North Pole may have no ice this summer: US expert

0 Comments | AFP, June, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) — There could briefly be no ice at the North Pole this summer, a US scientist said Friday, an event that would mark a new stage in the melting of the Arctic ice sheets due to global warming.

"We could have no ice at the North Pole at the end of this summer," Mark Serreze, a scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, told AFP in an interview.

"And the reason here is that the North Pole area right now is covered with very thin ice and this ice we call first-year ice, the ice that tends to melt out in the summer."

If the ice, albeit briefly, were to break up completely this summer it would be the first time this had happened in human history.

Serreze put the chances of this occurring at 50 percent -- if...