A group of Russian scientists had to abandon their polar station near Svalbard when the ice their station was standing on started to melt away, three months too early.

The polar station was placed on a huge flake of ice last year and the scientists expected to be able to stay on the station for one year. But now, after only nine months, the once so huge flak of ice had melted from 15 to 0,12 square kilometres forcing the scientists to abandon their polar station.

It’s clearly not easy being a polar scientist these days!

Source: DN/TT-NTB

Iceland has killed two polar bears since the U.S. Department of Interior formally listed the polar bear as a “threatened” species a few weeks ago.

The first polar bear, named Björn Björnesson, came to Iceland in the beginning of June this year. The polar bear was shot as soon as he was spotted for fears he would get into the nearest village. According to the hunters, killing the polar bear was the only solution as it would take to long to get the anaesthetic that was on the other side of the island.

The polar bear had probably travelled the 29 miles (47 kilometres) from Greenland on a flake of ice and swim the last miles to Iceland.

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It is a fact that global warming affects the icebergs in a most dramatic way. The greenhouse effect is to be blamed, as it is the cause of global warming. How does that make the sea level rise? Well first of all when water is heated it expands. But also since an iceberg is 99% ice it starts to melt as soon as the temperature is over 0 degrees, making it just too easy for the icebergs to start melting.

Icebergs are huge, the largest one is 12,000 cubic miles. So, if you were to melt it you would get an awful lot of water. Also there are many, many icebergs on earth, so if all of them melted you would have millions of gallons of water. Icebergs won’t melt completely, but enough to make the sea level rise quite a bit.

Scientists used to say that by the end of the century the sea may have risen up to three centimetres. That didn’t sound a lot, but it really is. And now, scientists have started to realise that their first calculation was far too positive for our case, since nothing is done to stop global warming and the process of melting ice becomes quicker and quicker.

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