Well, it isn't that much of a secret that the Earth is melting anyway. But so you know: a huge ice bridge which would have served as a port for the massive Canadian Coast Guard Ship Amundsen icebreaker is already gone.

The CCGS Amundsen icebreaker houses Canada's largest research project on the impact of climate change on the entire Arctic ice ecosystem - everything from the flora and fauna to the atmosphere. Part of the project entails studying the permanent ice pack of the Western Arctic but the CCGS Amundsen icebreaker can only go so far with its bulky cargo of sophisticated lab instruments.

The team of 200 researchers was confident about a massive ice bridge in the Amundsen gulf which would serve as a parking lot, protecting the ship from the fixed ice. But the ice bridge is nowhere to be found even if it has consistently appeared every winter across 120 kilometers of the gulf.

Instead, the team is left to improvise. They would have to fly there once a week to complete this four-year, US$ 40 million study. Had the ice bridge been around, they would have been conveniently riding their snowmobiles there.

It has been estimated that 1.3 million square kilometers of ice disappeared in the summer of 2007 from the permanent Arctic ice pack. Well, if the CCGS Amundsen team wanted to know the impact of climate change in the Arctic region, then it can't get any more clearer than that: ice bridges or the lack thereof.