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Friday, December 5, 2014

National Geographic News- Melting Ice

I have to interject here a poster I did for a NRDC competition when I was a student at NY City Tech out in Brooklyn--this is going back some years, you know, and I was just a beginner at the time and just learning Photoshop...but I don't know if I could do any better today, really, I am rusty




Warming Seas Drive Rapid Acceleration of Melting Antarctic Ice

As warm ocean water rises up to melt them, glaciers around the Amundsen Sea are losing half a Mount Everest a year.

A photo of Ice Island B31 breaking off from the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica.
A satellite image from November 2013 shows an iceberg called B3, about 21 miles (34 kilometers) across, breaking off Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier and drifting into the Amundsen Sea.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CORBIS
Warren Cornwall
for National Geographic
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 4, 2014
Melting Antarctic glaciers that are large enough to raise worldwide sea level by more than a meter are dropping a Mount Everest's worth of ice into the sea every two years, according to a study released this week.
A second study, published Thursday in the journal Science, helps explain the accelerating ice melt: Warm ocean water is melting the floating ice shelves that hold back the glaciers.
The two new pieces of research come as officials of the World Meteorological Organization announcedWednesday that 2014 is on track to be the warmest year on record.
Scientists have long worried that the West Antarctic ice sheet is a place where climate change might tip toward catastrophe. The ice sheet holds enough water to raise sea level by 16 feet (5 meters). The region along the Amundsen Sea is the sheet's soft underbelly, where the ice is most vulnerable. (See "Rising Seas" in National Geographic magazine.)
Earlier this year, researchers at the University of California, Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported that the glaciers flowing into the Amundsen Sea—notably the Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers—were already doomed to collapse, and at the current rate of melting would be gone in 200 years. A study released Tuesday by members of the same team, published in Geophysical Research Letters, confirms those troubling measurements with ones made by other researchers using a total of four different techniques.
The study shows that ice loss from the Amundsen Sea glaciers has accelerated sharply over the past two decades. Between 2003 and 2011 it averaged an eye-popping 102 billion metric tons every year. Mount Everest—rocks, ice, and all—weighs approximately 161 billion metric tons. (See also West Antarctica Glaciers Collapsing, Adding to Sea-Level Rise.)
The decline is driven less by melting on the surface or changes in snowfall, and more by a speeding up of the glaciers' journey to the ocean, the scientists concluded. In some cases, glaciers reached speeds of more than a third of a mile in a year as they approached the Amundsen Sea, where they either merge into a floating ice shelf, or fall into the water and become icebergs.
The momentum behind this moving ice means the glacier loss is unlikely to stop any time soon, said University of California, Irvine geophysicist Isabella Velicogna, one of the authors of the new study. Velicogna likened the process to a ball at the top of a hill. "Once you give the first push, the ball just keeps rolling," she said.
Warming Ocean, Melting Ice
The study published today in Science provides a reason why this conveyer belt of ice might be accelerating. A team led by oceanographer Sunke Schmidtko of the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Germany found that the shallow waters in the Amundsen and nearby Bellingshausen Seas have been warming over the last three decades.
Warming ocean water has been a prime suspect for the decline of ice in the West Antarctic. Massive floating ice shelves there act like a cork, bottling up the ice sheets and glaciers behind them on land. Turn up the temperature in this water bath, and the ice shelves start melting faster, loosening the cork.
This study offers new clues about how that's happening. Merging a variety of data sets, along with their own observations, the researchers found that deep and relatively warm ocean water known as Circumpolar Deep Water has warmed at a rate of roughly .1 degree Celsius per decade (.18 degree Fahrenheit) since 1975 around most of the continent. That's thought to be tied to broader climate change that's pouring extra heat into the oceans, Schmidtko said.
At the same time, this warmer water has been shoaling, or rising closer to the surface, in many spots. In some cases it has risen more than 330 feet (100 meters ) in two decades, reaching depths of 1,000 feet (300 meters).
While one-tenth of a degree might not sound like much, it requires a tremendous amount of heat energy to warm that much water—and that heat can then help melt ice that comes in contact with the water, Schmidtko said.
How far that warmer water encroaches toward ice shelves varies around the continent, a difference that appears to be driven by the wind. As easterly winds blow counterclockwise around Antarctica, they create a current of cold water that acts like a wall, blocking much of the warmer water from getting up to the shallow ocean bottom beneath the ice, Schmidtko said. But those winds have shifted or weakened along the continent's western edge, making the current weaker and opening the door for warmer water to reach the ice. It's not yet clear what has caused this change, Schmidtko said.
He and his colleagues found worrying signs that the accelerated melting could spread to bigger glaciers elsewhere on Antarctica. Warm water in the southern Weddell Sea has risen from around 766 yards (700 meters) below the surface in the 1980s to approximately 383 yards (350 meters) after 2010, the scientists found. The ice shelves there connect to glacier systems more massive than the one in the Amundsen Sea. Melting there could cause sea levels to rise up to 10 feet (3 meters).
"If this shoaling rate continues, there is a very high likelihood the warm water will reach the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf, with consequences which are huge," Schmidt said.
Current predictions of sea level rise may understate the risk because they don't accurately take into account this shoaling of warm water in the Antarctic, said Sarah Gille, an oceanographer at the University of California, San Diego, who wasn't involved in the study. "This is really driving at the core of our uncertainty about the future of places where people live around the coast," she said.
Follow Warren Cornwall on Twitter.
17 comments
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kenneth byrne
kenneth byrne
you can blame wat ever you want. you can deny that there has been any change in the weather at all. i believe were tumbling through space on a rock. we shouldnt share it w/any other life form,or any other race of people.we need to use up as much of the natural resources  as we can before r children grow up. you know their goin to want some of r planet for their kids. kids that arent even born yet  r goin to expect the same fresh air we had. clean drinking water. we dont need to leave anything for them. as long as theres enuff for us. they say you cant take it w/ya wen ya die. i say we can. wen our generation is gone we wont have to worry about climate change/global warming/whos fault it was wont matter to us. the last thing we as the human race have to worry about is a bunch of kids that think their entitled to a planet that supports life. our god/gods created this 1 for us. an buy god i say we use as much as we can as fast as we can. ryt??????
David Sanders
David Sanders
@Jakob Stagg so true jakob, and so sad. this is the reason the kochs and other oil barons are buying the services of republican politicians. the barons know the public will not suffer their plundering of the earth when climate change is irreversible and obvious to all so they see the imperative to grab all they can while they are still able. they love republicans because they have consistently shown themselves to be ignorant and easily manipulated and ready to accept their campaign contributions without asking too many questions. of course, democrats are also vulnerable but republicans are easier when the big bucks are floated in front of their eyes...and since they don't 'believe in science' they are a ready audience for flimflam.
Darren Shao
Darren Shao
This is totally horrible. We've changed too much landscape of Earth, I'm afraid if we fail to realize how serious the consequence is and still commit chronical suicide, there will be one day when it's too late. 
Lucas Jobe
Lucas Jobe
@Macho Bunny  Climate is a weather pattern measured over decades. Yes, our world is warming, but we still have cold weather. Climate change can even increase the amount of precipitation when storms hit, causing intense rain or snowfall.  
Dash Riprock
Dash Riprock
@Lucas Jobe @Macho Bunny And don't forget, global warming can also make it colder as we were all told last winter when we had record snow and record cold so remember, global cooling is ALSO global warming it just looks and feels like it's cold. Got that?
Jakob Stagg
Jakob Stagg
Is there a purpose to stories like this? The simplest of realities is nothing will be changed as long as there is an opportunity to make money: ignoring the possibility of climate change or selling something to reverse it, whether it exists or not.

Nothing gets done because it is the right thing to do. Only things that make money ever gets done.
Macho Bunny
Macho Bunny
Not sure how it was where you live, but I am on the central East coast of the US and it has been the COLDEST year I have seen in over 30 years. 
Dash Riprock
Dash Riprock
@Macho Bunny That's right, BUT.... as proponents of global warming courageously pointed out, global cooling is actually the effects of global warming, it's like putting a kettle full of water on your stove, the higher you make the flame the colder the water in the kettle becomes...simple.
Zen Galacticore
Zen Galacticore
I'm not an anthropogenic global warming denier or anything, but I JUST read this Scientific American article a few minutes ago that says the Antarctic ice is growing, not shrinking or melting. 

This is from the study released yesterday, that this Nat Geo article mentions, from the World Meteorological Organization using data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA, and U.K. Met Office.  From that article:


"The Arctic in 2014 saw the sixth-lowest ice cover in September, covering 1.24 million square kilometers less than the 1981-2010 normal.

Meanwhile, the Antarctic set a high record for ice cover, covering 560,000 square kilometers more than the previous record set in 2013. Scientists are studying the Antarctic to understand why its sea ice extent has been growing since 1979."


It's no wonder some people are doubtful or confused about man-made global warming. Both assessments cannot be right, can they?
David Jones
David Jones
It would have been interesting if the article had related the surface behavior with the massive increase of subsurface ice.
Jon Grant
Jon Grant
In the 80's and 90's local temps were definitely warmer than normal. The last 4 years though have been below normal. I want the warmth back.
Rick Anderson
Rick Anderson
Everybody needs to read these articles.... 

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