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Giant Iceberg to Collide with Glacier
OECD writes "NASA reports that a massive 100-mile-long iceberg is on a collision course (movie) with a floating glacier near the McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica. NASA scientists expect a collision to occur no later than January 15, 2005."
Cold Fusion?
That's the day after tommorow...well it almost is.
Its one thing to be scared its another to do something about it.
Things like this dont happen too often. Surely someone can sacrifice a few bucks to set up a camera in the front row. Maybe it could be some inspiration for those CGI effects in Hollywood.
tsumanis, icebergs, mudslides, giant asteroids on a collision course with earth, windows exploits. armegeddon?
Of course it's cool. If it weren't, it would be just liquid water, or even steam.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
What's an iceburg?
From German:
Berg (as in iceberg): mountain
Burg (as in, umm, iceburg): castle
So I guess this iceburg is some mad scientist's hideout (Dr. Frost or whatever).
I don't need a signature.
Aside from looking cool and being important to penguins (the two things that the article seems to focus on) this can affect things that are actually important.
2 47 96.100
The ice tongue that the iceberg is going to hit is the ocean end of a glacier. If that is knocked off by the collision that could be like pulling the cork from a bottle. It may cause the glacier to discharge into the more rapidly than it otherwise would, raising sea levels.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg184
(been a long time since i did some math)
From the site:-
"The B-15A iceberg is a 3,000-square-kilometer (1,200-square-mile) behemoth"
Pulling figures from the nether region, i'm assuming the berg to be 100mts high. This would give us:-
Surface area = 3000 sq. km = 3000 x 1000 x 1000 = 3 x 10^9 sq. mt.
Thus, volume of berg = 3 x 10^9 x 100 = 3 x 10^11 cubic mts.
Now, i know that roughly, 1 cubic meter of ice (water) = 1000kg.
Thus, weight of berg = 3 x 10^11 x 1000 = 3 x 10^14 kgs.
That's 3000000,000,00,000kgs. = 3000000,000,00 metric tons = 300000000 kilotons = 300000 million tons!
If my math is correct, then oooh boy, this is going to be one heck of a fender bender.
http://www.nasa.gov.nyud.net:8090/vision/earth/loo kingatearth/ice_berg_ram.html
Not much, if you live in Montana.
But if you live in Texas, or Louisiana, or Florida, it's got quite a lot of consequence. Ice melts on its exposed edges. So break it up into smaller pieces and it melts faster, decreasing the salinity of the ocean, and thus affecting circulation, which leads to changes in storm patterns. Had any hurricanes lately?
Melting of floating ice, of course, doesn't change the sea level. But the floating glacier provides back-pressure which holds back the much larger glacier on shore. If you break off the floating part of the glacier and release the back-pressure, more of the non-floating part slides down into the sea and starts to float, and that does change the sea level. How high do you want your tide today?
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Quick! Gather up your children and amble away as though your life depends on it.
-he who laughs last, is a bit slow.
journal
Now all I need is a martini the size of Poland.
There's probably a penguin on the iceberg pumping its foot and yelling "Waaaa! No brakes, no brakes!"
I'm not sure just how fresh the water in Icebergs is but increased amounts of fresh water in the Ocean can cause problems.
I remember watching a program a while back which said that due to global warming huge russian rivers were dumping much more than the usual amount of fresh water in the North Atlantic.
The North Atlantic contains one end of the Gulf Stream where the warm water sinks down and flows back to the Gulf Of Mexico to be reheated. Apparently if the salinity of the water reduces by any more the warm water might not sink down and in effect turn off the Gulf Stream at which point we in the UK would be pretty f#cked.
How many other scientist agree with this idea though I am not sure.
There's this bar - and there's a Chinese guy and a Jewish guy who find themselves seated next to each other a couple of nights. Things are going pretty good until one night after a few too many, the Jewish guy hauls off and decks the Chinese guy.
The Chinese guy picks himself up and says "What the hell was that for?!"
The Jewish guy snaps "That was for bombing Pearl Harbor."
"Pearl Harbor? Pearl harbor was bombed by the Japanese!"
The Jewish guy shrugs "Chinese, Japanese, what's the difference?!"
The next night they find themselves at the bar again, and after a snootful, the Chinese guy hauls off and decks the Jewish guy.
He picks himself up and shouts "What the hell was THAT for?"
The Chinese guy says "THAT was for sinking the Titanic!"
"Are you nuts? The Titanic was sunk by an iceberg?!"
"Yeah, well - iceberg, Goldberg - what's the difference?!"
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