Arctic Ice Shelf Retreat and Sea Ice Melt

Some people, innocent people, in other words, retards (oh, he is just one of them), still think that the whole global warming scenario is a fraud that made up by politicians in order to scare the crap out of us to achieve their conspiracies. Fortunately, these retards only compose a very small portion of human population.

People who can read the newspaper and have a little bit of common sense should have enough intelligence to understand that global warming is a fact. Melting of Arctic ice shelf is on the news every other day. Why is the ice melting? Because the Earth is getting hotter. And we are talking about a large quantity of ice. Oh, don’t forget about the acidification of the ocean, which is caused by elevation of carbon dioxide in the ATM.


Sorry for a little bit of rant and let’s talk about ice. Before I start, I need to make it clear that all the information in this post are found on the internet and I have no bias when I interpret them. Sea ice and ice shelf is different. Sea ice is ice that form and float on water, whereas ice shelf is a large floating platform of ice formed by frozen glacier and ice sheet that flow down to the coastline.

First we look at a graph of the changes in area of sea ice.


I got this graph from one of the article in Economist. Although this is not a very detailed graph, it illustrates the idea quite clearly. As you can see on the graph, a large portion of sea ice has melted and this is the second-smallest record of sea ice coverage. Bear in mind this graph does not show any range or standard deviation of the data, so care must be taken during interpretation.


There is another graph, also from National Snow and Ice Data Centre.

This graph provides a comparison between the Arctic sea ice melting rates of
2005, 2007 and 2008. The area of sea ice are similar in these 3 years in May, however they are all lower than the average. The difference between the recent records and the average level widen in summer. You can see the see ice extent of 2008 have a chance to go below the lowest extent in 2007.


On the other hand, there are also reports of major changes in Arctic ice shelf. Fresh from BBC today, ‘Major Ice-Shelf loss for Canada’. Form the satellite images, you can see a massive chunk of ice-shelf has disintegrated with the coastline.

Unlike sea ice, which the total area varies significantly over the year, this disintegrated ice shelf consists of ice that is up to 4500 years old.


There are more cases of disintegration of ice shelf, such as the giant Ayles Ice Island drifting off Canada's northern shores has broken in two in 2007 and the break off of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf.


So this is a little bit of information about ice for you. Oh, by the way, the guy in the video said carbon dioxide is no pollutant and it is not going to end the world. That is true and I agree, for now. But this is the typical kind of people that only focus on the recent, without enough vision to foresee the future. Few years ago subprime mortgage was big and made a lot of money, and see what happen now, it fucked the global economic up.