Word: multiyear
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Barber was aboard the Canadian research icebreaker Amundsen, checking on ice in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska and Western Canada. The ship was well inside a region the satellites said should be choked with thick, multiyear-old ice. "That's pretty much a no-go zone for an icebreaker of the Amundsen's size," says Barber. But the ship kept going, at a brisk 13 knots - its top speed in open water is 13.7 knots - and even when it finally reached thick ice, he says, "we could still penetrate it easily...
...short, as Barber and his colleagues explain in a recent paper in Geophysical Review Letters, the analysis of what the satellites were seeing was wrong. Some of what satellites identified as thick, melt-resistant multiyear ice turned out to be, in Barber's words, "full of holes, like Swiss cheese. We haven't seen this sort of thing before." (Read "Arctic Mystery: Identifying the Great Blob of Alaska...
...problem climate scientists have been warning about since the record melt of 2007: after each summer meltback, the Arctic Ocean refreezes completely in winter. The problem is that much of that refreezing creates a relatively thin layer of so-called first-year ice. "It's weaker than thick, multiyear ice," says University of Colorado scientist James Maslanik, "and less resistant to melting...
...suggests that the analysis of satellite observations might be due for updating. "The algorithms we use to monitor ice extent were developed a long time ago," says Stroeve, "based on what 'typical' ice looked like at that time. We know there are errors with the measurements." The weakness in multiyear ice also suggests that if the unfavorable winds and currents that caused the 2007 meltback should recur, the Arctic Ocean could undergo another especially dramatic summer melt. Not just the first-year ice might go, but also some of the "rotten" multiyear ice that Barber encountered...
...China and the rest of Asia reaped enormous benefits from a mercantilist growth model that was tied increasingly to the voracious appetite of the American consumer. Unfortunately, Asia did not do a good job in hedging that bet. The U.S. could now be in the early stages of a multiyear consumption retrenchment, making the problems of an unbalanced, export-dependent Asian economy even more acute...