SCIENTIST STUDYING ARCTIC ICE MELT MAKES STARTLING DISCOVERY

Stonnhafen Ice Shelf, Lapland - 04/12/07 As he’s done every day since 1994 Canadian meteorologist Per Larrson woke up at dawn on a recent Saturday, drank seven cups of instant coffee then headed out into the bitter cold to pull ice samples from this desolate ice shelf some 1,000 nautical miles from the Novia Scotian coast. In a telephone interview Larrson said he wasn’t expecting any surprises.

“I’ve been out here 13 frickin’ years, by myself, and haven’t observed anything,” he said, “Any-thing. Then all of a sudden I’m reeling in (ice sample) K-544 from its 6-meter deep shaft and wham, right there, right next to my foot, I see it. Just like that. The last thing on earth I - or any of my colleagues - would have expected to find out here. My pen.”

The discovery of Larrson's pen – lost 11 years earlier - has created controversy and turned conventional assumptions about global warming on their head, experts say. The pen has also become a political football in the ongoing debate over the severity of rising planetary temperatures.

The writing instrument, a Mont Blanc Meisterstuck Series Black-and-Platinum Homage to W.A. Mozart ball-point, had been a gift to Larrson from his father for having finished graduate school and for having cleaned his room and folded his laundry before going to the movies with friends.

“That pen meant so much to me,” Larrson said. “It was the only gift my father ever gave me if you don’t count his eyebrows. When I lost it on that vast ice sheet the scientific community basically agreed with my hypothesis that it would never be found. And that if it were found that it would be very cold. I’m happy to have the pen back, because of its weightiness and clean design, but it also calls my life’s work into question.”

Larrson is to publish the finding in the January edition of the prestigious Canadian science quarterly, Who’d a Thunk It! United Nations officials hope the report will cajole top greenhouse gas emitters like the United States to reduce polluting. U.N. Green House Gas Project Development Officer Moze Zubikwe brought up the startling find at the Global Conference on Global Warming underway this week in Bali.

“Whoever’s lost shit in the snow,” Zubikwe told conference attendees, “knows damn well that you almost never find it. My daughter lost a ferret in Tierra del Fuego. The snow does not give up her dead. Unless she is melting.”

In Geneva this week Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore refused to weigh in on the development, saying only that he’d never owned a Mont Blanc pen. He used his acceptance speech to urge people to recycle ink.

“By cutting out individual letters from junk mail, books and personal diaries and then rearranging them to form new sentences we can reduce ink consumption by 4 million pens a year. Those pens in turn can be used as straws or to build little model forts with glue recycled from livestock remains recycled from hot dogs.”

On Wednesday the Nobel Committee said it had no plans to take Gore’s prize back.

Larrson is to travel to a conference on rising sea levels in Miami next week where he’ll be given a research grant to follow up on his find plus a pocket protector. Accompanying him will be famed French ice sculptor Yves Leposte. Leposte’s work became the focus of another study on global warming after several of his statues showed up melted after being shipped to his home in Key West.

Weheeziem Buktr contributed to this report from Istanbul.