The geographic North Pole was last covered with water about 50 million years ago, during the early part of the present Cenozoic Era. Known as the Age of Mammals and the Recent Life Era, this modern age, which saw the dawn of human beings, began 65 million years ago. During the Cenozoic Era, the continents which formed Pangea, the super continent, had begun to move into their present positions. As these continents drifted northward, they formed the shoreline of the Arctic Ocean which lies directly over and around the geographic North Pole.

About 15 million years into the Cenozoic Era (about 50 million years ago), the Arctic Ice Cap formed over the Arctic Ocean, virtually covering the entire sea with a sheet of ice. As the continents continued to move, climatic changes brought about by shifts in water and air currents caused the Earth to gradually cool down. This created the glaciers that mostly dominated the land masses through the end of the Great Ice Age in the Pleistocene Epoch, about 10,000 to 1.8 million years ago, and that still exist today on Greenland.

The same climatic conditions that created the glaciers, which are essentially great ice sheets formed on land, also formed the Arctic Ice Cap. Yet the ice sheet covering the Arctic Ocean rests directly on top of the ocean instead of land, and it has remained relatively stable and frozen since it was formed, until now.

Spanning 1500 miles across the top of the earth between Canada and Russia, the Arctic Ocean is completely frozen for much of the year. Although temperatures close to the Pole seldom rise above -10°C, the southern reaches of the Arctic Ocean thaw during the summer months allowing the whole Arctic icecap to move and break up. As the summer months advance, conditions across the whole Arctic Ocean become increasing treacherous as the movement opens up vast ‘rivers’ of unfrozen water (known as “leads”) or drives plates of ice together forming “pressure ridges” 30 feet high.

Daylight

The sun rises and sets only once a year at the North Pole. During the winter months the entire Arctic Ocean is plunged into continuous darkness. The sun returns to the region in early March and hovers just above the horizon for six months before setting again in September.

Even at the height of the summer, the sun viewed from the Pole is never more than 24 degrees above the horizon, as compared with 64 degrees in London. This oblique sunshine does little to warm the polar atmosphere and accounts for the perpetual cold. Temperatures in the Arctic are at their lowest in the early spring when the sun first returns to the region after the long winter and causes the normally still, cold air to move around, adding wind chill to air temperatures already below minus 40°C. As the summer advances temperatures gradually rise to minus 10°C.

Wildlife

Although the Arctic regions are home to a wide variety of animals, the ice of the Arctic Ocean remains the preserve of the Polar Bear, the only mammal adapted to hunt and survive in this environment. In contrast to most other land mammals, it is through the winter months that the Polar Bears thrive as the solid ice pack allows them to range far offshore in search of their primary sources of food, seals and fish.

In the summer months the melting ice forces Polar Bears to come ashore where they are poorly adapted for hunting and struggle to stay properly nourished. By Autumn, it is common to find thin, undernourished bears waiting near the coast for the ice to come in so that they can return to the Arctic Ocean and once again hunt in the conditions for which they are uniquely adapted.

Aside from Polar Bears, seals and whales are the only other mammals living in the Arctic Ocean. There is, however, an abundance of land based wildlife within the Arctic Circle. Caribou (large deer) and Musk Oxen both occur in substantial numbers and were an important source of food for early explorers. The region also supports a variety of smaller land mammals including wolves, foxes, wolverines, ermine (Arctic stoat) and hares.

Gray whales winter amid Arctic ice (by Doug O'Harra)

When scientists moored a couple of acoustic recorders in the Arctic Ocean northeast of Barrow in October 2003, they wanted to eavesdrop on the songs of bowhead, gray and other cetaceans as they feast on the polar ocean’s summer bounty. And then, as darkness fell and the ocean froze, the whales would exit though the Bering Strait and the sea would go silent.

After all, the great whales can die if caught in thick ice — three gray whales trapped in ever shrinking leads near Barrow triggered an international rescue in the fall of 1988. At least one animal disappeared before a Russian ice-breaker plowed a path to open water. But a few gray whales didn’t get the memo. Instead of joining 10,000 other Pacific grays on their 5,000-mile fall migration to wintering grounds in Mexico, the intelligent bottom-feeding invertebrate munchers spent the winter amid Alaska’s Arctic pack.

In a stunning finding that raises questions about accelerating climate change and undermines assumptions about gray whale behavior, an autonomous acoustic device anchored 4,100 feet beneath the surface of the frozen Beaufort Sea recorded gray whale calls throughout the winter of 2003-04. “Because this is the first-ever winter-long acoustic study, we cannot be certain that gray whales have not over-wintered in the Beaufort Sea in the past,” the authors wrote in a report published in the journal Arctic. “However, a combination of increasing population size and habitat alteration associated with sea ice reduction and warming in the Alaskan Arctic may be responsible for the extra-seasonal gray whale occurrence near Barrow.”

No one knows for sure what gray whales eat northeast of Barrow, though the animals have been seen along the shelf break only about 25 miles out in summer. Nor do the researchers quite know what to make of the presence of the whales all winter. Could they have been trapped, just like the whales in 1988? Satellite images showed enough plenty of leads — making the winter of 2003-04 one of the highest open-water winters on record. The scientists concluded the whales were not trapped. Other explanations? Gray whales have been expanding in population, and seasonal migration has drifted later in the season in recent decades. Climate warming, changes in prey and foraging habits, and less sea ice might have contributed. Read the full article: Here.

The Arctic Ice Shelf and the Polar Bear

Most of the coastline along Russia and Canada's north is ice-free in summer, which is a distinct change from the recent past. Most people have heard a great deal about the ice caps melting - but a vicious cycle is often overlooked. The expanding Arctic Sea absorbs more heat than ice. Ice reflects a large amount of heat from the sun, but the liquid water absorbs it and slowly transfers it to the ice, actually accelerating the process. The more ice melts, the faster the remaining ice will follow suit. The melting Arctic Shelf also spells the end for the polar bear, which lives on the ice and hunt for seals whilst swimming between ice masses. Polar bears have already started to drown whilst looking for food as they have been unable to find ice to rest upon. Predictions see all the ice in the Arctic melting by the end of this century, but the polar bear could be extinct 50 years before that.

COUNTERPOINT

Surely you’ve heard the media hyperventalating about a supposedly shrinking arctic ice cap, drowning polar bears, the end of the world as we know it, yadda yadda, woof woof…

But what the media haven’t been telling you —and won’t tell you— is that the antarctic ice cap is bigger than ever before. In fact there’s a great deal they haven’t been telling you lately and won’t be telling you anytime soon —like reporting on any of the 500 peer-reviewed scientific studies that dispute the findings of the anthropogenic global warming doom-sayers. Or reporting on any of the increasing number of experts who believe current climate change isn’t man made at all, but part of a natural cycle of warming and cooling caused by fluctuations in the sun's output.

Are We Living in a New Geologic Epoch? Read the article and weigh in on the debate.