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Arctic Now A Swimming Pool For Gulls For millions of years travellors have crossed the artic, on foot, now a polar bear would have to swim. This month, a group of international scientists aboard a Russian icebreaker arrived at the pole to find not ice but a stretch of at least 1.6kilometres of open water with gulls circling overhead. Since Robert Peary led the first `Westerner' expedition to the top of the world on foot, no one had ever before found a watery pole, or birds flying in the Arctic air, and it is 50 million years since scientists can be certain that the pole was last definitively awash. "It was totally unexpected," James McCarthy, a Harvard University oceanographer, said at the weekend. "There was a sense of alarm. Global warming was real, and we were seeing its effects for the first time that far north. "I don't know if anybody in history ever got to 90 degrees north to be greeted by water, not ice," said paleontologist Malcolm McKenna of the American Museum of Natural History. Six years ago, when he last sailed to the pole in an icebreaker, Dr McCarthy recalled, the vessel ploughed through an ice-cap between 1.8 and 2.7metres thick at the pole. On his latest visit, the icebreaker Yamal crunched its way through kilometres of unusually thin ice. Scientists could see through the ice to plankton growing in unaccustomed sunlight. When the ship reached the pole, water was lapping its bows. The Russian captain of the Yamal told Dr McCarthy that he had made the voyage to the pole 10 times in recent years and never before encountered an open sea. The scientists' discovery appears to present some of the most tangible evidence that global warming is a real phenomenon. Over the past century, the surface temperature of the globe has risen by less than one degree, although the rate of increase has accelerated in the past 25 years. Strong evidence of the shrinking of the polar ice cap is not new. Scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Science Institute, who have compared 1950s data from submarines with recent findings, have shown the ice cover over the entire Arctic area has shrunk by about 45per cent. Yes, 45 percent! Satellite images have confirmed that the extent of the ice cap has been reducing in recent years. Scientists now say it will be hard for sceptics to keep claiming the problem does not exist. Those who disbelieve global warming should join those who disbelieve the Earth is round.. .
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