Scientists who cancelled their Arctic expedition due to thick ice conditions haves an interesting excuse for why they had to abandon their research project — climate change.
“We’re doing a large-scale climate change study and before we can even get going on it, climate change is conspiring to force us to cancel that study,” David Barber, a University of Manitoba scientist who lead the expedition, told The Guardian Wednesday.
Barber’s expedition set out in late May after being caught in 25-foot thick ice off the northern coast of Newfoundland. The expedition was forced to turn back after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for a four-year project to study the effects of global warming on Hudson Bay.
Now, Barber and fellow researchers are blaming their botched expedition on global warming, or climate change, as they call it.
Their evidence? Not much, except the opinions of some scientists involved — at least, The Guardian didn’t present any evidence otherwise. The paper just assumed climate change was the culprit.
Interestingly enough, The Guardian blamed a similar event in 2013 as a product of “weather” and not “climate change.” That year, a Russian icebreaker carrying scientists ended up stuck in thick Antarctic sea ice.
“It’s not something you would expect to see there and not something we’ve seen there before,” Barber said. “In the high Arctic, climate change is causing the ice to get thinner and there to be less of it. What that does is that it increases the mobility of ice.”
Scientists studied the ice around them while they were stuck. They noticed lots of multi-year ice more common closer to the North Pole. However, what happened to scientists could be a weather-related event.
