Washington Post: Big waves like those fit for surfing are not what we think of when contemplating the Arctic Ocean. The water is ice-covered most of the time -- and it takes large expanses of open sea plus wind to produce mighty surf.
So the fact that researchers have now measured swells of more than 16 feet in the Arctics Beaufort Sea, just north of Alaska, is a bit of a stunner. Swells of that size, researchers say, have the potential to break up Arctic ice even faster than the melt underway there for decades...