Melting ice opens ocean for traffic

Rapidly melting ice in Alaska's Arctic is opening up a new navigable ocean in the extreme north, allowing oil tankers, fishing vessels and even cruise ships to venture into a realm once trolled mostly by indigenous hunters.
The Coast Guard expects so much traffic that it opened two temporary stations on the nation's northernmost waters, anticipating the day when an ocean the size of the contiguous United States could be ice-free most of the summer.

"We have to prepare for the world coming to the Arctic," said Rear Adm. Gene Brooks, commander of the Coast Guard's Alaska district.

Scientists say global warming has melted the polar sea ice each summer to half the size it was in the 1960s, opening vast stretches of water. Last year, it thawed to its lowest level on record.

The rapid melting has raised speculation that Canada's Northwest Passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans could one day become a regular shipping lane.

But scientists caution that it could be centuries before the Arctic is completely ice-free all year round.

Still, conservative estimates indicate the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free in the summer within 20 years, although some scientists believe that will occur much sooner.

Greenland glacier cracking
In northern Greenland, a part of the Arctic that had seemed immune from global warming, new satellite images show a growing giant crack and an 11-square-mile chunk of ice hemorrhaging off a major glacier, scientists said last week.

And that's led the university professor who spotted the wounds in the massive Petermann glacier to predict disintegration of a major portion of the Northern Hemisphere's largest floating glacier within the year.

If it does worsen and other northern Greenland glaciers melt faster, then it could speed up sea level rise, already increasing because of melt in southern Greenland.

The crack is 7 miles long and about half a mile wide. It is about half the width of the 500-square-mile floating part of the glacier. Other smaller fractures can be seen in images of the ice tongue, a long narrow sliver of the glacier.

"The pictures speak for themselves," said Jason Box, a glacier expert at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University who spotted the changes while studying new satellite images. "This crack is moving, and moving closer and closer to the front. It's just a matter of time till a much larger piece is going to break off. ... It is imminent."

The chunk that came off the glacier between July 10 and July 24 is about half the size of Manhattan and doesn't worry Box as much as the cracks. The Petermann glacier had a larger breakaway ice chunk in 2000. But the overall picture worries some scientists.

MAGNETISM: No role in treating water
Magnets have no significant role in treating water, despite the claims of their manufacturers, according to a new study by the National Consumer Affairs Center of Japan.

So-called magnetic water treatment devices, which are said to remove and reduce residual chlorine and toxic substances through magnetism, have practically no effect, the center said last week.

THE BRAIN: Special face center found
Neuroscientists have identified a pea-sized region in the brain that reacts more strongly to faces than it does to cars, dogs, houses or body parts.

"The evidence is overwhelming that there is a specialized system dedicated to processing faces and not other objects," said Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

It's called the fusiform face area because it vaguely resembles a spindle -- fusus in Latin. It's about halfway back in the head, near the bottom of the visual cortex, the part of the brain than handles vision. Information about the pea-size discovery was published last week in the journal Nature.

Most people have two FFAs, one on each side of the head; the one on the right is dominant, the other a backup.

Researchers say evolution may explain why humans and other primates developed a chunk of brain tissue dedicated to face recognition -- it helped them quickly spot friends and foes.

Understanding how face recognition works can have practical applications, Tsao said. Insights into these brain circuits may help prevent or treat depression, autism or social disorders.