Ice Breaker.

• Author: Flavin, Christopher

The rapid and unexpected breakup of the Arctic icecap may help break the icejam at critical climate negotiations in the Hague this November. But the equally dramatic collapse of the coal market in China may turn out to be an even more effective ice breaker.

When the Russian icebreaker Yamal neared the North Pole last July, the scientists and tourists aboard gradually became aware that something was amiss. As later reported in a New York Times story that caused worldwide reverberations, the observers found only thin patches of ice floating in large expanses of open water. The usual 2- to 3-meter thick pack ice was virtually nonexistent. And when the Yamal arrived at the North Pole itself, the passengers found completely open water, a phenomenon never before reported in the 91 years since Robert Peary and Matthew Henson reached the North Pole by dogsled in 1909. But human memory is the wrong scale on which to measure this development: the last time the North Pole was completely ice-free was 50 million years ago.

Of course, there have been patches of open water here and there in the Arctic for as long as memory serves, and--as some scientists noted in the aftermath of the Times article--the constant shifting of the ice pack as a result of wind and water currents could mean that next year there will be ice at the Pole once again. But the basic conclusions drawn by the scientists on the Yamal--that the Arctic as a whole is losing its ice cap--have been corroborated by numerous other observations. A small Canadian police boat transiting the sub-polar Northwest Passage from Alaska to Greenland in late summer, for example, reported seeing virtually no ice, and was able to navigate the complex route in a remarkable six weeks.

Scientific observations, made from both above and below the ice, lead to an unarguable and momentous conclusion: The earth's frozen top is melting at an extraordinary rate. Satellite photographs have shown a 10 percent reduction in the area covered by Arctic ice, while sonar measurements taken by U.S. submarines have tracked a 40 percent decline in its average thickness since the 1950s--a decline far exceeding the rate of melting previously estimated. Scientists at the University of Bergen's Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Norway have concluded that by the middle of this century, the entire Arctic could be ice-free in summer. Among the myriad signs of human-induced global climate change--fossil fuel combustion...