EDIT
It is the acceleration that stuns scientists. Greenland's glaciers are adding up to 58 trillion gallons of water a year to the oceans, more than twice as much as a decade ago and enough to supply more than 250 cities the size of Los Angeles, NASA research shows. That's particularly unsettling because elaborate climate models that scientists use to estimate the effects of global warming did not foresee it. Scientists themselves never imagined Greenland's ice, which holds enough water to raise sea levels 23 feet and sits in position to influence Northwest weather, would move so quickly.
"The overriding mind-set was that it would take many centuries to change in any significant way," said Robert Bindschadler, a leading ice researcher and chief scientist at NASA's Hydrospheric and Biospheric Sciences Laboratory. "The whole community was astonished at how rapidly these really large glaciers are accelerating."
So much ice is disappearing so rapidly that the earth beneath Greenland is rising -- bouncing back like a bathroom scale when you step off it. Researchers helicoptering around Greenland are now dotting its coast with global positioning units to track that rise. Higher temperatures are melting more of the ice sheet, at higher elevations than ever known before.
EDIT
The melting removes an insulating blanket from the ocean surface, releasing warmth from the water into the cold air above as towering columns of warmer air. Those columns appear to reorient global air flows the way a boulder falling into a stream reorients the current, said Jacob Sewall, a professor of geosciences at Virginia Tech, who has used atmospheric models to study the effect. The result is that the stream that carries storms over the West Coast of North America shifts north, turning much of California drier, and the Northwest wetter. "Instead of hitting near San Francisco, they'll be pushed to the north and come in over Oregon," Sewall said. "The ice changes we're seeing now appear to be following this pattern. We're already seeing some of these precipitation shifts in western North America."
EDIT
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1189232816204570.xml&coll=7&thispage=1
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
