Iceland Bucks Global Warming Trend - Increasing Ice...

[Logan13]

Iceland Bucks Global Warming Trend - Increasing Ice...
02/04/2007
telegraph.uk

The oceans may be warming and air temperatures rising, but in recent days Iceland has bucked the global climate trend.

Thick pack ice, the like of which has not been seen for decades, stretched into the western fjords as temperatures plummeted and a bitter wind blew in from -Greenland.

The ice has proved a headache for fishermen, who have been unable to put to sea, but it is what comes with pack ice that has caused most concern: polar bears.

advertisementPeople living around the fjord of Dyrafjördur, which last week was almost filled with the ice, were keeping an eye on the sea, conscious that the bears live on the pack ice that covers much of the Arctic ocean.

When chunks break off, as appears to have happened last week, the bears become stranded, drifting wherever the ice takes them.

There have been numerous accounts of bears making land on the shores of Iceland in the past. But it is the bears who tend to come off worse in encounters with the Icelanders, who take a distinctly unsentimental approach to wildlife.

In 1993, the last time a bear is known to have made it to Icelandic waters, it was caught by a fishing crew and killed. It is believed to have been stranded on a piece of pack ice that broke off the main pack and melted, leaving the animal swimming in the open ocean 70 miles from the main ice sheet. Five years earlier, the last bear to make it to shore was promptly shot when it turned up near the town of Haganesvík in the north of the country.

Coastguard commander Asgrinur Asgrinsson remembers a polar bear coming ashore on the island of Grimsey, north of the mainland, when he was a child. It was shot and stuffed and now has pride of place in the museum in the town of Husavik.

There are thought to be about 25,000 polar bears in the wild and environmentalists have warned that they are in danger of becoming extinct as their habitat shrinks. Climate change scientists say that with temperatures rising, the pack ice may have melted completely by 2040, leaving the Arctic ocean navigable and the polar bears with nowhere to go.

Last week's return of the pack ice to Iceland initially suggested that those predictions might have been overly pessimistic.

"I have lived here my whole life, but I have never seen so much pack ice before," said Helgi Árnason, a farmer in -Dyrafjördur.

"Forty years ago, large icebergs drifted on to beaches but it was nothing compared with this.

"[Pack ice] used to be Iceland's ancient enemy, but we stay calm so long as the situation doesn't worsen. This is just to remind us where we live."

According to the coastguard, the build-up of ice was the result of a combination of a high pressure system to the south of the mainland coupled with winds blowing in from Greenland, 300 miles to the west.

"It looked like the main pack ice had reached the coast," said Mr Asgrinsson. "But in fact it was a piece of the main pack that had broken away."

A report by a panel of international scientists, published on Friday, blamed greenhouse gas emissions for rising global average air and ocean temperatures, the widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global mean sea levels.

The report said that average Arctic temperatures increased at almost twice the global average rate in the past 100 years.

A recent Nasa study showed that Greenland is losing 53 cubic miles of ice every year, twice the rate in 1996.

The melting polar ice means polar bears are not the only hazard for those living in the region.

Another study suggested that the thaw was luring killer whales further north.

Researchers said the whales were attacking a wide range of sealife, including beluga, bowhead and narwhal whales.

Jeff Higdon, from the University of Manitoba and the Fisheries and Oceans Canada monitoring project, said the increasing areas of open water meant the whales were able to venture farther into the Arctic.

"We've got reports of killer whales attacking every marine mammal in the Arctic," he said.

[spywizard]

and it's -45 with the windchill right now here in minnesota...

global warming?? i'm all for it..