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Posted Fri May 13 2011: from
BBC:
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Wikileaks cables show race to carve up Arctic http://apocadocs.com/s.pl?1305308409
The opportunity to exploit resources has come because of a dramatic fall in the amount of ice in the Arctic.
The US Geological Survey estimates oil reserves off Greenland are as big as those in the North Sea....
Tom Burke, who advises mining company Rio Tinto and the UK Foreign Office on climate change and business, told Newsnight that political tensions were rising because "the ice is declining much faster" than expected, so "everybody who thinks they've got a chance to get at those resources wants to get in there and stake their claim".
Since the 1970s, Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University has made repeated trips under the North Pole in Royal Navy nuclear submarines to measure the thickness of the ice.
He told Newsnight the graph "has gone off a cliff" because the ice sheet has thinned as well as shrunk.
The Pan-Arctic Ice-Ocean Modelling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) which measures ice volume shows that last September there was only a quarter of the ice in the Arctic that there had been in 1979.
Prof Wadhams says in summer "it could easily happen that we'll have an ice-free North Pole within a year or two".
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[Read more stories about:
arctic meltdown, ocean warming, permafrost meltdown, albedo effect]
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