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The Arctic Ocean Is Looking Less 'Arctic' And More 'Ocean' With Sea Ice Melting Faster Than Ever

Russian shipping companies are stoked. Used to be that if you had a supertanker full of a couple hundred-thousand tons of gas needing to get to, say, South Korea, you had to steer the thing clear around Scandinavia, down through the Atlantic, up the...

Russian shipping companies are stoked. Used to be that if you had a supertanker full of a couple hundred-thousand tons of gas needing to get to, say, South Korea, you had to steer the thing clear around Scandinavia, down through the Atlantic, up the Mediterranean and through the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean and finally around and up into the Pacific. It takes about 40 days that way and there are pirates, though you don't hear too much about them anymore. I guess we're winning, or something else has filled that slot in the news cycle.

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This year shipping companies are experimenting with a new route: through the Arctic. Lanes of open water have appeared in the normally ice-locked ocean, letting shippers take a short cut for at least a few months of the year, shaving off about 18 days from the trip. From a piece in the Guardian yesterday: "In a further sign that the Arctic was opening up, Russian atomic icebreakers received 15 requests to escort Arctic voyages in 2011, against four in 2010." Which I copy here in large part to call your attention to the words "Russian atomic icebreakers."

These are Russian atomic icebreakers:

To be honest, I think the face painted on this one feels more "diesel" than "atomic," but, then again, a blast victim silhouette doesn't seem very marketable.

According to NASA, last month found the Arctic Ocean with its second lowest level of ice coverage on record. No surprise, of course, that it's not a freak occurrence. This is just how it's going in the Arctic, or has been over the past three decades. "The sea ice is not only declining, the pace of the decline is becoming more drastic," Joey Comiso, a senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center says. "The older, thicker ice is declining faster than the rest, making for a more vulnerable perennial ice cover."

The Arctic, at its current rate, loses about 12-percent of its sea ice per decade. Models have the ocean losing all of its summer ice by 2100, but that's not really taking into account the increasing rate of decline.

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There's a couple of footnotes to this making it all the more sour: This week NASA published a study in Nature examining unprecedented ozone loss over the Arctic, putting it at about par with ozone losses over the Antarctic, which has sustained the heaviest ozone damage. And as in the Antarctic, human-produced chemicals are largely to blame, reacting with cold air over the poles and turning into the stuff that actually depletes ozone.

And, yes, this is more climate change. "Day-to-day temperatures in the 2010-11 Arctic winter did not reach lower values than during previous cold Arctic winters," says lead author Gloria Manney of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, in a press release. "The difference from previous winters is that temperatures were low enough to produce ozone-destroying forms of chlorine for a much longer time. This implies that if winter Arctic stratospheric temperatures drop just slightly in the future, for example as a result of climate change, then severe Arctic ozone loss may occur more frequently."

You should have this picture in your head as you read, lest we get confused about how climate change causes warming and cooling.

Understand that as the surface temperature rises on Earth, the entire atmosphere does not rise too. That would mean the planet would be giving off a whole bunch of extra heat, putting it out of balance. Instead, as surface temps rise, the temperatures in the stratosphere cool to compensate. It's an inverse relation. Venus for example has a surface temperature of around 834 degrees. Meanwhile, its stratosphere is four to five times colder than ours.

So as the planet down here gets warmer, it's actually getting colder up high, making it even easier to destroy ozone. This is what's happening now. Everything is a balancing act in nature, and it might be helpful to think of the process as a big house of cards collapsing, first in slow motion, eventually speeding up and up and up until it's even going a little faster than real-life-speed.

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Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.