Peter Wadhams, of the Scott Polar Research Institute, said that for the fifth winter in the last seven years, a huge tongue of shelf ice had failed to form in the Greenland sea.
Arctic ice is both thinning and dwindling.
One US climate scientist has warned that if the Gulf stream was turned off, Britain and Ireland would experience temperatures familiar on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen. Temperatures in Britain would drop about 5C and Norway would suffer a 10C fall. The Gulf stream flows north from the Caribbean, keeping Britain at least 5C warmer than expected at its latitude. Britain's chief scientist, Sir Robert May, once calculated that it delivered 27,000 times the warmth that all Britain's power stations could supply. It merges with the north Atlantic current and the encounter of this giant, warm surface river with the Arctic winter ice is a powerful part of the convection machine which keeps the ocean swirling.