“I think it was a little more stable, and there was a little bit more assurance that the ice you were on was not going to disintegrate on you that easy,” said whaling captain Gordon Brower.
"If they were moving out of the Arctic, then you would see a lot of ponds draining... But thats not what we saw, we saw a lot of new ponds forming."
The Arctic’s like an air conditioner or refrigerator for the global climate...And as the Arctic warms, partly because the sea ice is going away, it’s like you’re opening that refrigerator door.
“It’s an area that I and some other colleagues have started thinking about: can you get methane forming in terrestrial environments? But it’s a very new area of science,” carbon scientist Katey Walter Anthony said.
"Currently we don't have any studies specifically looking at what factors are affecting those demographics," said Jason Caikoski, a wildlife biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Listen now
"These ridges that we’re standing on, there would have been more of them, and they would have been bigger," ice researcher Andy Mahoney said. "The features that we now see, they’re something of a shadow from the past." Listen now
This November in Utqiaġvik was the hottest on record, averaging 17.2°F. It was so warm that NOAA's quality control algorithms flagged the data. “When we look out on the ocean right now we see a few icebergs,” Thomas said. “Normally we would see white to the horizon in the past, and in this case we’re seeing dark water to the horizon.”
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