In five years, you might be able to row to the North Pole in the summer. The Arctic climate such as we know it can be gone forever.
I 2007 the UN's climate pannel extimated that it would take 100 years for the arctic ice to melt. Calculations now show that the arctic ice can be gone as early as 2013 or 2040 at the latest.
The American, Wieslaw Maslowski has calculated that the area around the Arctis, the North Pole, will be free of ice in the summer already by the year 2013 - in five years. Professor Tore Furevik of the University of Bergen believes he is right.
"It is absolutely a realistic scenario," says professor Tore Furevik.
The area of ice in the Arctic is smaller than ever, and the thickness of the ice is drastically reduced. This means that the ice doesn't get time to built up again throughout the winter before the melting of the ice resumes in the spring. In this way, even more ice disappears the following spring.
But does it matter?
Well, so what?
The most important function of the ice on Mother Earth is to cool her down.
White snow reflects the sunrays and sends the warmth of the sun back. But the dark ocean attracts the warmth like a sponge.
When poles and glaciers melt, there is more ocean and less snow. The earth and the ocean get warmer and even more ice melts, like a spiral
"Will the ocean also rise as the North Pole melts?"
"The ocean will rise a maximum of half a metre the next hundred years, according to calculations the oceangraph, Harald Loeng of the Ocean Research Institute relies upon.
Winners and losers
There are therefore both positive and negative consequences of the rise in the ocean temperature," according to Loeng.
The Lofot cod is the winner, whilst seal and polar bears are the losers.
On the one side, you have the cod in the Barents Sea which will probably grow faster in warm water.
In the Irish Sea, a cod weights twice as much as one in the Barents Sea when it is four years old. The reason is the warmer water.
"The commercial varieties in the ocean will benefit by a temperature increase," says Loeng.
Ships are also more able to pass with an ice-free passage and a shorter way between Japan and the North Calotte. The ships can avoid the Suez canal. The oil trade gains better access to the resources along the Siberian coast.
The loser
"But when the Arctis is ice-free in the summer, seals and polar bears will have big problems," he says.
The seal gives birth to her young on the ice in the spring. When the ice is gone, the seal will have to float. In this way, the food source for polars bears disappears too.
Researchers have accepted that this will happen. But if it happens within 5 years, seals and polar bears will have big problems adapting in time.
"Sea mammals that live on the ice will be hit the hardest," says Loeng.
South Pole
An even worse omen however is that researchers see signs of the South Pole melting.
The South Pole contains 90 percent of all the world's ice.
The South Pole lies on firm land, contrary to the North Pole which is just floating ice on the ocean.
So far, the UN's climate pannel has reckoned that the ice in the South Pole is constant. But when Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg visited the Antarctic in January this year, Kim Holmén of the Norwegian Polar Institute could point to the melting of ice and open puddles in the ice on the world's coldest continent.
But judgement day is not looming. The level of the ocean will not be significantly affected for the next 200 years, according to analyses by The Norwegian Veritas and British Antarctic Survey.
This is why
So far, the gas, CO2 has been blamed for most things. It now transpires that soot from millions of diesel cars, oil and wook-burners, the burning of straw from industries and agrictulture is the chief reason for ice melting so quickly.
Researchers at the Norwegian Institute of Air Pollution and an American research group from the University of California have found the same thing in their air guages and seen it on satellite pictures: Big, black clouds of soot are sent north and south on wind currents, and the particles then fall down over the ice at the poles.
"The soot particles emmited by the Snow White plant outside Hammerfest, will affect the melting of the snow in the north," says professor Tore Furevik.
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