The Obama administration has “released more than a thousand intelligence images of Arctic ice,” following a declassification request by the National Academy of Sciences. These high-resolution spy photos of rapid sea ice loss off the northern coast of Alaska, kept classified by the Bush administration, show “the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic”:
The newly-declassified images also reveal the retreat of glaciers in Washington and Alaska. USGS scientist John Crowe tells ThinkProgress that “security issues” prevented the U.S. Geological Survey from launching the Global Fiducials Library website until now, saying he had been “working for some time to get this data to the public.” The same day the images were made public, NOAA anounced that the world’s ocean surface temperature in June 2009 was the warmest on record.