Saturday, January 29, 2011

Arctic current warmer than for 2,000 years

Alister Doyle in Reuters: A North Atlantic current flowing into the Arctic Ocean is warmer than for at least 2,000 years in a sign that global warming is likely to bring ice-free seas around the North Pole in summers, a study showed.

Scientists said that waters at the northern end of the Gulf Stream, between Greenland and the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, averaged 6 degrees Celsius (42.80F) in recent summers, warmer than at natural peaks during Roman or Medieval times.

"The temperature is unprecedented in the past 2,000 years," lead author Robert Spielhagen of the Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Literature in Mainz, Germany, told Reuters of the study in Friday's edition of the journal Science…

Heleysundet Svalbard, seen from southwest, shot by Hermanhi, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

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