"We could have no ice at the North Pole at the end of this summer," Mark Serreze, a scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, told AFP in an interview.

"And the reason here is that the North Pole area right now is covered with very thin ice and this ice we call first-year ice, the ice that tends to melt out in the summer."

If the ice, albeit briefly, were to break up completely this summer it would be the first time this had happened in human history.

Serreze put the chances of this occurring at 50 percent -- if it does happen, in September "it's possible" that ships could sail from Alaska right to the North Pole.

Last summer, melting ice allowed ships through the Arctic's Northern Passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for longer than ever before.

Serreze pointed out that even if there were no ice left at the North Pole, there would be ice in other parts of the Arctic Ocean this summer.

But he recognized the symbolism of an ice-free North Pole in the minds of the public, and said it was yet another indication of the environmental changes taking place because of global warming.

"There should be ice at the North Pole, and there might not be at the end of the summer and that is telling that something is wrong," he said.

"Clearly if you look over what we have seen in the past three years and where we were headed, we are in ... this long-term decline and we may have no ice at all in the Arctic Ocean in summer by 2030 or so," he said.

He recalled that a few years ago, such a scenario was not expected to happen until between 2050 and 2100. Personally, he said that five years ago, he would not have imagined the situation occurring now.

In last year's Arctic summer, the surface of the ice sheet in mid-September was the "the least sea ice that we have ever seen in satellite record, probably the least in a century," Serreze noted.

The sheet melted by 23 percent, breaking the previous record from 2005.

Arctic ice begins to melt in about mid-June and reaches its thinnest level around mid-September, before beginning to freeze over again and reaching a maximum around mid-March.

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions to reduce the rate of global warming should slow down the effect of such melting but to reverse the trend will take a long time, Serreze said.

On the upside, the melting of the Arctic ice sheet could help ships by providing an alternative route around the world to the Panama Canal, while it has also made accessible areas rich in natural resources, experts say.

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