Cracking ice floe forces Russia to pack up Arctic ice station

Will Englund in the Washington Post: Russia is evacuating a drifting Arctic research station that was supposed to last until September, because the ice it is built on is starting to break up. The cracks are another indication of the rapid decline of the Arctic ice sheet — especially so because the encampment is on the Canadian side of the Arctic Sea, where the ice is oldest and most durable.

“It’s a huge loss for us, and for science,” Vladimir Sokolov, director of the expedition, said in a telephone interview from his office in St. Petersburg. “For us, it is very important to get information about the climate system in the high-latitude Arctic.”

The station — the 40th in a string of North Pole drift stations that began in 1937 — went into operation Oct. 1, later than usual because the leaders of the project had a difficult time finding a sufficiently robust floe to base the camp on. In fact, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the extent of sea ice in September was the lowest on record, 18 percent lower than the previous minimum, in 2007.

Last year’s ice conditions, Sokolov said, forced the Russian researchers to look for a base floe closer to Canada than to their own country.

In years past, drift stations have remained in operation for 12 months or longer, with the exception of 2010, when an early breakup also caused a premature evacuation....

Photo by Patrick Kelley, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license