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The Open Polar Sea was a conjectured ice-free body of water that was believed to encircle the North Pole.Although this theory was widely accepted and served as a basis for many exploratory expeditions aimed at reaching the North Pole by sea or discovering a navigable route between Europe and the Pacific via the North Pole, it was ultimately proven to be untrue.
Explorers thought that an Open Polar Sea close to the North Pole must exist. [17] The belief that a route lay to the far north persisted for several centuries and led to numerous expeditions into the Arctic. Many ended in disaster, including that by Sir John Franklin in 1845.
HMS Racehorse and HMS Carcass in the ice, engraving after John Cleveley the Younger, from Phipps' 1774 book. The 1773 Phipps expedition towards the North Pole was a British Royal Navy expedition suggested by the Royal Society and especially its vice president Daines Barrington, who believed in an ice-free Open Polar Sea.
Even quite late in the century, the eminent authority Matthew Fontaine Maury included a description of the Open Polar Sea in his textbook The Physical Geography of the Sea (1883). Nevertheless, as all the explorers who travelled closer and closer to the pole reported, the polar ice cap is quite thick and persists year-round.
The first sea ice-free September could occur as early as the 2030s, the study found. Arctic sea ice has been declining for decades but has shrunk at an even faster rate in the past 20 years.
Polar bear in Manitoba, Canada. November 2004. Polar seas is a collective term for the Arctic Ocean (about 4-5 percent of Earth's oceans) and the southern part of the Southern Ocean (south of Antarctic Convergence, about 10 percent of Earth's oceans). In the coldest years, sea ice can cover around 13 percent of the Earth's total surface at its ...
Majestic, increasingly hungry and at risk of disappearing, the polar bear is dependent on something melting away on our warming planet: sea ice. In the harsh and unforgiving Arctic, where frigid ...
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