Greenland ice-melt 'speeding up'

[muriel_volestrangler]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3922579.stm

In 2001 NASA scientists published a major study based on observations by satellite and aircraft.

It concluded that the margins of the Greenland ice-sheet were dropping in height at a rate of roughly one metre a year.

Now, amid some of the most hostile conditions anywhere on the planet, Carl Boggild and his team have recorded falls as dramatic as 10 metres a year - in places the ice is dropping at a rate of one metre a month.

Scientists have traced the retreat of the Sermilik glacier

[hatrack]

1. Thanks - posted this on GD as well

Well, gosh, that's just 35 feet a year. Nothing to see here - move along!!

[smirkymonkey]

2. What are the implications of this?

I am sure it will affect the North Atlantic conveyer negatively, but what kind of time line are we looking at and what will the fallout look like? (Low countries under water? Extreme weather patterns? etc.)

[Donkeyboy75]

3. All of the above, possibly.

At least from what I've read.

[Vulture]

4. Probably not underwater

Just really crappy weather. Especially if the Atlantic conveyer shuts down.

It is worth pointing out that rising oceans has far less to do with melting ice than it has to do with thermal expansion of the water. Fortunately, the heat capacity of water is very high and so any thermal expansion will happen very slowly, on the order of a few inches per decade if the average temperature shot up in a worst case scenario (not likely if the conveyer shuts down).

I'll just say that if we can't deal with an extra foot of water in 50 years (worst case), we've really dropped the ball on this whole advanced technology thing. But the likely case is that the weather will start to really suck and the climate will go south in much of Europe (and other places). In another century, this would have been a food production disaster, but fortunately our technology is up to the task and efficient agriculture can feed the world with a relatively small land footprint (which shrinks every year).

[smirkymonkey]

5. Thanks for the explanation!

I was unaware of the thermal expansion aspect to the changes.

So I guess it won't be like "The Day After Tomorrow" then? ;)

[indigobusiness]

7. Who will pollenate the crops when the bees

go batty from the magnetic field weirding out (as is already being seen)? How will technology pollenate crops?

Beware an over-dependency on technology.

The dove-tailing of climate change and magnetic field reversal and mass extinction doesn't bode well for our planet, or our species.


on edit to Muriel- Sorry for posting a duplicate thread...I didn't see yours.

[NickB79]

8. The weather will more than just "suck" in Europe

Without the moderating effects of the Gulf Stream, most of Europe would assume the same climate as Nova Scotia. You ever hear anyone refer to Nova Scotia as the breadbasket of Canada? Their crop output would fall dramatically, and Europe would have to import massive amounts of food to make up for the shortage. Further, their fisheries will be shot to hell as the already-damaged fish populations bottom out. It WILL be a food production disaster, even in the 21st century.

[indigobusiness]

17. Good input, Nick

Thanks

[phantom power]

9. thermal expansion is (not) negligible.

water's coefficient of (volumetric) thermal expansion is 210x10^-6 per degree celcius.

(edit)
Well, actually that works out to about 0.75 meters (~2 ft) per degree celcius, so that's significant. Assuming that the oceeans would uniformly increase in temperature, which is far from true. But still not negligible.

Now I'll have to find some figures on sea level rise from melting ice caps.

[phantom power]

11. OK, now for some ice-cap melting figures

According to this site:
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/HannaBerenblit.shtml

The volume of the Antarctica ice-cap is about 30 million cubic kilometers. If *all* of that melted, it would raise the level of the oceans by about 83 meters, or about 200 feet.

If 1% of the ice-cap melts, then that's 2 feet: as much sea-level rise as from thermal-expansion (at 1 degree celcius).

If 10% of the ice-cap melts, that's 20 feet.

[Salviati]

21. The (arctic) ice cap melting wouldn't raise the water level at all...

Because that ice is already floating, it's already displaceing as much space as the water it will become when it melts. What will raise the ocean levels is the melting of all the ice that is not currently floating in the oceans, e.g. in Greenland, Antartica, etc...

[phantom power]

22. That is a good point.. (my figures were for antarctic ice)

What worries me about arctic ice isn't sea-level, it's other stuff. Decreasing earth's overall albedo (absorbing more heat). Changing ocean currents. Changing salinity. Increasing the amount of moisture picked up by wind.

I grew up in western NY, where weather is highly influenced by Lake Erie. On those winters where Lake Erie froze over, the amount of snow would immediately drop, because the fronts coming down from Canada would pick up much less moisture from ice, than from open water.

I would expect a corresponding *increase* in moisture, as the arctic ice caps disappear and the atmosphere comes in contact with more open water.

It seems difficult to predict what all these changes will add up to, but it all makes my sphincter pucker up.

[Salviati]

25. Yup, though it wouldn't raise the water levels...

I'm sure it would bring a whole host of other problems with it...

[indigobusiness]

6. The climate change, from the gulf-stream shutting down,

is being felt now in England and along the eastern seaboard of the US, etc. This summer in England, there was a winter storm warning IN JULY. Last summer the water was icy in mid summer at NC beaches.
Soon, the canals in Amsterdam will freeze and summers will beseriously wintery in England. At that point, people will begin to realize the seriousness of this. Change will happen swiftly. Migrations will be affected and people will gravitate toward the equator.

[amazona]

10. be gentle -- I may have missed something -- have a ? about this ?

Has the Gulf Stream shut down? Is the Atlantic Ocean cooler now? Would this be the reason there have been no tropical storms/hurricanes (knock on wood) so far this year? 2003 was a terrible year with tropical storm formation going on from an unprecedented April through December. Not a good year for me personally either as my house had five figures worth of damage caused by a tropical storm.

If there is a bright side to all this -- and I don't know if there is -- then it seems to me that a cooler Atlantic means no more tropical storm formation in the Atlantic, since tropical storms/hurricanes can't form if the water is too cool.

Could someone maybe throw me a few links so I could better inform myself? I made plans this year based on a concern I would need to stick close and have evacuation plans at the ready at home, because it was supposed to be a heavy tropical storm/hurricane season. If it's going to be a calm season, as I am pretty much unemployed now, I would like to take advantage of this time to travel and see a bit of the world before it ends up under ice or something. (I know, selfish.) I tried a google search but maybe I don't know what words to use -- couldn't find anything about the Gulf Stream having shut down as yet. I might be overly concerned about storms now but having a tree take down half your house with you inside it will do that to a person!

[phantom power]

12. the salinity gradient is definitely building up

Increasing salinity gradient has been measured by oceanographers. To my knowledge, there has been no measured slowing of the current.

I don't think anyone really knows what the threshold is for a current shutdown. We probably wouldn't, unless it actually happens, although climatologists must have educated guesses.

[indigobusiness]

13. Exactly wrong...on both counts.

The North Atlantic is being desalinated by the influx of fresh water from the melting polar cap and Greenland ice sheet, etc. The engine of the Gulf Stream is driven by the high salinity in the North Atlantic that reaches a critical level of density and falls to the depths. Without this driving force the Gulf Stream is crippled and climate is affected, globally..

There has been a marked change measured in the current recently.

[phantom power]

14. I don't follow you

What you are describing is what I was referring to. The north atlantic is becoming less saline, and the equatorial lattitudes are becoming more saline (at least on the surface) due to increased evaporation.

It's a buildup of salinity gradient. And it might screw up the thermohaline circulation.

Yes?

[indigobusiness]

16. You threw me with "increasing salinity...etc"

I follow you now. My mistake. But if you are making a case for somekind kind of flux between salinity levels at different latitudes, I don't belive there is a correlation.

[phantom power]

18. As I understand it, the gradient matters

There's a nice summary of what's going on here:
http://www.climate.unibe.ch/~christof/div/fact4thc.html

The reason that the salinity gradient matters, is that it counteracts the density gradient due to decreasing temperature, which is what allows the water to sink at high lattitude.

When the gradient is low, the temperature difference allows the water to sink. Now that the salinity-gradient is increasing, the density difference due to temperature is counteracted, and the water may not sink as effectively.

[indigobusiness]

19. No there is no correlation to a salinity gradient between latitudes.

The pool of heavily salted water at the upper levels of the N Atlantic is a local phenomenon. Once a certain density is reached it falls, in a large mass, to the bottom, and this is the driving force that powers the Gulf Stream. The loop of the Gulf Stream involves currents that reach around S Africa, almost to Australia and back up the S American coast. It is the engine of global weather. When it shuts down, ice-ages occur...in as little as a decade or two.

[indigobusiness]

15. This about catastrophic climate change...not, merely, weather.

I'll dig up some links for you to get started with.

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WEATHER/07/15/euro.wacky.weather.ap/index.html

July 13 was an ominous day for flooding: a ferocious thunderstorm similar in violence to the Edmonton storm swept across Shanghai, killing seven and sinking a cargo ship. In Southeast Asia, the worst monsoon flooding in memory has killed thousands and left over five million people homeless across India, Bangladesh and Nepal. A typhoon has killed at least 50 people in the Philippines and Taiwan, and left a quarter of a million homeless.

Also on the 13th, there was a 17-inch downpour in northwestern Japan, killing at least five people. Again, the rains were sudden and intense, and the sudden flooding overcame people in low-lying areas, in areas that had never experienced these kinds of floods before. On the same day, more that a foot of rain fell in a few hours in New Jersey. The flooding was so fast that, as in Edmonton, people had to flee their cars to escape rising water. The flood zone extended into Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Meanwhile, Europeans from Oslo to Budapest are having snowball fights in July. Europeans feared a repeat of last year's killer heat wave, and southern Europe has indeed experienced some intense heat. But most Europeans have had temperatures that are about half what they were last year. Read the CNN Report.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3896425.stm

[indigobusiness]

20. Here is a reference to the impact on ocean currents etc

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/291120.stm

plus: Grim Report on Climate Change
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/205867.stm

Controversy continues to rage over the reliability of climate change forecasts, and over the very notion that climate change is being caused by human activity, and not by natural cycles.

But the overwhelming consensus of climatological opinion insists that climate change is real, and that we are playing the chief part in causing it.

This evidence from the Hadley Centre is compelling and suggests that the threat is far more real and urgent than some scientists - and many politicians - have yet acknowledged.


Ice ages and magenetic reversals
http://www.iceagenow.com/Magnetic_Reversal_Chart.htm

etc

http://www.pvbr.com/Issue_1/global.htm
http://www.nexusmagazine.com/climate.html
http://www.john-daly.com/
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/7/14/103443.shtml

http://www.iceagenow.com/Pacemaker.htm

[Boomer]

23. We may ALL have missed something

There are signs that the Gulf Stream is definitely slowing down, but since oceanic research is so poorly funded I doubt there is a definitive answer on whether it is on the verge of stopping soon (as in the next year or so) or has already basically stopped.

Does anyone on this forum know whether there are enough equipment/researchers in place to accurately measure the Gulf Stream's current state? A few months ago I read of a lone ship going off to begin monitoring the area, but my impression is that the scientists were establishing a base line for future reasearch rather than conducting an exhaustive investigation. The "Someday this may be a problem" policy line. I haven't heard any followup on the mission since then.

Of course, I also suspect that any truly bad news would be immediately suppressed.

[indigobusiness]

24. Currents are measured and mapped. The data is available at noaa

Try

http://rdre1.yahoo.com/click?u=http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/OCEAN_PLANET/HTML/oceanography_currents_1.html&y=026B04BD1BB228C6&i=482&c=9103&q=02%5ESSHPM%5BL7p%7Cz~q%3F%7Cjmmzqkl6&e=utf-8&r=0&d=wow-en-us&n=E9L45H05V05K2794&s=64&t=&m=410BFA38&x=011742E9DF889691

http://earth.usc.edu/~stott/Catalina/Oceans.html

[Boomer]

29. I must have been hallucinating then

I thought I'd read somewhere that cuts to funding had basically ended significant ocean current research some years back and that a new project had been launched very recently to try and catch up on those lost years.

[indigobusiness]

30. I believe there was some stink about cutbacks

and certain specialized sensor-buoys being cut. Makes you wonder why, doesn't it?

[Boomer]

31. Oh, I don't wonder...

I have a pretty good idea why funding would be cut by the * and Bliar administrations. Climate change ain't good for big bidness, and hard facts might distract the masses from buying Walmart goods.

And now some extremely useful weather satellites that help with tracking global climate changes are going to be allowed to fall to Earth instead of spending a couple of hundred thousand dollars to keep them in orbit. Meanwhile, millions of dollars are unaccounted for in Iraq and on Halliburton's accounting.

[hatrack]

33. There's also this - rapid salinization of tropics, freshening of polar sea

"Tropical ocean waters have become dramatically saltier over the past 40 years while oceans closer to Earth's poles have become fresher -- relatively rapid oceanic changes that scientists say may reflect changes in the fundamental planetary system that cycles fresh water around the globe.

A December 17 press release says an international team of scientists -- funded in part by the National Science Foundation -- analyzed salinity measurements collected over recent decades along a key region of the Atlantic Ocean, from the tip of Greenland to the tip of South America.

The researchers, whose report was published in the December 18 issue of the journal Nature, observed that surface waters in tropical and subtropical Atlantic Ocean regions have become markedly saltier over the past 40 years. Simultaneously, much of the water column in the high latitudes of the North and South Atlantic has become fresher. The scientists take these changes in salinity as an indication that net evaporation rates over the tropical Atlantic have increased by 5 to 10 percent over the past four decades -- a trend that appears to have accelerated since 1990, when 10 of the warmest years since record-keeping began in 1861 have occurred.

The fresh water lost from the low latitudes under this scenario falls back to the oceans at high latitudes, explaining the fresher water in those regions. Considering other recent studies revealing parallel salinity changes in the Mediterranean, Pacific and Indian Oceans, a growing body of evidence suggests that the global hydrologic cycle has revved up in recent decades."

EDIT

http://usinfo.state.gov/gi/Archive/2003/Dec/19-130199.html

Of course, it's coming from that hotbed of anti-Americanism,the State Department . . .

[indigobusiness]

27. Here is more info

DISCOVERY MAGAZINE

One of the first hints that something may be different than what we are
being told (especially here in the US) was published in Discover magazine in
September 2002 with the cover announcing "Global Warming Surprise, A New Ice
Age", "Oceanographers have discovered a huge river of freshwater in the
Atlantic formed by melting polar ice. They warn it could soon bury the Gulf
Stream, plunging North American and Europe into frigid winters."
That was almost two years ago, and no one listened. Life goes on oblivious
to the incredible danger approaching.

ENGLAND & SIR DAVID KING

Then in January 2004 enter Sir David King. Sir King is the Prime Minister of
England's chief scientist. Sir King went to Mr. Blair and told him of the
impending worldwide disaster and that they needed to tell the world of what
was about to happen.

Tony Blair told Sir David King to be quiet and not speak. But Sir King felt
that this was simply too important for him to say nothing, so in January of
this year he deliberately went around Mr. Blair and went straight to the
American journal Science where he published his information and concern.

Sir King said in this article, "In my view, climate change is the most
severe problem we are facing today, more serious even than the threat of
terrorism."

England placed a gag order on Sir David King, and now he is not even allowed
to discuss this subject publicly without threat of detention.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=115&topic_id=11748

[indigobusiness]

26. clipped from Global Warming thread

I received this from an internet mailing list I subscribe to. I've run a cursory check on some of the facts in the article (i.e., the Ross ice shelf, the Fortune magazine article, the Pentagon study, and Sir David King's report) and they appear to be valid. I've not seen anything put together quite as well as this.


-----------------------------------------------------------
Dry /Ice: Global Warming Revealed


What you are about to read is going to change your world forever, of this I
can promise you. I actually apologize that I have to be the one that brings
this unsettling news, but you must know if you wish to survive for what is
coming will either be DRY and heat or ICE and freezing.
Global warming has been in the news for over 40 years, and by this time we
have become complacent. Our scientists have come to the agreement that
global warming will eventually cause major changes and problems in the
world, but in their way of thinking it will be 50 to 100 years before we
will actually have to deal with the effects.

The general idea is that global warming will be slow and the world will find
time to discover the solutions to the problems.

New powerful evidence strongly suggests that this scenario is simply wrong,
and we had better prepare for another more abrupt possibility.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x11748

[indigobusiness]

28. more

>From another point of view in the same article we hear: "They (the Bush
Administration) do not have a credible plan, either domestically or
internationally, for addressing the problem (Global Warming), says Michael
Oppenheimer, a climatologist at Princeton University. They (the Bush
Administration) argue that they don't want to address global warming, he
says, 'because the science is shaky'. And that approach is indefensible,
because the science isn't shaky."

The North Pole Melting

Let's look at the facts. Two summers ago the North Pole completely melted
for the first time in history that we know of. Both private and military
ships floated directly over the actual North Pole as it was completely
water. This area has never been seen to be less then ten feet of solid ice.

Greenpeace a few years ago announced that the North Pole's winter to summer
snow pack had receded by around three hundred miles, but no one listened.

And today, as I am writing this article, we are witnessing the Alaska fire
that has consumed over one million acres of forest. This fire is burning in
an area that is always wet with rain or snow until now. And this fire, as
you will understand in this article is directly related to the melting of
the poles and the Gulf Stream.

[indigobusiness]

32. Cold Current Kills Fish - Md. + Greenland Ice- Melt Update

Local Beaches Awash With Dead Fish
AP, Aug 4

OCEAN CITY, Md. (AP) - A surge of cold water generated from an offshore current killed nearly a million adult Atlantic croaker, leaving maintenance crews at local resorts with their hands full of carcasses to clean up.

In Ocean City, maintenance crews scoured the beaches Tuesday picking up and disposing of hundreds of dead Atlantic croaker - a silvery greenish and grayish fish with brassy spots - who succumbed to thermal shock.

...

The Maryland Department of Environment on Tuesday attributed the cause of the deaths to a sudden temperature drop in the water. No other species of fish or marine animals are believed to have been affected by exposure to the cold water temperatures, and tests for harmful algae blooms and bacteria have come up negative, according to spokesman Richard McIntire.

McIntire said several hundred thousand to slightly more than a million croaker have died.

"They were probably swimming in water temperature around the 60 degrees," he said. "Then it got down to the 40s. Just like humans, some of us suffer heatstroke or suffer frostbite at different temperatures. Same thing with fish. They couldn't handle the rapid temperature drop."
http://www.wmal.com/listingsEntry.asp?ID=240180&PT=NEWS


Scientists alarmed at increase in melt rate of ice
The Scotsman, Aug 4

GREENLAND’S cover of ice is melting ten times quicker than previously thought, an increase that could lead to floods across the world, scientists have found.

Newly published research shows an alarming rise in the rate of collapse of the massive Greenland ice-sheet as a result of global warming. Scientists now believe the ice-sheet is shrinking at the rate of ten metres a year, not the one metre previously thought

...

One medium-term side-effect of the destruction of the Greenland ice-sheet could be the loss of the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe warm and temperate. The fresh water from the ice mixes with the salt water in the sea, altering the salinity and changing the direction and behaviour of major currents.
http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=891712004