Wednesday, January 09, 2008

The Disappearing Barnes Ice Cap

This one's for all you loons who grasp at fantasy claims that the Arctic ice field is rebounding. Your own rag of choice, the National Spot, reports that the last vestige of ice age Canada, the Barnes ice cap is rapidly disappearing:

"Canada's oldest ice, the Barnes Ice Cap, which covers close to 6,000 square kilometers of Baffin Island, is shrinking at a dramatically accelerating rate, says a U.S. research team. It reports the ice cap has recently been thinning at almost 10 times the rate it was 25 years ago.

While not a big surprise -- glaciers and ice fields throughout the Canadian Arctic are wasting away as the climate warms -- researchers say the demise of the Barnes Ice Cap is particularly noteworthy. It is the last remnant of vast kilometers-thick Laurentide ice sheet that blanketed Canada during the last ice age.


"The oldest ice we have in Canada is in the Barnes Ice Cap," says glaciologist Martin Sharp, of the University of Alberta, noting that some of the ice is "20,000 years plus."

"The Laurentide ice sheet basically retreated onto the ice mass that is now the Barnes Ice Cap," says Mr. Sharp. "It's the last bit that got left behind. And now it's on it's way out too.

"This old ice is an archive of history, and once it's gone, it's gone," says Mr. Sharp."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I guess undeniable reality silences the deniers once in a while.

I checked back in thinking someone would have posted a photo claiming the ice measuring instrumentation was sitting too close to a toaster or microwave and that the ice cover was actually twice as large as it had ever been.