LOL
Global Warming Has Now Made the Northwest Passage a Thing
More than a century ago, explorers dreamed of a Northwest Passage, a route from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic by plying the waterways north of Canada, threading through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, huge icy islands north of the Canadian mainland.* Such a trip was fantastically dangerous and well-nigh impossible, since in the winter and even most of the summer, the waterways were either frozen solid or littered with huge blocks of ice.
Phil Plait
PHIL PLAIT
Phil Plait writes Slate’s Bad Astronomy blog and is an astronomer, public speaker, science evangelizer, and author of Death From the Skies!
Roald Amundsen was the first to successfully make his way through. It took him three years in a small ship starting in 1903, and included getting stuck in ice three times.
Fast-forward. On Aug. 16—just days ago—a 250-meter-long, 1,070 passenger cruise ship, the Crystal Serenity, set sail, and is expected to make its way through the Northwest Passage in just eight days.
How can it do so? Global warming.
Over the past few years, the Arctic has warmed so much that the fabled passage has become a reality. The ice melts so much in the summer that it’s not only possible for ships to make their way through the archipelago, but it may be commercially viable to do so.
To be clear, quite a few ships have made the passage since 2007, the first year the ice had melted enough to make it far easier to cross. But it’s been a struggle, and bigger ships have a more difficult time. On average, every year it gets easier as the ice melts away due to the increased heat in the Earth’s northern regions.
Deniers of global warming will make sidetracking claims, talking about how Antarctic ice is increasing (it isn’t), or other non sequiturs (note: In a massive irony, even the fossil fuel companies funding so much climate change denial accept that the Arctic is melting, and are scrambling for rights to drill for oil there). The reality is that the Arctic is warming at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the planet—temperatures in the Arctic have been more than seven degrees Celsius higher than average—and the ice up there is melting so fast that it’s been called a “death spiral.”
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astr...easier_access_to_the_no rthwest_passage.html
