Richard Morgan
Toolik Field Station (Alaska):

As Anne Giblin was lugging fourfoot tubes of Arctic lakebed mud from her inflatable raft to her nearby lab this summer, she said,

For 1st Time In Human History, Arctic Ice Cap Can Be Circumnavigated

London: It

Lucknow resident Dhruv S, who had recently won the title of

Arctic sea ice shrank to its second-lowest level ever, US scientists said on Wednesday, with particular melting in the Chukchi Sea, where polar bears were recently seen swimming far off the Alaskan coast.

This year's Arctic ice melt could surpass the extraordinary 2007 record low in the coming weeks. Last year's minimum ice level was reached on Sept. 16, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Paris: Climate change could release unexpectedly huge stores of carbon dioxide from Arctic soils, which would in turn fuel a vicious circle of global warming, a new study warned on Sunday.

And according to one commentary, current models of climate change have not taken this extra source of greenhouse gas into account. Scientists have long known that organic carbon trapped inside a blanket of frozen permafrost covering one fifth of the world's land mass would, if thawed, release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The meltdown in the Arctic is speeding up and as a result the North Pole could be ice-free by 2013 instead of in 60 years' time as earlier predicted, scientists have warned.

Their apprehensions are based on computer studies of satellite images that reveal that ice at North Pole melted at an unprecedented rate last week, the disappearance is said to have exceeded the record loss of more than a million square kilometres in 2007 as global warming tightened its grip.

Two chunks of ice together measuring almost 20 square kilometres have broken off an Arctic ice shelf, the biggest break-up of Arctic ice in three years, Canadian officials announced.

Two floating islands of ice - measuring four to five square kilometres and 14 square kilometres - formed after the chunks broke from the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf off Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, officials said.

"The first broke off sometime around July 22 and the second in the night of July 23 to 24," Luc Desjardins, a senior iceberg forecaster for Environment Canada's Ice Service, said.

Polar bears may not be the only Arctic wildlife threatened by global warming. Scientists have discovered that Arctic foxes also struggle as the ice disappears because they rely on the frozen seas to survive the bleak winters.

Researchers tracked the movements of 14 young foxes as they faced their first Arctic winter in northern Alaska, where the temperature plunges to minus 30{+0}C and it is dark for 24 hours a day. Only three animals survived the winter, by wandering hundreds of miles across the frozen sea ice looking for seal carcasses left by polar bears.