Greenland’s slip-sliding glaciers offer chilling evidence of warming
The Mercury News ran a story on the weekend, Greenland’s slip-sliding glaciers offer chilling evidence of warming.
By all accounts, the glaciers of Greenland are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago, even as the ice sheets of Antarctica — the world’s largest reservoir of fresh water — also are shrinking, researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Kansas reported in February.
And that’s just one of many studies being done in that area, as the article outlines,
Across the ice cap, however, the area of seasonal melting was broader last year than in 27 years of record-keeping, University of Colorado climate scientists reported. In early May, temperatures on the ice cap some days were almost 20 degrees above normal, hovering just below freezing.
By 2005, Greenland was beginning to lose more ice volume than anyone had anticipated — an annual loss of up to 52 cubic miles a year — according to more recent satellite gravity measurements released by JPL. The volume of freshwater ice dumped into the Atlantic Ocean has almost tripled in a decade.
“We are clearly seeing the effects of climate change starting to kick in,” [Jay] Zwally [a NASA glaciologist] said.
We covered this accelerating phenomena earlier this year, and it seems the situation is rapidly worsening.
In an influential paper published in the journal Science, Zwally surmised that the ice sheets had accelerated in response to warmer temperatures, as summer meltwater lubricated the base of the ice sheet and allowed it to slide faster toward the sea.
In a way no one had detected, the warm water made its way through thousands of feet of ice to the bedrock — in weeks, not decades or centuries.
Other scientists are confirming his findings.
At the same time, University of Texas physicist Ginny Catania pulled an ice-penetrating radar in a search pattern around the camp, seeking evidence of any melt holes or drainage crevices that could so quickly channel the heated water of global warming deep into the ice.
To her surprise, she detected a maze of tunnels, natural pipes and cracks beneath the unblemished surface.
“I have never seen anything like it, except in an area where people have been drilling bore holes,” Catania said.
No one knows how much of the ice sheet is affected.
When we think about the future will it be Water World or Mad Max? Clearly something has to change, and change fast, before the Earth does it for us. We know what the root of the problem is — humans pumping CO2 and other greenhouse gasses into the air is heating the planet. So the only way to stop it is to either stop emitting greenhouse gases, impossible in the short-term and unlikely in the mid- to long terms, or pay the hundreds of groups all over the world who are experts in CO2 emissions reductions to get rid of that pollution for us. There’s about 57 billion extra tonnes of CO2 equivalent in the air each year. Buying carbon credits funds the elimination of those emissions. — DS
Technorati Tags: Arctic, climate change, eco, global warming, Greenland, meltdown, sea levels
