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Why do they need to lie?
The ice is melting - 1
ITV then broadcast a heart-rending account of how the polar bear would soon become an endangered species because its Arctic habitat was melting. And, not only was this affecting their ability to catch fish and seals, we were told, but they were being left many miles from shore and drowning. Again it was a moving programme; again man-made global warming was blamed; and again it was totally misleading.
The 1,800 km Gakkel Ridge runs beneath the Arctic ice sheet from Eastern Greenland to Siberia, passing close to the North Pole. Originally thought to be non-volcanic, recent surveys have found that the Gakkel Ridge is extremely active.
In 2001, a team of researchers from Columbia, the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Tulane collected data along the Gakkel Ridge using a nuclear powered submarine. Bathymetric data and sidescan images of the eastern Gakkel Ridge depicted two young volcanoes covering approximately 447 square miles of the seafloor.1 The location of a western volcano is the site of close to 250 teleseismic events detected in 1999. The researchers say: ‘We found more hydrothermal activity on this cruise than in 20 years of exploration on the mid-Atlantic Ridge’.
In 2003, Henrietta Edmonds, a marine scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, found at least nine hydrothermal vents on the ridge.2 The water that spews forth from hydrothermal vents can reach temperatures of 662ºF (350ºC).
Is it any wonder the arctic ice is melting? But we aren’t responsible.
And, incidentally, far from being an endangered species threatened with extinction, the polar bear is doing very nicely, thank you. Satellite images now show that polar bear numbers are at record – high – level.
References
1. Edwards MH, Kurras GJ, M. Tolstoy, DR, et al. Evidence of recent volcanic activity on the ultraslow-spreading Gakkel ridge. Nature 2001; 409: 808-812.
2. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/01/0123_030123_hotspring.html, accessedFebruary 2009,
Last updated 20 February
2009
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