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Warming Opens Famed Northwest Passage to Navigation

posted by martyb on Wednesday October 21 2015, @11:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the Henry-Hudson-was-ahead-of-his-time dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Beneath the Aurora Borealis an oil tanker glides through the night past the Coast Guard ice breaker Amundsen and vanishes into the maze of shoals and straits of the Northwest Passage, navigating waters that for millennia were frozen over this time of year.

Warming has forced a retreat of the polar ice cap, opening up a sea route through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for several months of the year.

Commander Alain Lacerte is at the helm as the vessel navigates the Queen Maud Gulf, poring over charts that date from the 1950s and making course corrections with the help of GPS.

[...] Today, taking this route cuts 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles) off a trip from London to Tokyo, saving time and fuel.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @10:23AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @10:23AM (#253148)

    there are fossils of tropical plants in the arctic

    Continents move, moron. Antarctica, for example, used to be attached to the west coast of North America. "There's fossils of tropical plants there!" doesn't mean it was warmer, it means that location used to be a lot further south than it is now. See Gondwana [wikipedia.org] / Laurasia, [wikipedia.org] Rodinia, [wikipedia.org] Pangaea, [wikipedia.org] etc.

  • (Score: 2) by RedGreen on Thursday October 22 2015, @09:29PM

    by RedGreen (888) on Thursday October 22 2015, @09:29PM (#253401)

    Yet another fool who ignores the higher temperatures/CO2 levels in the past the planet had, as I said the Earth will do fine, people not so much so possibly we will find out in a century or two or at least our descendants will.

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