AP issues retraction over fake north pole photo in global warming article

The Associated Press issued a formal retraction of a photo it published that claimed to show that a large lake had formed at the North Pole due to global warming.

In its retraction, the AP admitted that not only was the “lake” simply a small melt-pond but that it was natural, not due to global warming. The AP also admitted that the “lake” wasn’t even at the North Pole, explaining that the monitoring station where the photo was taken had drifted hundreds of miles to the south.

 Full AP retraction

Editors, photo editors, and photo librarians – please eliminate AP photo NY109 that was sent on Saturday, July 27, 2013. The caption inaccurately stated that “the shallow metlwater lake is occuring due to an unusually warm period.” In fact, the water accumulates in this way every summer. In addition, the images do not necessarily show conditions at the North Pole, because the weather buoy carrying the camera used by the North Pole Environmental Observatory has drifted hundreds of miles from its original position, which was a few dozen miles from the North Pole.

The backstory

A few weeks ago a photo made the rounds of news websites and blogs purportedly showing a scientific monitoring station at the North Pole surrounded by what appeared to be a large lake. Silly liberal journalists and bloggers blamed global warming, wringing their hands that if the North Pole was melting then the rest of the planet couldn’t be far behind, or something.

“The continued heating of the seas and melting ice caps does not bode well for ice cover in the arctic. Sorry, Santa Claus. It may be time to move to one of those ice bars,” Yahoo News wrote July 24.

The Yahoo story is still up.