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.

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 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.

Ms. Violet Ford (Inuit Circumpolar Conference)

It's just the tip of the iceberg.

I served on the International Panel for Climate Change in the mid 1990 s, reviewing the scientific evidence concerning the magnitude of increases in greenhouse gasses and their economic and social consequences.

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

The vanishing Arctic sea ice also affects the atmosphere.

Its southern counterpart, the aurora australis (or the southern lights), has features that are almost identical to the aurora borealis and changes simultaneously with changes in the northern auroral zone.

A polar bear can swim up to 500 kilometers.

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

Early evidence for a geomagnetic connection comes from the statistics of auroral observations.

All these islands lie in the cold seas below the Antarctic convergence.

The World Climate Research Programme has specifically included research on climate and cryosphere, the main purpose of which is to provide a globally integrated approach to the study of the role of the cryosphere in the climate system.

The ice drilling project on the north eastern corner of the Amery ice shelf near Davis Station continued.

It was formed by glacial melting at the end of the Ice Age.

A polar bear wouldn't hesitate to attack a huge walrus if it were hungry.

The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) recognizes it as an ocean, although some oceanographers call it the Arctic Mediterranean Sea or simply the Arctic Sea, classifying it a mediterranean sea or an estuary of the Atlantic Ocean.

If its ice sheet melted completely, sea levels would rise by seven meters meaning that we cannot afford to lose even a small fraction of the ice sheet.

The last glacial period, popularly known as the Ice Age, was the most recent glacial period within the current ice age occurring during the last years of the Pleistocene, from approximately 110,000 to 12,000 years ago.

Brown Glacier, Heard Island, had retreated by 50 metres over three years, with the lower slopes of the glacier having lost as much as 11 metres in thickness, while Collins Glacier, King George Island, retreated by some 200 metres between 1987 and 2005.

In 1948, the underwater Lomonosov Ridge in the Arctic Ocean was named in his honor.

It was followed by a cooler period in the North Atlantic termed the Little Ice Age.

Geographic features The physiography of Latvia and its neighboring areas was formed, to a large degree, during the Quaternary period and the Pleistocene ice age, when soil and debris were pushed by glaciers into mounds and hills.

Its maximum extension in recent history, marking the advance of the glacier in response to the cooling of the Little Ice Age, was reached not earlier than the late 18th century, and more probably at the beginning of the 20th century.

Projections are that we could lose polar bears they could become extinct in the next 50 to 100 years.

In the last three decades, its volume has shrunk by roughly three quarters.

The challenge will be to find a way out of this and work towards a mutually acceptable solution to this icy conflict.

Most of Ross Ice Shelf is in the Ross Dependency claimed by New Zealand.

The last glacial period of the current ice age ended about 10,000 years ago.

A polynya is an area of open water surrounded by sea ice.

Late ice age climatic changes caused plant communities and animal populations to change.

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. The color of the Aurora Borealis can be controlled using this single bar of color at the bottom, and we'll put it down here to red.

These plants have a distinct trait in their pollen grains of exhibiting three colpi or grooves paralleling the polar axis.

The loch is only about 10,000 years old, dating to the end of the last ice age.

The voyage was the culmination of four centuries of failed attempts to navigate the Northwest Passage a direct route from Europe to Asia across the Arctic Ocean and remains one of the greatest tragedies in the history of polar exploration.

This is about as good as maps get, and to reach it you've got to ski literally over the frozen crust, the floating skin of ice on the Artic Ocean.

Polar bears need ice to be able to move back and forth they're not very good swimmers and we know what's happening to the ice.

Climate Sisimiut lies within the polar climate region, belonging to the E group of the Köppen climate classification.