Arctic Ocean could be largely ice free within a decade

The Arctic Ocean could be largely ice free in summer within a decade; scientists announced. This past spring scientists had taken measurements along a 280-mile (450-kilometer) route across the northern part of the Beaufort Sea (map). Most of the ice, they found, was young and thin. With a larger part of the region now first-year ice, it is clearly more vulnerable, expedition leader and sea-ice expert Peter Wadhams of the University of Cambridge in England, said in a statement. The Arctic Ocean ice cover last spring was 6 feet (1.8 meters) thick, on average, indicating that it was only about a year old, the explorers said. More durable, multi-year ice, by contrast, is about nine feet (three