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Ice Split
Tue Nov 11, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton and this is The Weather Notebook’s weekly show about global climate
change. When the Ward Hunt ice shelf broke apart, it took a rare and mysterious ecosystem
with it. New Hampshire Public Radio’s Trish Anderton has more.
The Ward Hunt ice shelf sits on the coast of Canada’s Ellesmere Island, just 500 miles from
the North Pole. Over the last century, the massive ice block has been shrinking. Last year,
scientists found the ice shelf had split in two. Geophysicist, Martin Jeffries of the
University of Alaska, Fairbanks says those developments are consistent with climate change
going on throughout the region.
There’s a lot of interest in how these ecosystems function in this cold and dark environment
because they could tell us about life on early earth, and they could give us clues as to life
on the planet.
That crack is more than just a warning shot. It also signals the loss of an unusual
ecosystem. The ice shelf trapped freshwater running off the island. That water formed a
140-foot layer on top of the saltwater, in what scientists call an epishelf lake. Jeffries
says a fascinating stew of saltwater and freshwater microbes lived there.
Certainly there is strong evidence that in last decade or so in artic there's been an almost
arctic-wide warming. Air temperatures are increasing, other aspects of weather have been
changing
But, almost all the freshwater drained off after the fatal crack. Jeffries says he never
expected to see this much damage to the ice shelf in the twenty years he’s been studying it.
He fears in another twenty years, it could be gone entirely.
The Weather Notebook is produced at the Mount Washington Observatory. We are funded by Subaru
and The National Science Foundation.
Today's Links
The Splitting of the North\'s Largest Ice Shelf:
http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF16/1665.html
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