Tag: glaciers

On an island

EOBaffin.jpg

NASA’s Earth Observatory is without doubt one of my favourite web sites. As I write, the above view of sea ice off Baffin Island (or a version of it) is their Image of the Day, and aside from the obvious beauties of the swirls of melting sea ice (memorably described in a comment at RealClimate as “frappucino”), I reckon you can make out the two chunks of last year’s Petermann Ice Island that I blogged about last week. My two red arrows mark the huge relict chunks of ice shelf. Click on the image (or here) for the full NASA version (about 3.5MB), and then go and look at the icebergs pouring out of the fjords on Greenland’s west coast (top right of the big picture). Dramatic and lovely, and frightening at the same time.

In other Arctic news, there are a new set of forecasts for this year’s minimum at the SEARCH Sea Ice Outlook site: most teams are picking a result somewhere between 2007 and 2008, but two of the sea ice modelling efforts are still suggesting a new record is possible. The NSIDC’s July 22nd update notes that 2009’s melt is now running ahead of 2008, and looking at their daily graph of extent, the current rate of melt seems to be faster than 2007. This has prompted some speculation about when the NE and NW Passages might open. Scanning the Cryosphere Today and University of Bremen maps, it looks as though the NE Passage (above Russia) might open soon. Blue colours on the CT image correspond the ice swirls on the NASA image above, and there’s still plenty of melt season to run. The NW Passage doesn’t look as sure a prospect: I think it could open, but perhaps only on the northern route. We live in interesting times…

Plus: great images of the Petermann Ice Tongue from the Greenpeace science team up there at the moment at the Guardian and Discovery Channel. Not to be missed.

[David Gilmour]

First we lose Manhattan…

It looks as though the Petermann Ice Tongue in northern Greenland is about to lose another major chunk of ice. This New Scientist video (accompanying text here) shows a team working on the tongue, documenting events as they happen. They expect a major break-up event within weeks:

When this happens, an island of ice the size of Manhattan, spanning 100 km2 holding 5 billion tonnes of ice, will break free and drift out to sea.

Researchers are concerned that the loss of this huge mass of ice might “uncork” the glacier, leading to a speed up and further ice loss.

Last year’s ice island started out at 25 km2, but has moved an amazing distance since it broke off in July 2008. By September it had moved south through Nares Strait (between Greenland and Ellesmere Island), and at that point the Canadian Ice Service installed a GPS tracking beacon. The ice island is now down to 21 km2 in area, drifting off the SE coast of Baffin Island. The massive berg has its own regularly updated page at the Canadian Ice Service (with satellite imagery), and you can follow its daily position here. I wonder how far a new Manhattan-sized island might get…

Meanwhile, the Telegraph reports that huge blobs of organic “goo” up to 15 miles long are appearing in the Chuckchi Sea and to the north of Alaska.

The US Coast Guard told the Anchorage Daily News that the strange find is not an oil product or a hazardous substance of any kind.

“It’s definitely, by the smell and make-up of it, some sort of naturally occurring organic or otherwise marine organism,” said Petty Officer 1st Class Terry Hasenauer. In recent history I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this,” he added.

Results of an analysis are expected next week

Climate alarmist spouts nonsense

DennisAvery.jpg New Zealand agriculture is doomed and the country will go bust if it adopts measures to restrain carbon emissions, claims Dennis T Avery of the “centre for global food issues” at right wing US think tank the Hudson Institute. Avery is notorious as a vocal climate crank, and was invited to speak at last month’s Agribusiness conference in Blenheim. His message was standard crank nonsense, as the Marlborough Express reported:

Charging farmers for carbon emissions is unfounded and will cripple the New Zealand economy, according to a United States expert on global warming. […] “Do not let them send you out of business. Don’t go quietly. Not only will [a carbon tax] kill you, it will kill the entire economy of New Zealand.”

The alarmist message is underlined in an article he penned on returning home to the US:

No country in the world would risk as much for “global warming” as New Zealand if it goes ahead with the cap-and-trade energy taxation installed by Helen Clarke’s now-departed Labour Government.

Avery’s do-nothing line might have gone done well with some at the Agribusiness conference, but it apparently didn’t find much favour elsewhere:

I said this recently to several New Zealand government ministers and business leaders at a private dinner in Wellington. My message was not welcomed. John Key’s new government seems to understand that New Zealand’s economy would be at terrible risk from carbon taxes — but its voters apparently don’t realize it.

Intriguing. I wonder which ministers he met, and who organised the dinner? And who still thinks Avery is remotely credible on climate issues? Just look at his handy summing up of why action on climate change isn’t necessary:

Never mind that the earth’s global warming stopped after 1998 because the sun has gone into a startling quiet period. That’s why New Zealand’s many glaciers have been growing recently instead of receding. Never mind that even full member compliance with Kyoto would “avoid” only about 0.05 degree C of warming over the next 50 years—by the alarmists’ own math.

Avery is making stuff up — telling lies in an attempt to influence policy. NZ’s glaciers growing? Not what the figures show, Dennis. But then if you think global warming stopped in 1998, you’re clearly not the sharpest pencil in the drawer. It’s a pity the organisers of the Agribusiness conference hadn’t spotted that before inviting him over here to mislead, misinform and misdirect.

A coral room

Coral.jpg Sea level rise is usually considered to be a relatively slow process, at least in human terms. Even a one metre rise over the next century (well within the bounds of possibility) is “only” one cm a year. It seems like a small number, even if when those small numbers start accumulating they bring big problems for coastal communities. Faster rates of rise are known from the past — up to a metre every 20 years during Meltwater Pulse 1A, a 5 metre sea level surge 14,000 years ago, as the great northern ice sheets broke up and the ice age ended. These sorts of rates are not generally considered likely for the near future, because we are in an interglacial and the most vulnerable ice melted a long time ago. However, a paper(*) in Nature this week suggests that a sea level surge of 2 – 3 metres 121,000 years ago, as the last interglacial was drawing to a close, could have taken place in as little as 50 years. Andy Revkin at the New York Times quotes from the study:

“The potential for sustained rapid ice loss and catastrophic sea-level rise in the near future is confirmed by our discovery of sea-level instability” in that period, the authors write.

The NYT is careful to point out that this new information is controversial, and will need confirmation before it’s accepted (see Revkin’s DotEarth blog post), but the most interesting feature of this sudden rise (if confirmed) is that it took place during an interglacial warmer than present, when sea level was higher, and when large parts of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets are thought to have melted. In other words, melting ice sheets are prone to very rapid ice loss. The bounds of what’s possible in our future just took another step outwards.

(*) Rapid sea-level rise and reef back-stepping at the close of the last interglacial highstand, Paul Blanchon, Anton Eisenhauer, Jan Fietzke & Volker Liebetrau, Nature 458, 881-884 (16 April 2009) doi:10.1038/nature07933

[Kate Bush]

Extreme Ice

James Balog descends into in a moulin“It’s a strange, evil, gorgeous, horrible, fantastic place,” calls out photojournalist James Balog as he abseils a short way down into a deep hole in the Greenland ice opened up by surface meltwater rushing down perhaps to bedrock hundreds of metres somewhere below. It’s understandable Balog should have mixed feelings.  The view is stunning. But that rushing meltwater may be lubricating the great ice sheet at its base and hastening the movement of its glaciers to the sea. 

The film which records this moment, Extreme Ice,  is showing on the National Geographic channel on Sky on Wednesday 22 April at 9.30 pm and a couple of times more in succeeding hours. It will also be showing in Australia. I’ve had the opportunity to preview it. I recommend it highly.

Continue reading “Extreme Ice”