Twenty eight years ago, this is what the polar ice cap the North Polar ice cap looked like at the end of the summer, at the fall equinox.

Today, a far greater Arctic tragedy is unfolding the Arctic sea ice cap is melting.

For instance, as the Arctic ice cap melts, less sunlight is reflected.

Greenland remains. Twenty eight years ago, this is what the polar ice cap the North Polar ice cap looked like at the end of the summer, at the fall equinox.

Some companies even seem to celebrate the melting of the polar ice cap, because it will reduce the cost of extracting the oil that lies beneath the Arctic Ocean.

But few saw, for instance, the Artic ice cap melting as rapidly as now seems to be the case.

Last year I showed these two slides so that demonstrate that the arctic ice cap, which for most of the last three million years has been the size of the lower 48 states, has shrunk by 40 percent.

Another part is that the so called Arctic Oscillation of wind patterns over the Arctic Ocean is now in a state that it does not allow build up of old ice, but immediately flushes most ice into the North Atlantic.

Indeed, the ice cap s area has decreased by half since the 1980 s, when summer sea ice still extended over roughly seven million square kilometers, as opposed to less than four million today.

The only native land mammal when humans arrived was the Arctic fox, which came to the island at the end of the ice age, walking over the frozen sea.

The B15 iceberg broke off the Ross Ice Shelf.

Auroras Underfoot.

The drama more accurately, a tragedy playing out in the North is the rapid disappearance of the polar ice cap, the Arctic Ocean s defining feature.

This is a bowhead whale.

tip of the iceberg ?

tip of the iceberg.

They get you on top of some glacier point out the sunset, and suddenly, like an avalanche....

We fly right over them.

Ice cover waxed and waned.

Ms. Violet Ford (Inuit Circumpolar Conference)

Auroras are caused by solar activity.

It's just the tip of the iceberg.

Life thrives on and around an iceberg.

Oh, and that's not even the tip of the iceberg.

This is near the top of the icefall.

That's the retreat of this glacier.

And you'll see that it leads with a shifting star field, and there's an Aurora Borealis in the background, kind of morphing with color.

Especially when you deal with polar coordinates.

Once an iceberg breaks away from the glacier or ice shelf, it will usually live for three to six years, floating around, carried by the currents and tidal movements of the ocean.

A polar bear swimming in the Arctic, by Paul Nicklen.

The vanishing Arctic sea ice also affects the atmosphere.

I'll bet 3,000 that she'll send him to Sejong Antarctic Research Center. lt BR gt

We were attacked by a polar bear on day two.

However, these are just the tip of the iceberg.

The first one was reaching the Pole itself.

This is a view of what's called the calving face.

Okay. We had a team out watching this glacier, and we recorded the biggest calving event that's ever been put on film.

It's off the berg. There's tons of it up forward.

A polar bear can swim up to 500 kilometers.

It is not disorienting to see auroras underfoot, he says.

Indeed, more auroras are in the offing.

And the water at the North Pole is minus 1.7.

that ice sheet became very dynamic and was very easily melted.

(g) Land ice and ice shelf mass balance and sealevel

Well, we were going into the worst part of the last ice age.