Ice Free Arctic Sea by 2015

In an email to The Guardian newspaper, a Cambridge professor and Arctic ice expert, Prof. Peter Wadhams said the final collapse of Arctic sea ice in summer will occur within four years. The "global disaster" is now developing as the sea ice shrinks to new lows with each melting cycle. He first predicted the collapse of summer sea ice in 2007 when the previous record reached 4.7km² This year the ice extent has dropped unexpectedly to less than 3.5km². Ice thickness records from submarines passing beneath the ice sheet at first suggested the summer ice might last fifty more years, but the summer melting rate has overtaken winter ice formation. The Arctic Sea will be ice free in the summer months of August to September by 2015-16. While an ice-free Arctic for two months will aid shipping and resource exploration, the acceleration of global warming is serious. Not only will the sea water temperature rise, but continental margins composed of permafrost will melt releasing tons of trapped methane which traps much more solar radiation than CO₂ Wadhams says the world must urgently consider new ways to reduce global warming including various climatic engineering schemes such as cloud seeding. In another Arctic development, Shell Oil announced it is curtailing its plan to start exploratory drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. The company got off to a slow start this year and experienced considerable opposition from environmentalists who criticized the attempt when the company could not demonstrate it was capable of responding to an major oil spill in harsh Arctic conditions.  In fact, the latest operational mishap for Shell was the damaging of a dome intended to contain an oil spill.  They will be back.