Arctic sea ice thinnest ever going into spring

The Arctic is treading on thinner ice than ever before. Researchers say that as spring begins, more than 90 percent of the sea ice in the Arctic is only 1 or 2 years old. That makes it thinner and more vulnerable than at anytime in the past three decades, according to researchers with NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado.

"We're not set up well for summertime," ice data center scientist Walt Meier said Monday. "We're in a very precarious situation."

Young sea ice in the Arctic often melts in the spring and summer. If it survives for two years, then it becomes the type of thick sea ice that is key. But the past two years were warm, and there's more young, thin ice at the top of the world.

In normal winters, thick sea ice - often about 10 feet thick or more - extends from the northern boundaries of Greenland and Canada almost to Russia. This year, the thick ice cap barely penetrates the bull's-eye of the Arctic Circle.

The amount of thick sea ice hit a record wintertime low of just 378,000 square miles this year, down 43 percent from last year, Meier said. The amount of older sea ice that was lost is larger than the state of Texas.

"That thick ice really traps ocean heat; it keeps the planet in its current state of balance," said Waleed Abdalati, director of the Center for the Study of Earth from Space at the University of Colorado and NASA's former chief ice scientist. "When we start to diminish that, the state of balance is likely to change, tip one way or another."

Sea ice is important because it reflects sunlight away from Earth. The more it melts, the more heat is absorbed by the ocean, heating up the planet even more, said NASA polar regions program manager Tom Wagner. That warming also can change weather patterns worldwide and it alters the ecosystems for animals such as polar bears.

The Arctic essentially acts as a refrigerator for the rest of the globe. And the amount of sea covered by ice - thick or thin - has been shrinking at a rate of about 3 percent a decade in the Arctic.

This year, the maximum ice cover of 5.85 million square miles - reached on Feb. 28 - was higher than four of the previous five years. But it was still the fifth lowest since record-keeping began in 1979.

Usually, younger, thin ice accounts for about 70 percent of the ice cover. This year it reached 90 percent, Meier said.

And the problems of global warming caused melt is being seen at the other pole, too.

The U.S. Geological Survey last week released a detailed map of the Antarctic coastline and found dwindling and even disappearing ice shelves.

The map itself was finished in the middle of last year, but the previous Interior Department didn't want to release it and other Antarctic maps, said map co-author Richard Williams Jr., a glaciologist for the USGS. The report with the map bears the 2008 date and the previous interior secretary's name on it.

The map shows found for the first time that an entire ice shelf - the Wordie ice shelf on the western end of the Antarctic peninsula- has essentially disappeared. In 1966, it was 772 square miles. In addition, about 4,500 square miles of the Larsen ice shelf is gone.

"The map portrays one of the most rapidly changing areas on Earth, and the changes in the map are widely regarded as among the most profound, unambiguous examples of the effects of global warming on Earth," the USGS report concludes.

taken from: jakarta post

SBY points finger at elections commission

The General Elections Commission (KPU) is fully responsible for the 2009 elections, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said Thursday, in response to demands that he explain why millions of eligible voters were disenfranchised.

“While up until the 1999 elections the party responsible for the elections was the president, with the KPU reporting to the President, this is not the case in the 2009 elections,” he said in a televized address at the presidential palace, citing the current law on elections.

“Therefore the role of the government, the political parties and elements of society is to assist the KPU,” Yudhoyono said, exactly a week after legislative elections.

A number of organizations have filed lawsuits against the government, the Home Ministry and the Elections Commission, over elections violations related to the voter lists. A number of political parties plan to file similar lawsuits.

Ahead of the April 9 polls many citizens across the country said they had found that they were not on the list of eligible voters, even though they had identity cards and had lived in their area for a long time.

An analyst has suggested that at least 10 million citizens were disenfranchised, estimating that 20 residents at each of more than 500,000 polling stations were not on the list of over 171 million eligible voters.

The President was, however, quick to add that other parties shared the blame. The KPU, he said, had invited political parties and legislative candidates, along with local election committees, to give feedback on the provisional voter lists.

The task shows the division of labor between the KPU, the election supervisory body, the government, political parties and citizens, Susilo said.

"But clearly determining the eligible voters' list is the authority of the KPU," he said.

He added that as president he had issued all the necessary regulations to help the commission with its task.

Based on input from several governors Yudhoyono said there was both a "lack of information from the KPU" and also a "lack of response" mainly from candidates, the local administrations and citizens.

The President said he was "deeply concerned" with the voter list problem, but added that suspicions of cheating without evidence would be "premature and bad politics". Yet he "agreed 100 percent" that alleged violations should be legally processed and that the perpetrators should be "firmly punished."

Meanwhile, KPU chairman Abdul H. Anshary ruled out demands to annul the results of the elections, the final tally of which is expected to be announced on May 9.

"There's no strong reason," he said Thursday.

"There has to be evidence. Besides, nothing in the law justifies the annulment of the election's result."

Any shortcomings "would not have been intentional," he said.

He urged citizens who were unregistered to ensure they were listed for July's presidential election.

Election expert Hadar Gumay cited the law, saying it does not provide the possibility of repeating elections based on unregistered voters.

A revote would only be possible "if there was a lawsuit stating

that the elections law is unconstitutional, given that the Constitution guarantees the citizen's right to vote," he said.