‘Rotten’ Arctic sea ice duping satellites, multi-year ice virtually gone: expert
One of Canada’s top northern researchers says the permanent Arctic sea ice that is home to the world’s polar bears and usually survives the summer has all but disappeared.
Experts around the world believed the ice was recovering because satellite images showed it expanding.
But David Barber says the thick, multi-year frozen sheets crucial to the northern ecosystem have been replaced by thin “rotten” ice which can’t support the weight of the bears.
“It caught us all by surprise because we were expecting there to be multi-year sea ice - the whole world thought it was multi-year sea ice,” said Barber, who just returned from an expedition to the Beaufort Sea.
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