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The Melting Arctic

Sleep and Memory

Area 51: Revealed

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Area 51. It’s the most famous military institution in the world that doesn’t o!cially exist. If it did, it would be found about 100 miles outside Las Vegas in Nevada’s high des-ert, tucked between an Air Force base and an abandoned nuclear testing ground. Then again, maybe not— the U.S. government refuses to say. You can’t drive anywhere close to it, and until recently, the airspace overhead was restrict-ed—all the way to outer space. Any mention of Area 51 gets redacted from o!cial documents, even those that have been declassified for decades.

It has become the holy grail for conspiracy theorists, with UFOlogists positing that the Pentagon reverse engi-neers flying saucers and keeps extraterrestrial beings stored in freezers. Urban legend has it that Area 51 is connected by underground tunnels and trains to other secret facilities around the country. In 2001, Katie Couric told Today Show audiences that 7 percent of Americans doubt the moon landing happened—that it was staged in the Nevada desert. Millions of X-Files fans believe the truth may be “out there,” but more likely it’s concealed inside Area 51’s Strangelove-esque hangars—buildings that, though confirmed by Google Earth, the government refuses to acknowledge.

The problem is the myths of Area 51 are hard to dis-pute if no one can speak on the record about what actually

happened there. Well, now, for the first time, someone is ready to talk—in fact, five men are, and their stories rival the most outrageous of rumors. Colonel Hugh “Slip” Slater, 87, was commander of the Area 51 base in the 1960s. Edward Lovick, 90, featured in “What Plane?” in LA’s March issue, spent three decades radar testing some of the world’s most famous aircraft (including the U-2, the A-12 OXCART and the F-117). Kenneth Collins, 80, a CIA experimental test pilot, was given the silver star. Thornton “T.D.” Barnes, 72, was an Area 51 special-projects engineer. And Harry Martin, 77, was one of the men in charge of the base’s half-million-gallon monthly supply of spy-plane fuels. Here are a few of their best stories—for the record:

On May 24, 1963, Collins flew out of Area 51’s restricted airspace in a top-secret spy plane code-named OXCART, built by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. He was flying over Utah when the aircraft pitched, flipped and headed toward a crash. He ejected into a field of weeds.

Almost 46 years later, in late fall of 2008, sitting in a co"ee shop in the San Fernando Valley, Collins remembers that day with the kind of clarity the threat of a national security breach evokes: “Three guys came driving toward me in a pickup. I saw they had the aircraft canopy in the back. They o"ered to take me to my plane.” Until that mo-

!"#!!"Aliens? UFOs? Here’s what really happened.

ment, no civilian without a top-secret security clearance had ever laid eyes on the airplane Collins was flying. “I told them not to go near the aircraft. I said it had a nuclear weapon on-board.” The story fit right into the Cold War backdrop of the day, as many atomic tests took place in Nevada. Spooked, the men drove Collins to the local highway patrol. The CIA disguised the accident as involving a generic Air Force plane, the F-105, which is how the event is still listed in o!cial records.

As for the guys who picked him up, they were tracked down and told to sign national security nondisclosures. As part of Collins’ own debriefing, the CIA asked the decorated pilot to take truth serum. “They wanted to see if there was anything I’d forgotten about the events leading up to the crash.” The Sodium Pento-thal experience went without a hitch—except for the reaction of his wife, Jane.

“Late Sunday, three CIA agents brought me home. One drove my car; the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I was loopy from the drugs. They hand-ed Jane the car keys and left without saying a word.” The only conclusion she could draw was that her husband had gone out and gotten drunk. “Boy, was she mad,” says Collins with a chuckle.

At the time of Collins’ accident, CIA pilots had been fly-ing spy planes in and out of Area 51 for eight years, with the express mission of providing the intelligence to prevent nuclear war. Aerial reconnaissance was a major part of the CIA’s preemptive e"orts, while the rest of America built bomb shelters and hoped for the best.

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Even though Slater considers himself a fighter pilot at heart—he flew 84 missions in World War II—the opportu-nity to work at Area 51 was impossible to pass up. “When I learned about this Mach-3 aircraft called OXCART, it was completely intriguing to me—this idea of flying three times the speed of sound! No one knew a thing about the pro-gram. I asked my wife, Barbara, if she wanted to move to Las Vegas, and she said yes. And I said, ‘You won’t see me but on the weekends,’ and she said, ‘That’s fine!’ “ At this recollection, Slater laughs heartily. Barbara, dining with us, laughs as well. The two, married for 63 years, are rarely apart today.

“We couldn’t have told you any of this a year ago,” Slat-er says. “Now we can’t tell it to you fast enough.” That is be-cause in 2007, the CIA began declassifying the 50-year-old OXCART program. Today, there’s a scramble for eyewitness-es to fill in the information gaps. Only a few of the original players are left. Two more of them join me and the Slaters for lunch: Barnes, formerly an Area 51 special-projects en-gineer, with his wife, Doris; and Martin, one of those over-seeing the OXCART’s specially mixed jet fuel (regular fuel explodes at extreme height, temperature and speed), with

his wife, Mary. Because the men were sworn to secrecy for so many decades, their wives still get a kick out of hearing the secret tales.

Barnes was married at 17 (Doris was 16). To support his wife, he became an electronics wizard, buying broken tele-vision sets, fixing them up and reselling them for five times the original price. He went from living in bitter poverty on a Texas Panhandle ranch with no electricity to buying his new bride a dream home before he was old enough to vote. As a soldier in the Korean War, Barnes demonstrated an un-canny aptitude for radar and Nike missile systems, which made him a prime target for recruitment by the CIA—which indeed happened when he was 22. By 30, he was handling nuclear secrets.

“The agency located each guy at the top of a certain field and put us together for the programs at Area 51,” says Barnes. As a security precaution, he couldn’t reveal his birth name—he went by the moniker Thunder. Coworkers trav-eled in separate cars, helicopters and airplanes. Barnes and his group kept to themselves, even in the mess hall. “Our special-projects group was the most classified team since the Manhattan Project,” he says.

“It wasn’t always called Area 51,” says Lovick, the physi-cist who developed stealth technology. His boss, legend-ary aircraft designer Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson, called the place Paradise Ranch to entice men to leave their families and “rough it” out in the Nevada desert in the name of sci-ence and the fight against the evil empire. “Test pilot Tony LeVier found the place by flying over it,” says Lovick. “It was a lake bed called Groom Lake, selected for testing because it was flat and far from anything. It was kept secret because the CIA tested U-2s there.”

When Frances Gary Powers was shot down over Sverd-lovsk, Russia, in 1960, the U-2 program lost its cover. But the CIA already had Lovick and some 200 scientists, engineers and pilots working at Area 51 on the A-12 OXCART, which would outfox Soviet radar using height, stealth and speed.

Col. Slater was in the outfit of six pilots who flew OX-CART missions during the Vietnam War. Over a Cuban meat and cheese sandwich at the Bahama Breeze restaurant o" the Las Vegas Strip, he says, “I was recruited for the Area after working with the CIA’s classified Black Cat Squadron, which flew U-2 missions over denied territory in Mainland China. After that, I was told, ‘You should come out to Nevada and work on something interesting we’re doing out there.’ “

Harry Martin’s specialty was fuel. Handpicked by the CIA from the Air Force, he underwent rigorous psychologi-cal and physical tests to see if he was up for the job. When he passed, the CIA moved his family to Nevada. Because OXCART had to refuel frequently, the CIA kept supplies at secret facilities around the globe. Martin often traveled to these bases for quality-control checks. He tells of preparing for a top-secret mission from Area 51 to Thule, Greenland. “My wife took one look at me in these arctic boots and this big hooded coat, and she knew not to ask where I was go-ing.”

So, what of those urban legends—the UFOs studied in secret, the underground tunnels connecting clandestine fa-cilities? For decades, the men at Area 51 thought they’d take their secrets to the grave. At the height of the Cold War, they cultivated anonymity while pursuing some of the coun-try’s most covert projects. Conspiracy theories were left to popular imagination. But in talking with Collins, Lovick, Slat-

er, Barnes and Martin, it is clear that much of the folklore was spun from threads of fact.

As for the myths of reverse engineering of flying sau-cers, Barnes o"ers some insight: “We did reverse engineer a lot of foreign technology, including the Soviet MiG fighter jet out at the Area”—even though the MiG wasn’t shaped like a flying saucer. As for the underground-tunnel talk, that, too, was born of truth. Barnes worked on a nuclear-rocket program called Project NERVA, inside underground cham-bers at Jackass Flats, in Area 51’s backyard. “Three test-cell facilities were connected by railroad, but everything else was underground,” he says.

And the quintessential Area 51 conspiracy—that the Pentagon keeps captured alien spacecraft there, which they fly around in restricted airspace? Turns out that one’s pretty easy to debunk. The shape of OXCART was unprece-dent-ed, with its wide, disk-like fuselage designed to carry vast quantities of fuel. Commercial pilots cruising over Nevada

at dusk would look up and see the bot-tom of OXCART whiz by at 2,000-plus mph. The aircraft’s tita-nium body, mov-ing as fast as a bullet, would reflect the sun’s rays in a way that could make anyone think, UFO.

In all, 2,850 OXCART test flights were flown out of Area 51 while Slater was in charge. “That’s a lot of UFO sightings!” Slater adds. Commercial pilots would report them to the FAA, and “when they’d land in California, they’d be met by FBI agents who’d make them sign nondisclosure forms.” But not everyone kept quiet, hence the birth of Area 51’s UFO lore. The sightings incited uproar in Nevada and the surrounding areas and forced the Air Force to open Project BLUE BOOK to log each claim.

Since only a few Air Force o!cials were cleared for OX-CART (even though it was a joint CIA/USAF project), many UFO sightings raised internal military alarms. Some gener-

als believed the Rus-sians might be send-

ing stealth craft over American skies to in-

cite paranoia and create widespread panic of alien

invasion. Today, BLUE BOOK findings are housed in 37 cubic

feet of case files at the National Archives—74,000 pages of reports.

A keyword search brings up no mention of the top-secret OXCART or Area 51.

Project BLUE BOOK was shut down in 1969—more than a year after OXCART was retired. But what continues at America’s most clandestine mili-tary facility could take another 40 years to disclose.

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From large-scale Pixar and Disney productions to small-budget independent films, 3D cinema is getting a bigger push than ever.

Reporting from Cannes, France -- The Cannes Film Festival has no shortage of big-budget 3-D spectacles: It opened with Pixar’s 3-D animated film “Up,” and Disney on Monday showed footage from its upcoming 3-D holiday movie “A Christmas Carol,” while fake snow decorated the landmark Carlton Hotel in the 80-degree Cannes weather.

But the immersive technology also is attracting a grow-ing crowd of independent filmmakers, some of whom are making -- and trying to sell -- 3-D movies on a fraction of Pixar’s and Disney’s budgets. They are con-vinced that the stereoscopic e!ect can help separate their films in a cluttered marketplace and drive moviegoers into theaters.

In a tiny booth not far from where the “Up” filmmakers walked the Cannes red carpet, 34-year-old Pavel Nikolajev was trying to drum up interest in “Duel 3D,” an action-fantasy film that the writer-director made for less than $100,000 in North Carolina.

A distributor from Turkey was watching scenes from

some of them completed and others just screenplays look-ing for underwriting.

“Duel 3D” is almost certainly the cheapest of the bunch. Several others are far more ambitious. The already filmed “Oceans 3D: Into the Deep” cost $14.5 million to make; and “Station 21: 3D,” scheduled to go into produc-tion next year, is budgeted at $45 million.

The films’ producers and sales agents hope that the strong box-o"ce receipts for recent 3-D movies such as “Monsters vs. Aliens” will improve their chances for sale.

In some international territories, the same film can do five times as much business in 3-D theaters as 2-D screens. Pixar Animation Studios, DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. and Walt Disney Co. have made a commitment to produce an array of 3-D titles in the coming years. Lionsgate is now developing a number of 3-D movies, convinced that the success of its “My Bloody Valentine” means 3-D horror, ac-tion and even sex-comedy titles can profit from the format.

Several sellers at Cannes said they were hopeful that director James Cameron’s 3-D movie “Avatar,” which de-buts Dec. 19, would open the floodgates for 3-D exhibition and distribution.

In a booth just a little bit fancier than Nikolajev’s, Isabel Pons was trying to catch buyers’ eyes with large posters for “Magic Journey to Africa 3D,” a $15-million family adventure and fantasy movie from Orbita Max, the same Spanish producers that made the documentary “Mystery of the Nile.”

Pons acknowledged that there’s a potential obstacle to 3-D theatrical distribution: There aren’t enough theaters equipped to show such movies.

“We have about 100 3-D screens in Spain,” Max said. “But every week, we are adding more screens.”

A shorter, documentary version of “Magic Journey” will be created to be shown in Imax theaters, most of which can show 3-D movies.

Some of these 3-D movies may never make it into wide release in U.S. theaters. The Latin American division of 20th Century Fox produced “The Happy Cricket and the Gigantic Insects,” a 3-D animated sequel to “The Happy Cricket,” a 2001 Brazilian film (“O Grilo Feliz”) that was released in the U.S. on DVD in 2006.

“That movie was a blockbuster in Russia,” said Helder Dacosta, whose Tropicalstorm Entertainment is in Cannes selling its 3-D sequel. He said the movie has been sold during the film festival to distributors in Turkey, Poland, Germany and Russia.

One of the most elaborate of the independently fi-nanced 3-D movies is the Australian production “Station 21: 3D,” a futuristic thriller. The film has at its center a ho-lographic character who should benefit from 3-D viewing.

“It will look a little bit better than the hologram of Princess Leia in the first ‘Star Wars’ movie,” said producer Laura Sivis, who has not yet started filming the movie and is trying to generate buyer interest from test footage.

“Three years ago, when we talked about making a 3-D movie, people just rolled their eyes at us. They thought 3-D would be a passing phase.”

the film on a 3-D-capable TV as Nikolajev, who was born in Kyrgyzstan and holds a master’s degree in information technology, tried to drum up business.“Everybody is shooting digital movies these days,” Niko-lajev said after the distributor, who seemed interested but

signed no contract, left. “It’s not that 2-D is boring. But it’s not that interesting anymore.”

Asked how sales were proceeding, the filmmaker said, “I’ve got a lot of interest from all over the world. Just not from the United States yet. But because it’s not a million-dollar production, I don’t have to sell it for a lot.”

Of the 4,500 movies being sold and 900 films being shown in the sales convention that runs parallel to the film festival here, there are more than a dozen new 3-D films,

The Red 3D

A cutting-edge

stereographic 3D

digital camera

Audiences watching 3D

movies in the 40s (right)

and today (left).

Monsters vs AliensA popular 3D children’s film re-cently released by DreamWorks

“It’s not that 2-D is boring. But it’s not that interesting anymore.”

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The dark side of Dubai

The wide, smiling face of Sheikh Mohammed – the absolute ruler of Dubai – beams down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more famil-iar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, a Shangri-La in the Middle East insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the region. He dominates the Manhattan-manqué skyline, beaming out from row after row of glass pyra-mids and hotels smelted into the shape of piles of golden coins. And there he stands on the tallest building in the world – a skinny spike, jabbing farther into the sky than any other human construction in history.But something has flickered in Sheikh Mohammed’s smile. The ubiquitous cranes have paused on the skyline, as if stuck in time. There are countless build-ings half-finished, seemingly abandoned. In the swankiest new constructions – like the vast Atlantis ho-tel, a giant pink castle built in 1,000 days for $1.5bn on its own artificial island – where rainwater is leaking from the ceilings and the tiles are falling o! the roof. This Nev-erland was built on the Never-Never – and now the cracks are beginning to show. Suddenly it looks less like Manhattan in the sun than Ice-land in the desert.

Two construction workers stand in front of the Burj Dubai - The tallest building in the world

There are three di!erent Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mo-hammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shout-ed at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Work-ers? What workers?

Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quaran-tined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunt-ed on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out.

Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patch-work of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means “City of Gold”. In the first camp I stop at – riven with the smell of sewage and sweat – the men

huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them.

Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. “To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell,” he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal’s village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takvka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they’d pay o! in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his fam-ily land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise.

As soon as he arrived at Dubai air-port, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusque-ly that from now on he would be work-ing 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was prom-ised. If you don’t like it, the company

A construction worker stands next to advertisements for what he has built.

told him, go home. “But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket,” he said. “Well, then you’d better get to work,” they replied.

Sahinal was in a panic. His family back home – his son, daughter, wife and parents – were waiting for money, ex-cited that their boy had finally made it. But he was going to have to work for more than two years just to pay for the cost of getting here – and all to earn less than he did in Bangladesh.

He shows me his room. It is a tiny, poky, concrete cell with triple-decker bunk-beds, where he lives with 11 other men. All his belongings are piled onto his bunk: three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, and a cellphone. The room stinks, because the lavatories in the corner of the camp – holes in the ground – are backed up with excrement and clouds of black flies. There is no air conditioning or fans, so the heat is “unbearable. You cannot sleep. All you do is sweat and scratch all night.” At the height of summer, people sleep on the floor, on the roof, anywhere where they can pray for a moment of breeze.

The water delivered to the camp in huge white contain-ers isn’t properly desalinated: it tastes of salt. “It makes us sick, but we have nothing else to drink,” he says.

The work is “the worst in the world,” he says. “You have to carry 50kg bricks and blocks of cement in the worst heat imaginable ... This heat – it is like nothing else. You sweat so much you can’t pee, not for days or weeks. It’s like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. You be-come dizzy and sick but you aren’t allowed to stop, except for an hour in the afternoon. You know if you drop anything or slip, you could die. If you take time o! sick, your wages are docked, and you are trapped here even longer.”

He is currently working on the 67th floor of a shiny new tower, where he builds upwards, into the sky, into the heat. He doesn’t know its name. In his four years here, he has nev-er seen the Dubai of tourist-fame, except as he constructs it floor-by-floor.

Is he angry? He is quiet for a long time. “Here, nobody shows their anger. You can’t. You get put in jail for a long time, then deported.” Last year, some workers went on strike after they were not given their wages for four months. The Dubai police surrounded their camps with razor-wire and water-cannons and blasted them out and back to work.

The “ringleaders” were imprisoned. I try a di!erent question: does Sohinal regret coming? All the men look down, awkwardly. “How can we think about that? We are trapped. If we start to think about regrets...” He lets the sen-tence trail o!. Eventually, another worker breaks the silence by adding: “I miss my country, my family and my land. We can grow food in Bangladesh. Here, nothing grows. Just oil and buildings.”

Construction workers sleeping in the shade during their 1 hour break.

Sahinal could well die out here. A Human Rights Watch study found there is a “cover-up of the true extent” of deaths from heat exhaustion, overwork and suicide, but the Indian consulate registered 971 deaths of their nation-als in 2005 alone. After this figure was leaked, the consul-ates were told to stop counting.

At night, in the dusk, I sit in the camp with Sohinal and his friends as they scrape together what they have left to buy a cheap bottle of spirits. They down it in one ferocious gulp. “It helps you to feel numb”, So-hinal says through a stinging throat. In the distance, the glistening Dubai skyline he built stands, oblivious.

Sahinal’s living quarters

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The Arctic sea ice cover continues to shrink and become thinner, according to satellite measurements and other data released yesterday, providing further evidence that the region is warming more rapidly than scientists had expected.

The data on this winter’s ice buildup came on the day that international ministers gathered in Washington to ad-dress issues facing Earth’s polar regions, which have been disproportionately a!ected by global warming. At the State Department, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting and the Arctic Council that the Obama administration will press for greater action on climate change and for passage of the Law of the Sea Treaty in order to help regulate expanded human activity in a warmer Arctic, including shipping, fish-ing and oil exploration.

Clinton said scientists are still struggling to understand the implications of the changes, “but the research made possible within the framework of the Antarctic Treaty has

shown us that catastrophic consequences await if we don’t take action soon.”

She added that the United States may propose that the Arctic Council’s member states -- including Russia, Cana-da, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland -- take steps to curb shorter-lived pollutants such as methane, soot (black carbon) and ozone that compound the e!ects of carbon dioxide in the polar regions.

“We know that short-lived carbon forcers like methane, black carbon and tropospheric ozone contribute significantly to the warm-ing of the Arctic,” Clinton said. “And because they are short-lived, they also give us an opportunity to make rapid progress if we work to limit them.”

Brooks Yeager, executive vice president for policy at the advocacy group Clean Air-Cool Planet, said such ef-forts could address some of the immediate e!ects scien-tists have detected at the poles. “We might be able to buy time for the Arctic system while we’re solving the global

Arctic ice levels this year are estimated to be lower than ever before.

How will this a!ect us?

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1981-2000 Median

2009

Sea Ice Area at Summer Minimum(Million Square Kilometeres)

Second Year Ice(1-2 Years Old)

Older Ice(>2 Years Old)

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4.00

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1978 2009

problem,” he said.The satellite data released by NASA and the National

Snow and Ice Data Center show that the maximum extent of the 2008-2009 winter sea ice cover was the fifth-low-est since researchers began collecting such information 30 years ago. The past six years have produced the six lowest maximums in that record, and the new data show that the percentage of older, thicker and more persistent ice shrank to its lowest level ever, at just 9.8 percent of the winter ice cover.

“We’re seeing an ice cover that’s younger and that’s thinner as we head into summer,” Walt Meier, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Cen-

ter, said in a telephone news conference. “It’s been a pretty sharp decline.”

The new evidence -- including satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 and 2006 was nine feet thick, a significant decline from the 1980s -- contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F. Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979.

Scientists have begun debating how soon the Arctic will lose its summer ice altogether, with some saying it could happen as early as 2015. White House science advis-

er John P. Holdren told the crowd at the State Department that the total disappearance of sea ice in the Arctic “may be far, far closer” than scientists thought just a few years ago.

Meier said the gradual loss of ice is already transforming the region. “There’s already impacts, in terms of the climate, in terms of the people,” he said.

The loss of sea ice in the Arctic will not directly raise global sea levels, researchers said, but will contribute to an overall ocean warming that could erode the Greenland ice sheet, which would a!ect sea levels. The disappearance of the polar ice cap could also a!ect global ocean circulation patterns, and its melting has already imperiled native spe-cies such as the polar bear.

Norway’s foreign minister, Jonas Gahr Stoere, painted a

stark picture of the climate change in the Arctic and Ant-arctic regions. “The ice is melting,” Stoere said. “We should all be worried.”

The latest Arctic sea ice data from NASA and the Na-tional Snow and Ice Data Center show that the decade-long trend of shrinking sea ice cover is continuing. New evidence from satellite observations also shows that the ice cap is thinning as well.

Arctic sea ice works like an air conditioner for the glob-al climate system. Ice naturally cools air and water masses, plays a key role in ocean circulation, and reflects solar radiation back into space. In recent years, Arctic sea ice has been declining at a surprising rate.

Scientists who track Arctic sea ice cover from space an-

nounced today that this winter had the fifth lowest maxi-mum ice extent on record. The six lowest maximum events since satellite monitoring began in 1979 have all occurred in the past six years (2004-2009).

Until recently, the majority of Arctic sea ice survived at least one summer and often several. But things have changed dramatically, according to a team of University of Colorado, Boulder, scientists led by Charles Fowler. Thin seasonal ice -- ice that melts and re-freezes every year -- makes up about 70 percent of the Arctic sea ice in win-tertime, up from 40 to 50 percent in the 1980s and 1990s. Thicker ice, which survives two or more years, now com-prises just 10 percent of wintertime ice cover, down from 30 to 40 percent.

According to researchers from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., the maximum sea ice extent for 2008-09, reached on Feb. 28, was 5.85 million square miles. That is 278,000 square miles less than the average extent for 1979 to 2000.

“Ice extent is an impor-tant measure of the health of the Arctic, but it only gives us a two-dimen-sional view of the ice cover,” said Walter Meier, re-

search scientist at the center and the University of Colora-do, Boulder. “Thickness is important, especially in the winter, because it is the best overall indicator of the health of the ice cover. As the ice cover in the Arctic grows thinner, it grows more vulnerable to melting in the summer.”

The Arctic ice cap grows each winter as the sun sets for several months and intense cold sets in. Some of that ice is natu-rally pushed out of the Arctic by

winds, while much of it melts in place during summer. The thicker, older ice that survives one or more summers is more likely to persist through the next summer.

Sea ice thickness has been hard to measure directly, so scientists have typically used estimates of ice age to ap-proximate its thickness. But last year a team of researchers

led by Ron Kwok of NASA’s Jet Propul-sion Laboratory in Pasadena,

Calif., produced the first map of

sea ice thickness over the entire Arctic basin.Using two years of data from NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and

land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), Kwok’s team estimated thickness and volume of the Arctic Ocean ice cover for 2005 and 2006. They found that the average winter volume of Arctic sea ice contained enough water to fill Lake Michi-gan and Lake Superior combined.

The older, thicker sea ice is declining and is being replaced with newer, thinner ice that is more vulner-able to summer melt, according to Kwok. His team found that seasonal sea ice averages about 6 feet in thickness, while ice that had lasted through more than one summer averages about 9 feet, though it can grow much thicker in

some locations near the coast.Kwok is currently working to extend the ICE-Sat estimate further, from 2003 to 2008, to see

how the recent decline in the area covered by sea ice is mirrored in changes in its

volume.“With these new data on both

the area and thickness of Arc-tic sea ice, we will be able

to better understand the sensitivity and vulner-

ability of the ice cover to changes in cli-

mate,” Kwok said.

while using far less energy than standard bulbs.

6. Use Less Hot Water.Buying Low-flow showerheads saves hot water and about 350 pounds of carbon di-oxide yearly.

7. Turn O! the Lights...and your TV, stereo and computer when you’re not using them.

8. Plant a TreeA single tree will absorb approximately one ton of carbon dioxide during its lifetime.

9. Get a Report Card from Your Utility CompanyMost utility companies provide free home energy au-dits to help you identify areas in their homes that may not be energy e!cient.

10. Encourage Others to ConserveShare information about recycling and energy conser-vation with your friends, neighbors and co-workers, and take opportunities to encourage public o!cials to establish programs and policies that are good for the environment.

TOP TEN THINGS YOU CAN DO TO REDUCE

GLOBAL WARMING

1. Reduce, Reuse, RecycleBy recycling half of your household

waste, you can save 2,400 pounds of car-bon dioxide annually.

2. Use Less Heat and Air ConditioningSetting your thermostat just 2 degrees lower in

winter and higher in summer could save about 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide each year.

3. Change a Light BulbCFLs also last 10 times longer than incandescent bulbs, use two-thirds less energy, and give o" 70 percent less heat.

4. Drive Less and Drive SmartEvery gallon of gas you save not only helps your budget, it also keeps 20 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

5. Buy Energy-E"cient ProductsHome appliances now come in a range of energy-e!cient models. Compact florescent bulbs are designed to provide more natural-looking light