Arctic storms seen worsening; threat to oil, ships

OSLO (Reuters) – Arctic storms could worsen because of global warming in a threat to possible new businesses such as oil and gas exploration, fisheries or shipping, a study showed on Wednesday.

“Large increases in the potential for extreme weather events were found along the entire southern rim of the Arctic Ocean, including the Barents, Bering and Beaufort Seas,” according to the study of Arctic weather by scientists in Norway and Britain.

A shrinking of sea ice around the North Pole, which thawed to a record low in the summer of 2007, was likely to spawn more powerful storms that form only over open water and can cause hurricane-strength winds.

“The bad news is that as the sea ice retreats you open up a lot of new areas to this kind of extreme weather,” said Erik Kolstad of the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Change in Norway who wrote the study with a British Antarctic Survey researcher.

Potential new businesses in the North — such as fisheries, oil and gas or shipping — would be vulnerable to extremes caused by polar lows and arctic fronts, the researchers wrote in the journal Climate Dynamics.

Reuters