Important North Pole Update: It’s Frozen Again

Important North Pole Update: It’s Frozen Again

Brace yourself, ladies and gentlemen, for some breaking somewhat-climate-change-related news coming out of the Arctic. The North Pole that just one week ago looked like a lake on the top of planet Earth, no longer looks like a lake. It’s frozen now, just like it usually is.

The internet exploded at the end of July when eye-catching images surfaced of a large body of water where the North Pole ice cap should be, quite obviously because it appeared to be some awful consequence of global warming. The two phenomena aren’t strictly related, though, according to scientists from the North Pole Environmental Observatory who were quick with the realism.

“The formation of these ponds and their disappearance is part of a natural cycle,” Alex Schweiger head of the Applied Physics Laboratory’s Polar Science Center at the University of Washington said last week. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore any potential links. He told LiveScience, “It’s important to recognise that these ponds may be linked to global warming, but the questions are more: How many and how deep they are, and when they appear and when they drain.”

It’s entirely possible that the ice on the North Pole might even melt again this year, and of course, it’s possible that the internet will freak out again. But it’s normal. That does not mean, however, that we don’t have some serious climate change-related problems on our hands. No siree, it does not. [Discovery News]


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.