Unusually little sea ice around East Greenland

Mr. Einar Sveinbjörnsson, meteorologist at the Icelandic Meteorological Office keeps a very interesting ‘weather blog’. Every day he writes about his observations of weather phenomena all over the world.

Link to his blog is the following:   http://esv.blog.is/blog/esv/

This morning he drew attention to the fact that sattelite pictures from yesterday show very little sea ice along the east coast of Greenland.

Quite interesting is the fact that the north coast of Svalbard (Spitzbergen) is almost ice free.

Check out this link to a Svalbard chart from the Norwegian Ice Service:

http://met.no/images/image_000140_1169218991.pdf

It is not questionable any more that the arctic sea ice is greatly diminishing. Recently there were news about how the American explorer, Dennis Schmitt, found a new island approximately 640 km north of the arctic circle off Greenland´s east coast. Previously this was considered to be the end of a peninsula but melting of the glaciers revealed an island. Also the Nunataks (rocks sticking out of the ice caps and glaciers) are quite often starting to join with mountains which were previously outside the ice.

See also our previous blog on the arctic ice and pictures from our visit to Greenland last summer.

We plan to sail Aurora again to Greenland this coming August. There are a few seats still available on that trip for those interested in seeing for themselves how global warming is affecting nature and cultures in the arctic.