More melting ice sheets
Reuters is running a story Massive Arctic ice shelf breaks away, saying
A huge 19 square mile (55 square km) ice shelf in Canada’s northern Arctic broke away last month and the remaining shelves have shrunk at a “massive and disturbing” rate, the latest sign of accelerating climate change in the remote region, scientists said on Tuesday.
They said the Markham Ice Shelf, one of just five remaining ice shelves in the Canadian Arctic, split away from Ellesmere Island in early August. They also said two large chunks totaling 47 square miles had broken off the nearby Serson Ice Shelf, reducing it in size by 60 percent.
“The changes … were massive and disturbing,” said Warwick Vincent, director of the Centre for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec.
It’s also being discussed in the Google Earth community.
Professor Barry Brook from Adelaide University warns in his blog that
The Polar ice sheets react sensitively to solar orbital forcing (a function of the Earth’s position and axis tilt relative to the sun) through feedback loops which include ice albedo loss, absorption of infrared radiation by exposed water and water-ice interaction.
and continues, explaining
Plans for climate “stabilization” at 450 ppm CO2-e may lead the Earth to conditions preceding the formation of the polar ice sheets, whereas plans for “stabilization” at 650 ppm may track toward conditions at the 55 Ma greenhouse event and associated extinction. IPCC climate projections and government plans for emission caps restricting temperature rises to ~2°C or ~3°C degrees take little account of the non-linear nature of ice-ocean-atmosphere-biosphere feedback effects.
Earth’s climate is moving into uncharted territory…
It is interesting to note that the rate at which we people are emitting GHGs into the atmosphere is slightly more than the amount of GHGs emitted during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum Prof Brooks refers to, aka the 55 Ma greenhouse event. The arctic is melting, chunk by chunk, so much so that now it’s become entirely separated from the mainlands for the first time in human history. It beggars belief that there are people out there who still deny the connection between greenhouse gases and global warming. — DS
