It’s getting to the point where simply covering warming events from the news would be overwhelming- polar bears declared endangered by the Bush administration? Unthinkable a few months ago.
Now we have conculsive proof of the collapse last year of a 41 square mile ice shelf in the Arctic. The shelf, which became an island an hour after the event is in danger of floating into sea lanes and becoming a major hazard- imagine a 41 square mile ice island suddenly appearing where there was nothing a year earlier.
According to Luke Copeland, an ice researcher and head of the new global ice lab at the University of Ottawa, it is the speed of change which is startling:
“Even 10 years ago scientists assumed that when global warming changes occur that it would happen gradually so that perhaps we expected these ice shelves just to melt away quite slowly,” he said.
There have been recent predictions that all Arctic ice will begin to disappear seasonally in the next few decades. Things are changing and it is accelerating.