew member aboard the USS Skate which surfaced at the North Pole in 1959 and numerous other locations during Arctic cruises in 1958 and 1959 said: [5]
“the Skate found open water both in the summer and following winter. We surfaced near the North Pole in the winter through thin ice less than 2 feet thick. The ice moves from Alaska to Iceland and the wind and tides causes open water as the ice breaks up. The Ice at the polar ice cap is an average of 6-8 feet thick, but with the wind and tides the ice will crack and open into large polynyas (areas of open water), these areas will refreeze over with thin ice. We had sonar equipment that would find these open or thin areas to come up through, thus limiting any damage to the submarine. The ice would also close in and cover these areas crushing together making large ice ridges both above and below the water. We came up through a very large opening in 1958 that was 1/2 mile long and 200 yards wide. The wind came up and closed the opening within 2 hours. On both trips we were able to find open water. We were not able to surface through ice thicker than 3 feet.”
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/uss-skate-open-water.jpg
Humans are almost 50 for 50.
50% of wildlife gone in not 50 years but… 40!
Earth has lost half of its wildlife in the past 40 years, says WWF
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/29/earth-lost-50-wildlife-in-40-years-wwf
Max-1 – so the WWF surveyed all animals on the planet? Really???? You know they found a bunch of new species this year?
Knickers,
“… Climate science is only about 100 years old.”
Not the one adult climate scientists use (The Exceptional American Denial).
“The existence of the greenhouse effect was argued for by Joseph Fourier in 1824. The argument and the evidence was further strengthened by Claude Pouillet in 1827 and 1838, and reasoned from experimental observations by John Tyndall in 1859, and more fully quantified by Svante Arrhenius in 1896.
In 1917 Alexander Graham Bell wrote “[The unchecked burning of fossil fuels] would have a sort of greenhouse effect”, and “The net result is the greenhouse becomes a sort of hot-house.” Bell went on to also advocate for the use of alternate energy sources, such as solar energy.” (Wikipeida, “Greenhouse Effect”).
As early as 1959, the first US submarine to surface at the North Pole, the USS Skate, did so in late March, and surfaced at 10 other locations during the same cruise, each time finding leads of open water or very thin ice from which to do so. It did a similar cruise a year earlier in August 1958, again finding numerous open leads within which to surface. Here is a photo of the Skate during one of its surfacings in 1959. As can be seen in all three photos, the flat new ice is scarcely different between 1959 and 1999, while the 1987 photo shows the extent to which open water can occur.
http://www.john-daly.com/polar/skate.jpg
Dredd
It’s supposed to be “head shoulders fingers and toes”… Right?
Yes Dredd you are right but there was much less in 1987 when three U S Navy Submarines where able to surface at the North Pole
http://www.john-daly.com/NP1987.jpg
Why Arctic sea ice will vanish in 2013
By Paul Beckwith
On March 23, 2013, I made the following prediction:
“For the record—I do not think that any sea ice will survive this summer. An event unprecedented in human history is today, this very moment, transpiring in the Arctic Ocean.
The cracks in the sea ice that I reported in my Sierra blog and elsewhere have spread. Worse news is at this very moment the entire sea ice sheet (or about 99 percent of it) covering the Arctic Ocean is on the move (clockwise), and the thin, weakened icecap has literally begun to tear apart.
This is abrupt climate change in real-time.
Humans have benefited greatly from a stable climate for the last 11,000 years (roughly 400 human generations). Not anymore. We now face an angry climate — one that we have poked in the eye with our fossil fuel stick — and have to deal with the consequences.
We must set aside our differences and prepare for what we can no longer avoid: massive disruption to our civilization.”
http://www.sierraclub.ca/en/AdultDiscussionPlease?fb_action_ids=633465710015337&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582
Joe Blow
Arctic Sea Ice third highest in the 10 year mean.
Not Ice free as predicted
…
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Fail 5th grade?
That is ice extent (sq. km. or sq. miles) which has nothing to do with ice volume (quantity, cubic km. or cubic miles) doncha know (How Fifth Graders Calculate Ice Volume – 5).