Tuesday 28 July 2009

Polar-ized vision of Earth's climate

Climate change is one of those black-and-white topics of conversation which tend to get people all hot and bothered, if you'll pardon the expression. Some of the evidence is quite damning, however, as the images highlighted in this article which appeared in the online magazine ITWire (www.itwire.com) is anything to go by.
Writer David Heath sets the scene...

Sometimes America's spy satellites have to pass over 'friendly territory.' When they do, they can still be put to good use – in this case, monitoring sea ice for evidence of climate change.
In the past few days, the US Government has de-classified and
released via the United States Geological Survey website a number of very high resolution images showing exceedingly clear evidence of warming in the Arctic.
Now, I don't know if these images have had their resolution decreased, but I thought that spy satellites were capable of much higher than the stated 1 metre resolution. No matter.
The first
example (warning, all these images are at least 20MB) shows the seashore around Barrow. Barrow is on the northern coastline of Alaska and is completely locked in by ice during the northern winter. By July of each year, the ice has melted sufficiently to allow barge access to bring supplies from the south. The first image in this set shows the state of the ice in July 2006, with the sea ice situated around 800m to 1000m off the coast. The second image, just one year later, shows no sea ice at all within the image's 3000m of offshore coverage.
The next
example, of the Beaufort Sea, approximately 200km north east of Barrow, shows a substantial loss of summer open-sea ice. Whereas the first image, in August 2001, shows a mass of sea ice with a degree of melting, the second image, in August 2007 shows open sea, with minor, small patches of ice – clearly melting.
These two pairs of images display an alarming change in the proximity and amount of sea ice over a relatively short time.


Read the full article here

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