Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.

I’m taking a well-deserved vacation this week so this will be an abbreviated version of my usual column.  But I couldn’t let the week pass without some comment on a very important news story.  After all, it isn’t often that you hear about something happening “for the first time in recorded history”.  In case you haven’t heard, the much-fabled Northwest Passage is no longer a fable.

When the Europeans sailed west in the 1400’s, they weren’t trying to prove the Earth was round or discover new land.  They were doing it for purely economic reasons.  They were trying to find a quick route to our neck of the woods (and farther south).  They were trying to reach the Spice Islands, better known today as Java, Malaysia and Indonesia.  When you don’t have refrigeration; food, especially meat’ spoils really fast, and although spices don’t really retard the process, they hide the taste.  Spices were literally worth their weight in gold and they didn’t weigh nearly as much.

Finding the Americas was nice, but they were basically a BIG obstacle in this driving economic urge and the saga of the 1500’s included a long line of explorers trying to find a way around them.  Magellan finally did it by sailing around South America; but since all the Europeans lived in the north, it made more sense to go that way.  And hence the Northwest Passage was born.  If you could just sail over the top of Canada, the riches of the Spice Islands and Asia would be yours.  Unfortunately, there was a little problem with the Northwest Passage.  It was full of ice.  All the time.

But something happened this summer.  According to a press release by the European Space agency, new satellite images show Arctic ice has shrunk to the smallest area on record, raising the possibility that the Northwest Passage that eluded famous explorers will become an open shipping lane.
The ESA release said almost 200 satellite photos taken this month showed an ice-free passage along northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland, and ice retreating to its smallest area since such images were first taken in 1978.

Arctic ice has shrunk to 1 million square miles. The previous low was 1.5 million square miles in 2005.  A UN panel on climate change has predicted that polar regions could be virtually free of ice by the summer of 2070.

The waters are exposing unexplored resources, and vessels could trim thousands of miles off the sea journey from Europe to Asia by bypassing the Panama Canal.  Of course, all this ‘new land’ has triggered animosity among the ‘polar’ nations.  Russia, Norway, Denmark, Canada and the United States are some of the countries involved in a race to secure rights to the Arctic.  A US study has suggested as much as 25 per cent of the world's untapped oil and gas could be hidden in the area.

Envisat ASAR mosaic of the Arctic Ocean for early September 2007, clearly showing the most direct route of the Northwest Passage open (orange line) and the Northeast Passage only partially blocked (blue line). The dark gray color represents the ice-free areas, while green represents areas with sea ice. Credit: ESA

Map of the region.

And if you compare the map and the satellite photo, you’ll see the astounding changes in Greenland.  The world is changing at a much more rapid rate than scientists predicted.  So is global warming real?  Judge for yourself.

The following is an article that I did on global warming two years ago. 

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Scientists have been warning for years that worldwide warming could cause unstable ice shelves on the South Pole continent of Antarctica to slide into the sea, thus raising the level of the world ocean to unprecedented heights.  But there hasn’t been much concern about the ice in the Arctic at the North Pole because it floats on the water and if it melts, it would cause little change in sea level.  That lack of concern about warming in the north polar regions has been eroded by a study just published in the research journal New Scientist.

According to that article, a vast expanse of western Siberia is undergoing an unprecedented thaw that could dramatically increase the rate of global warming.  The discovery was made by Sergei Kirpotin at Tomsk State University in western Siberia and Judith Marquand at Oxford.

They found that an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometers (much larger than Texas) has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.
The area, which covers the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia, is the world's largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that, as it thaws, it will release billions of tons of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.

"When you start messing around with these natural systems, you can end up in situations where it's unstoppable.  There are no brakes you can apply," said David Viner, a scientist at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. "This is a big deal because you can't put the permafrost back once it's gone.  The causal effect is human activity and it will ramp up temperatures even more than our emissions are doing."

Scientists are particularly concerned about the permafrost because as it thaws, it reveals bare ground that warms up more quickly than ice and snow, and so accelerates the rate at which the permafrost thaws.  The permafrost is likely to take many decades at least to thaw, so the methane locked within it will not be released into the atmosphere in one burst.

But calculations show that even if methane seeped from the permafrost over the next 100 years, it would add around 700 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year, roughly the same amount released annually from the world's wetlands and agriculture.  It would effectively double atmospheric levels of the gas, leading to a 10 to 25 percent increase in global warming.

But that’s not the only danger posed by thawing in the north polar regions.  As previously stated, when Arctic ice melts, it doesn't raise the ocean levels or threaten coastal communities with flooding.  The sea ice merely changes form when it melts.  As the ice above the surface melts, its weight decreases, so it displaces less water.  At the same time, the melted ice adds more water, so the ocean level remains the same.
But there is still reason to pay attention.  Water from the Arctic Ocean plays an important role in Northern Hemisphere weather.  The powerful Gulf Stream current moves warm water from the tropics past the east coast of the United States and Canada and northwestern Europe.  If the Arctic continues to melt, and cold water pours south past Greenland, some scientists fear the Gulf Stream will be diverted.  Without that warm water, heavily populated areas around the northern Atlantic might suffer bitterly cold winters.
Could global warming be the cause of Arctic melting?  And could that melting, ironically, make some places colder?  Global warming, global chilling. 

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If we were worried about what global warming was doing to the Siberian permafrost and the Gulf Stream two years ago, what will the opening of the Northwest Passage mean for the Gulf Stream?  Unfortunately, I suspect that in two or three years, scientists will find out and the rest of us are all along for the ride.  Here’s hoping it doesn’t become too bumpy!