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Reassuring Picture from Arctic Ice Scan
An electromagnetic “bird” dispatched to the Arctic for the most detailed look yet at the thickness of the ice has turned up a reassuring picture.
The meltdown has not been as dire as some would suggest, said geophysicist Christian Haas of the University of Alberta. His international team flew across the top of the planet last year for the 2,412-kilometre survey.
They found large expanses of ice four to five metres thick, despite the record retreat in 2007.
“This is a nice demonstration that there is still hope for the ice,” said Haas.
The survey, which demonstrated that the “bird” probe tethered to a plane can measure ice thickness over large areas, uncovered plenty of resilient “old” ice from Norway to the North Pole to Alaska in April 2009.
The thickness had “changed little since 2007, and remained within the expected range of natural variability,” the team reports in the Geophysical Research Letters.
Read more in the Ottawa Citizen: Scan of Arctic ice dispels melting gloom: Researcher
Synoptic airborne thickness surveys reveal state of Arctic sea ice cover
Christian Haas
Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Stefan Hendricks
Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany
Hajo Eicken
Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, Alaska, USA
Andreas Herber
Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany
While summer Arctic sea‐ice extent has decreased over the past three decades, it is subject to large interannual and regional variations. Methodological challenges in measuring ice thickness continue to hamper our understanding of the response of the ice‐thickness distribution to recent change, limiting the ability to forecast sea‐ice change over the next decade. We present results from a 2400 km long pan‐Arctic airborne electromagnetic (EM) ice thickness survey in April 2009, the first‐ever large‐scale EM thickness dataset obtained by fixed‐wing aircraft over key regions of old ice in the Arctic Ocean between Svalbard and Alaska. The data provide detailed insight into ice thickness distributions characteristic for the different regions. Comparison with previous EM surveys shows that modal thicknesses of old ice had changed little since 2007, and remained within the expected range of natural variability.
Citation: Haas , C., S. Hendricks, H. Eicken, and A. Herber (2010), Synoptic airborne thickness surveys reveal state of Arctic sea ice cover, Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L09501, doi:10.1029/2010GL042652.