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George Divoky
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The one-day animation at the Barrow Sea Ice Radar website show the rapid loss of shorefast ice that stranded a number of Barrow whalers on the ice yesterday.
http://seaice.alaska.edu/gi/observatories/barrow_radar
Getting ready
With the melting season getting ready to go full speed, I'm also busy getting everything ready. First of all on the virtual level by updating the Arctic Sea Ice Graphs page. I've slightly altered the daily graphs page, by adding a couple of links, graphs and category names to make it easier to ...
My concern with how the public, and even many parts of the scientific community, view the loss of summer ice is that it is looked on as being a physical loss and not the disruption and destruction of an ecosystem.
I study seabirds on an island off northern Alaska where in the past forty years I have seen the shift in the marine ecosystem with earlier and increasing ice retreat.
http://cooperisland.org/
While the public may see that polar bears are being displaced by melting ice they fail to view the recent unprecedented loss of sea ice as the same type of large-scale ecosystem loss occurring with tropical rain forests.
While there are now major efforts to study the little-known pack-ice ecosystem, it is too late to examine it in an undisturbed state. We can only get a snapshot of what is like during a period of decline before the loss of summer ice.
The recent Beaufort Sea ice event (and the attention it was getting) caused me to put together this video showing the location of my research as well as an excellent graphic from the Arctic Council showing the pack ice ecosystem.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdnposPoYoI
Perception of the Arctic
There was a time, not too long ago, when I didn't know the Arctic existed. Sure, I knew there was a North Pole and that it was cold there, but somehow I always thought that the Arctic and the Antarctic were the same thing, that someone had forgotten to add the Ant-. And of course, polar bears ...
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May 21, 2011
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