Arctic explorers go in search of sea ice-free summer
A British team has just set out to deploy what are 'usually considered bizarre or socially irrelevant skills' to discover the 'ground truth' in the Arctic. In English, this means they will be repeatedly dragging a mobile radar unit across bits of the Arctic in a bid to work out how quickly the sea ice is disappearing. In the process, they will be chomping through 6,000 calories a day and swimming the bits where the ice has already gone.
Arctic ice modeller Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, a science adviser to the survey, hopes the expedition will tell him when the first ice-free summer will be. He's currently pegging it around 2010 - 2016, dramatically bringing forward estimates placing it somewhere around the end of the century.
Why should we care? Because scientists believe that the ice tends to reflect heat back into space, while darker bodies of water tend to absorb heat, thereby accelerating global warming.
The expedition finishes in May and you can follow it on the Ö÷²¥´óÐã News site's .
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