Saturday, January 22, 2011

Intriguing headline: "Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt"

From The Washington Post:
The  Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some  places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a  report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulafft, at  Bergen, Norway.  Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers  all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto  unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone.  Exploration expeditions  report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees,  29 minutes.
Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the  gulf stream still very warm.  Great masses of ice have been replaced  by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many  points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.
Very  few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while  vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured  so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.  
Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice  melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities  uninhabitable.
Oops!   Never mind.  This report was from November 2, 1922, as reported by  the Associated Press and published in the Washington Post -- 88 years ago, and currently in the Library of Congress archives with the fascinating story behind it. The reality of global warming, while critical today, was evidently apparent years ago.

(With thanks to Mike Harlick who passed this on to me.) 

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