The thickness and concentration of ice is worse than we have ever seen

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Thick sea ice is hampering shipping in the Canadian Arctic.

A cargo ship made it to Resolute Bay, Nunavut this weekend after being anchored for four days due to thick sea ice.

The Rosaire A. Desgagnés dropped its anchor on Saturday about 18 kilometres from the Nunavut hamlet. It sat there until Wednesday when it was unloaded.

The success was likely welcome news for Waguih Rayes, general manager of Desgagnés Transarctik Inc., which oversees several Arctic ships as the managing partner for Nunavut Sealink and Supply Inc.

An unusual amount of ice and a swamped coast guard made Arctic shipping more difficult than usual this year, according to Rayes. He told CBC that he was recently on a morning phone briefing with Canadian Coast Guard representatives, and that the agency said it is “busy everywhere… [and] they don’t have enough boats to provide the level of service required.”

Sea Ice Extent (Global Antarctic and Arctic) – Day 276 – 2018

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For a while this year Antarctic was on track to set a record for lowest maximum. A late surge has now put it at 4th lowest maximum.

1986, 2002 and 2017 were lower.

South / North

Winter Kills: 80,000 died of the flu last winter in the U.S., the highest death count in decades

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Winter is a killer.

An estimated 80,000 Americans died of flu and its complications last winter — the disease’s highest death toll in at least four decades.

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, revealed the total in an interview Tuesday night with the Associated Press.

Flu experts knew it was a very bad season, but at least one found the size of the estimate surprising.

“That’s huge,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University vaccine expert. The tally was nearly twice as much as what health officials previously considered a bad year, he said.

In recent years, flu-related deaths have ranged from about 12,000 to 56,000, according to the CDC.

Last fall and winter, the U.S. went through one of the most severe flu seasons in recent memory. It was driven by a kind of flu that tends to put more people in the hospital and cause more deaths, particularly among young children and the elderly.