What climate change looks like in the Arctic

livemint.com:

The history of exploration in the Arctic by European and North American expeditions is littered with gruesome ways to die. The challenges of navigating the merciless landscape are many, which is why the first humans to travel over the surface of the frozen Arctic Ocean to reach the North Pole, the geographical top of the world, arrived as late as 1969—the same year astronauts made it to the surface of the moon. It is no longer possible to travel from land across Arctic Ocean pack ice to the North Pole as they did in 1969.

There simply isn’t enough ice. Most teams now start out not from land, but from sea ice some 60 miles away from the Pole. Yet even these partial journeys have become tenuous, given rising temperatures over recent decades.

Sea ice that was once solid and stable well into summer now becomes fractured in spring. The season for traveling by ski near the North Pole has shrunk to just three weeks in April. It gets shorter every year.Explorers have responded by finding new ways to traverse the Arctic Ocean, some setting out in the darkness of winter before the sea ice has weakened, others dragging canoes and kayaks with them to cope with ever larger stretches of open water between ice floes.The first time I traveled to the North Pole was in 2015.

I was a guide on a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker, taking adventurous tourists back and forth from the Siberian coast. The 14-story ship’s massive spoon-shaped bow crushed a path through the frozen sea, sending blocks of vibrant turquoise ice the size of houses tumbling along the sides. The ice seemed formidable, but I knew it to be in a precarious state of decline.