You just can't make this stuff up. The apparent goal of the Polar Defense Project was to "kayak from the Island of Spitsbergen (in northern Europe) across the Arctic Ocean, into the Arctic ice pack, and as close to the North Pole as possible." Apparently they got stuck in the ice after 4 short days, gave up and turned around.
Having read the article, I noted that the observers reported ice only a third as thick as last year's. It also stated "this is a record setting year for thinness of Arctic summer sea ice." OK, so the Northwest Passage through the 'frozen North' isn't quite navigable by kayak just yet. Hilarious.
This year's sea ice has still not gone below 2007: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png It is a shame that we cannot compare 1922. There is no doubt that some of the increased apparency of environmental 'issues' comes from vastly improved observational technologies. The tricky question is how much. Oops - had to edit in this news piece: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/2008/09/08/20080908monlets087.html It may be that Mr. Haney and I are looking at different NSIDC sites?
It's too bad we don't have comparable data sets. The trend certainly doesn't look good, but it's conceivable that it's not a long term trend. One thing I found interesting in the article from '22 as that they noted current temps of 15 deg C. That's amazingly warm. What are the current temps at the present time? Does anyone know what the currently thought is on soot deposition? That's something that's probably quite different to 1922 levels.
I wonder what shape the ice cap had back then, it would be interesting to compare it to what we observer now. For example, was the sheet really lop-sided? What was the ice thickness in areas that shouldn't be affected by the warm gulfstream current? This historical data gives us an incomplete picture, are there other observations from that time period that indicate what the ice was doing elsewhere? What this does show is that the ice can come back to a reasonable volume (makes me think of "Office Space") pretty quickly.
