How Thick Is That Ice

We hear it's all melting, these days all the time, so it must be real thick, right. Well one of the first visitors to the North Pole was the submarine USS Skate first surfaced at the geographic North Pole 17 March 1959. The photo below was taken at about that time.



A close examination of the ice leaning on the deck shows it's less than a few feet or so thick. There really isn't much floating at the North Pole. One thing they were concerned with, so they toolk a hard look with the periscope before venturing out, Polar bears, who may have thought a really big and edible seal was coming up.

The North Pole has been 'ice free' many times before, and last year, the unusually lean ice pack was determined to be the results of winds and currents.

Then of Course there is the recent discovery of massive volcanoes under the Arctic Ocean pm the Gakkel Ridge in the vicinity of the North Pole. Al Gore and his Gaia groupies are not happy about that.

The North Pole Is Melting

Surprised scientists find that their theories of how undersea volcanoes were thought to behave were wrong. Even when the volcanoes are miles deep under water, they can violently erupt and spew rock, lava and huge quantities of hot gases of all sorts.

Even under the Arctic ice cap.

New evidence deep beneath the Arctic ice suggests that a series of underwater volcanoes have erupted in violent explosions in the past decade.

Hidden 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) beneath the Arctic surface, the volcanoes can range up to more than a mile (2 kilometers) in diameter and a few hundred yards (meters) tall. They formed along the Gakkel Ridge, a lengthy crack in the ocean crust where two rocky plates are spreading apart, pulling new melted rock to the surface.

Until now, scientists thought undersea volcanoes only dribbled lava from cracks in the seafloor. The extreme pressure from the overlying water makes it difficult for gas and magma to blast outward…..

Robert Reeves-Sohn of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and his colleagues discovered jagged, glassy fragments of rock scattered around the volcanoes, suggesting that explosive eruptions occurred between 1999 and 2001.

Now there is this standard disclaimer that any of these volcanoes could possibly have anything to do with the melting of Arctic ice is pure fiction, right? Huge volcanoes under the North Pole, melting the Arctic sea ice, naw couldn't be, could it? How would it warm the water it's so deep. I wonder, is the calderas still hot down there? Yes I know it sounds convoluted that volcanoes couldn't possible melt the ice above them and change the Arctic currents, but these days you have to be politically correct.

While much is made by the true believers and the media (yes, that was redundant, wasn't it?) about the melting of Arctic ice, very little is written about the rapidly growing Antarctic ice. And it is growing very rapidly, indeed. See for yourself: North Pole, South Pole. Here's the Southern anomaly. That is not a declining trend, folks.