Arctic summer sea ice could vanish by 2013
By David Ljunggren OTTAWA (Reuters) – The Arctic is warming up so quickly that the region’s sea ice cover in summer could vanish as early as 2013, decades earlier than some had predicted, a leading polar expert said on Thursday. Warwick Vincent, director of the Center for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec, said recent data on the ice cover "appear to be tracking the most pessimistic of the models", which call for an ice free summer in 2013. The year "2013 is starting to look as though it is a lot more reasonable as a prediction. But each year we’ve been wrong — each year we’re finding that it’s a little bit faster than expected," he told Reuters. The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world and the sea ice cover shrank to a record low in 2007 before growing slightly in 2008. … "Some of this is unstoppable. We’re in a train of events at the moment where there are changes taking place that we are unable to reverse, the loss of these ice shelves, for example," he said. "But what we can do is slow down this process and we have to slow down this process because we need to buy more time. We simply don’t have the technologies as a civilization to deal with this level of instability that is ahead of us." …
