Good thing we packed a spare...
I feel like we've been on a rollercoaster this spring. Record heat in March turned into an off-and-on April, and now temps are way below normal for the start of May in the East. Today's Kentucky Derby in Louisville will be the coldest since 1997. I'll take my mint julep warm, please.
Speaking of chilly (terrible segue, sorry), Bill is back with another dispatch from the Arctic. He's been aboard the MS Freya, a Swedish ship built to navigate the ice.
—Angela Fritz, Meteorologist
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A dispatch from Bill Weir, Chief Climate Correspondent
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The Kongsbreen and Kronebreen glaciers sit along Kongsfjorden in Svalbard, Norway, deep in the Arctic north of Europe. (Julian Quinones/CNN)
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The first night was rough, like trying to sleep on a 150-foot seesaw. As we pushed north along the west coast of Svalbard, a polar storm brought 3-to-6-foot waves “to the beam;” the kind of 90-degree rollers that would normally motivate our captain to find a hidey-hole for the MS Freya in a dealer’s-choice of rugged fjords.
But turning the gangways of this converted Swedish Coast Guard ice ship into scenes from "Inception" was intentional. We are worried that our 9-day journey won’t give us enough time to reach the polar maximum—the edge of the Arctic's disappearing ice cap.
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Recent science looks at current rate of melt and predicts that ships could be able to sail over the top of the world in September 2035 without seeing any ice at all. But while the floating ice at the top of the world is vital for deflecting sunlight, it is designed to come and go with the seasons, and like the ice melting in your beverage of choice, it has no effect on sea levels at shore.
But the ice sheets and glaciers on land are a different story — the equivalent of dumping a fistful of ice cubes into already brimming glass. A mess is guaranteed. And seeing it now, I can testify that the most ambitious set designers in Hollywood would have a tough time conveying the SIZE of the ice cubes we are dumping in into the Arctic Ocean.
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Bill and Hedda Andersen chat on a Zodiac. (Evelio Contreras/CNN)
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"So, since the 1990s, it has retreated over half of the area of Manhattan,” Hedda Anderson tells me on a blustery Zodiac tour of Kongsbreen Glacier. The Norwegian glaciologist/former wilderness guide has been paying regular visits to the spot where two disappearing rivers of ice once met. “What’s left of that convergence is now that muddy hill,” she said, and describing the recent acceleration takes her breath away.
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“It lost 750 meters in just a couple of months,” she said. That is an ice cube more than seven football fields long, twice as many wide and 40 feet thick, gone in a single summer. But for context, if every glacier in Svalbard melts, the effect on global sea level would be measured in centimeters or inches.
When the ice sheet on neighboring Greenland goes, sea level rise will be measured in meters or yards.
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Bill stands at the edge of the Aavatsmarkbreen Glacier in Oscar II Land in Svalbard. (Julian Quinones/CNN)
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As a first timer, it was hard to imagine such relative warming while freezing and bouncing through enough snow and spray to take out one of our new immersive cameras. Good thing we packed a spare, because a few days later we hiked the glistening Aavatsmarkbreen Glacier under bluebird skies and blazing sunshine, marveling at the kind of speed-melt they know all too well in Colorado this year. And it is all connected.
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Aavatsmarkbreen Glacier in Oscar II Land in Svalbard. (Julian Quinones/CNN)
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Bill is a wandering storyteller who seeks out and brings to life the planet’s most fragile, beautiful places. |
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Angela is looking forward to hearing more stories from Bill's Arctic adventure.
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