Tag: Greenland

Time to buy new wellies

WellieRegular readers will know that I’ve been keeping a close eye on this year’s Arctic summer, and the record minimum sea ice extent reached last month (nice NASA picture here). The ice area is increasing now, but is still about 1m km2 below the same time last year. I might have to increase my bet… If all the summer Arctic sea ice disappears quickly, it won’t have any impact on sea level, but if the ice on land – mountain glaciers and the great ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic – melts, sea level will rise. During the last interglacial, about 125,000 years ago, global temperature was a degree or two warmer than today and sea level was about 5m higher. Some of that extra water came from Greenland and Antarctica.

When I was writing Hot Topic, the latest information suggested that Greenland was losing about 200 km3 (cubic kilometres) of ice every year, and Antarctica about 150 km3 (HT, p45). But time goes on, and the world warms. A study to be published in Geophysical Research Letters suggests that the glaciers of southeast Greenland are now losing 300 km3 of ice per year, a 400% increase in melt rate since 2004. AFP reports:

“Until 2004, the glacier mass in the southeastern part of the island lost about 50 to 100 cubic kilometres (12 to 24 cubic miles) per year. After this date, the melting rate accelerated to 300 cubic kilometres per year. It’s a jump of 400 percent, which is very worrying,” National Space Center head researcher and project chief Abbas Khan told AFP. […] The measurements indicated that the mountains hugging glaciers in the southeastern part of Greenland rose four to five centimetres (1.5 to two inches) per year, and that the banks of the glaciers thinned 100 metres per year.

Continue reading “Time to buy new wellies”

There’s no such thing as a free launch

MeltingNew Zealand melted before our very eyes at Wednesday night’s launch of Hot Topic, but serious flooding of the Minter Ellison boardroom was avoided, thanks to carefully planned adaptive strategies (and two large blue buckets). Scott Gallacher from Minter Ellison got things moving, followed by AUT vice chancellor Derek McCormack, who welcomed the arrival of AUT Media’s first book. I did my mini-Al Gore presentation – just the one slide, showing water plunging down a moulin in Greenland – and then David Cunliffe, who holds ministerial portfolios for Immigration, Communications, Information Technology and Associate Economic Development (standing in at short notice for David Parker, the climate change minister), made it clear to all that the government intended to take the issue very seriously. Then it was down to the real business of assessing the carbon neutral status of Grove Mill‘s products. A good night was had by all, including at least one freeloader, who has subsequently offered the contents of his/her “goody bag

Knee deep, and still digging

GreenlandmeltsmallJames Hansen, perhaps the most outspoken of mainstream climate scientists, reckons that unless we take urgent steps to cut emissions we’ll be committing the world to multi-metre sea level rise this century. In this week’s New Scientist, he presents his reasons why:

In my opinion, if the world warms by 2 °C to 3 °C, [..] massive sea level rise is inevitable, and a substantial fraction of the rise would occur within a century. Business-as-usual global warming would almost surely send the planet beyond a tipping point, guaranteeing a disastrous degree of sea level rise.

That’s a controversial viewpoint, and has lead to Hansen being described as “alarmist

On thin ice

Glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula are thinning and speeding up, according to new research by the British Antarctic Survey. They tracked 300 glaciers using aerial and satellite imagery, and report that 87% are retreating. Ice flow has speeded up by 12% from 1993 to 2003. From the BAS press release:

These observations – that echo recent findings from coastal Greenland – indicate that the cause is melting of the lower glaciers, which flow directly into the sea. As they thin, the buoyancy of the ice can lift the glaciers off their rock beds, allowing them to slide faster.

BBC coverage here.

At the other end of the planet, Reuters has been blogging (here and here) the activities of Koni Steffen of the University of Colorado and Jay Zwally from NASA as they make their annual visit to the Swiss Camp research post high on the Greenland ice sheet. Asked if he thought the IPPC’s fourth report underestimated future sea level increase, Steffen did not pull any punches:

I think it definitely underestimated. We complained heavily before it was released and that’s why they added a few lines that if there is a dynamic response of ice sheets the upper uncertainty might be higher. That tells you that the current IPCC report only takes into account the current understanding. We can model melt but we cannot model the dynamics.

And that’s why I keep covering this stuff…

Meanwhile, two Belgian explorers have been walking across the Arctic from Siberia to Greenland, taking snow measurements to help calibrate a new ESA satellite. ESA were able to help them to avoid early sea ice break-up to the northwest of Greenland in the Lincoln Sea. Story here, with some very cool animated pix of sea ice. For a look at the ice today, go to the NSIDC’s sea ice snapshot. Considerable thinning north of Alaska, where last year there was an unusual polynya. Cryospshere Today shows the same thing.

Greenland: ice, water and diamonds

More news of melting ice from the top of the world. According to Marc Tedesco, lead author of a paper in the May 29 issue of the American Geophysical Union’s Eos:

“The sensors detected that snowmelt occurred more than 10 days longer than the average over certain areas of Greenland in 2006