Ward Hunt Ice Shelf Breaks In Two

heidi writes "CNN has this story on the breakup of the largest ice cap. A permanent feature for the previous 3,000 years, it has broken into two pieces. "The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, on the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's Nunavut territory, broke into two main parts, themselves cut through with fissures. A freshwater lake drained into the sea, the researchers reported.""

Comments

Global Warming & The One World Government

[Anonymous Coward]

It is probably a good time to post this:

Bush covers up climate research (again)

The global conveyer

[MrLint]

I wonder what, if any, effect the draining of the fresh water lake into the sea will have on "the global conveyer. There was some speculation that the melting ice caps will release so much fresh water into the system the salinity and temperature difference that dries this engine will break down, and the CO2 that it deposits in the deep water will also stop. Is anyone an oceanologist?

Re:The global conveyer

[bm_luethke]

Hmm, what? I agree there (was the above post meant to disagree with me?) - that just wasn't the answer to the question asked (what would happen to the oceans).

I basically said the same thing you said to someone else below. Nothing now is extreme - people worry about how a non-extreme setting is going to affect everything (usually with dire consequences). Usually those same people have no real idea how rapid or extreme differences have been in the past. Obviously something happened back then to cause both the cooling and subsequent heating. Obviously it wasn't us. It can be shown to have happened VERY rapidly. And, as you say, who knows why?

I ended my college career in CS (the geology depart had two professors leave, two die, and one half retire over a single summer pretty much killing the dept). Since then I worked for several years at a national lab in the cluster computing dept, many of the weather people ran thier codes on our clusters. It was amazing having them call and complain that the cluster is slow only to find out that they spawned all thier processes on the head node instead of across the 64 nodes (what - you mean I need to add machines to the virtual machine?). I always wondered how accurate thier models were after seeing that simple of a thing screwed up - even assuming that they actually understood the geological processes.

Truly Terrifying

[foo fighter]

I've been on large, frozen lakes before ice-fishing when they split. I forget the technical term, but basically a huge, long crack appears out of nowhere with a horrifying sound. (Devils Lake, ND is the second largest closed basin lake in North America, after the Great Salt Lake. When Devils Lake splits you don't want to be near it. I was on it when it happened a few years ago, and I damn near literally shit my pants.)

I can't even imagine the terror of an entire ice shelf splitting. The reuters article doesn't mention if this was a slow or fast occurance.

Even scarier, we're several thousand years past due on the next ice age. This "global warming" thing could actually be the precursor to the beginning of the next, depending on which cadre of scientists you believe.

Arctic meltdown...

[Black Parrot]

The October 2003 Scientific American has a feature article on all the warming problems the Arctic has been undergoing. This is just one more in the pile...

According to the article, scientists are witholding judgement over whether this is a symptom of global warming: the arctic is such a complex place with so many feedback and self-regulating systems that the case simply isn't clear yet.

Now remember kiddies

[Gortbusters.org]

The ice is already in the water (ocean), so melting it is not going to increase the sea levels. Remember, water expands when it freezes and it goes back down when you melt it. If you don't believe me, fill a glass full of water and put it in the freezer.

As the earth is still coming out of its last ice age, we shouldn't be too concerned about global warming. What we should be concerned about is desertification due to the lack of vegitation and depletion of the Ozone. Given the natural course of things, the earth will make big dinosaurs, not silly monkeys who play on computers and bitch at eachother.

Anyone else up for a nice honda civic hybrid yet? :)

All part of the cycle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Had we been living 50,000 years ago, I wonder if we would have blamed the melting of the Bering Strait ice bridge on global warming.

Article discussed Global Warming

[billstewart]

If you RTFA, you'll see them discussing that they don't know whether this is global warming or just regional warming.
Not mentioned in the article, but relevant, is that in some parts of the Canadian Arctic, I think including this area, the local Inuit had stopped making kayaks for some centuries, and had to relearn in the mid-1800s when the weather got enough warmer that kayaks were useful again. Don't know if that's global warming or just regional either.

Re:Just another point on the curve?

[MickLinux]

Norway and Sweden, if I understand correctly, already are good farmland. You just have to know how to farm it. Slightly to the south are Latvia and Lithuania, and the gardens there are incredible.

First of all, they build shiltunamai (warm houses they say, we say green houses) for their start seeds and for their tomatos. The tomato plants grow 6-8 feet high, so the green houses are good for that. Then, they alternate potatos with grain. Grain is for the cattle; potatos are for the humans; the alternation helps refresh the land, as *did* the spring flooding of the rivers. [That's less often nowadays, though].

In the spring they harvest strawberries.

Then, they run beets, onions, carrots, Swiss Chard, Currants, bilberries, and raspberries, through the year. Sunflowers, apples, plums, and grapes are common autumn foods. Flowers of all kinds are grown in quantity as well.

From the forests, they harvest mushrooms.

Each garden also has a bee hive to help fertilize things.

Unfortunately, the area is being deforested now, which means that less rain falls, and the fields don't flood. But I can say that the Baltic region is definitely good farmland already.

No truth in it.

[Shivetya]

We still don't know all of the sources of CO2 on this planet. Everything these scientists believe they have all climate affecting variables nailed down another pops up.

Just recently they found that the AMAZON RIVER dumps more CO2 into the air than all the surrounding region. Go figure.

In our egotistical view we give ourselves too much credit over the influence of the weather. Sorry, but we ain't that "good" yet.

Correlation != Causation

[goldspider]

"The fact that temperature changes coincide with increasing levels of a known greenhouse forcing gas, is actually fairly pursuasive. Or did you mean 'mere coincidence.' ;)"

Anybody who deals in logic and facts will tell you that CORRELATION != CAUSATION! I'm surprise you've never heard that before.

Just remember, 30 years ago, some of these same crackpot hippy 'scientists' were predicting an impending ICE AGE! So which is it? Depends on what gets them more government funding, I suppose.