Study casts doubt on global melt-down fears

AARON SPITZER

IQALUIT — You know all that talk you’ve been hearing about the Arctic sea ice turning to slush?

Well, if Greg Holloway is right, it turns out the ice is barely melting at all.

Holloway, a researcher with the Ocean Sciences Institute in Sidney, B.C., revealed that conclusion at an international meeting of scientists in Iqaluit last week.

Speaking before scores of researchers at the annual Arctic Science Summit, Holloway said that contrary to the startling conclusions of recent studies, the ice that floats on the Arctic Ocean isn’t getting thinner.

Instead, he said, it has simply been “redistributed.”

Holloway’s work contradicts the findings of the famous 1999 Rothrock study, which seemed to show that the thickness of Arctic ice has decreased 43 per cent in the last 40 years.

Rothrock’s study was conducted by comparing ice measurements made by submarines in the Arctic Ocean since 1958.

But according to Holloway, the submarines simply weren’t measuring in the right place.

According to Holloway’s scientific models, while the ice in parts of the Arctic has indeed thinned, elsewhere — where the subs weren’t travelling — it has in fact grown thicker.

“The submarines missed the shift,” reported Holloway. He deemed their oversights a “fluke.”

The thinning and thickening of Arctic ice is caused by wind patterns, and nearly balances out, said Holloway.

Therefore, the actual decrease in ice volume has been more like 3 per cent per decade over the last two decades — still a loss, but just a fraction of what was reported in the Rothrock study.

Holloway said the 3 per cent figure is small enough that it could have been caused by natural variations in ice volume, rather than by melting caused by human-induced climate change.