Slashdot Mirror
Giant Ice Shelf Snaps
Popo writes "Sattelite images have revealed that an ancient 66 square-kilometer ice shelf, the size of 11,000 football fields, has snapped off from an island in Canada's arctic. The Ayles Ice Shelf was one of 6 major shelves remaining in Canada's arctic and is estimated to be over 3000 years old. The collapse was so powerful that earthquake monitors 250 km away picked up tremors. Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor."
Does 3000 year old ice make a good margarita?
FairTax baby!
11,000 football fields. Yeah, there's an easy-to-visualize image. What a helpful comparison.
It lasted a good deal longer than any shelf I've ever put up.
Dang it! I thought we told those Penguins that they couldn't keep dancing like that!
Seriously, is there anything happening in the arctic or antarctic regions that IS NOT the cause of Global Warming?
the size of 11,000 football fields
NFL? Canadian? European kickball?
Besides, this is a nerds site. Don't make athletic references.
Volkswagen Bugs or Libraries of Congress would be more appropriate.
Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor."
So what was the cause 30 years ago?
It's a fair question, yes? Like when I hear "such and such place recorded the highest temperature in 150 years this week!" I think "What caused the previous high 150 years agp?" My brain has a pesky habit of continually asking questions. All those X-Files episodes, I guess. Trust no one. Ideologues hate me.
The implication is that 30 years ago there was a larger event. So if a smaller sheet of ice broke off now than the one from 30 years back, doesn't that mean the problem is going away?
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
How many hockey rinks is that?
I agree with you that the tequila is what makes a good Margarita, but you are wrong about your crap. Penguins do not frequent the same ice as polar bears. Repeat with me, polar bears are in the North, penguins are in the South. Not, they do not meet at the tropics.
I was hoping to get a quick translation of football fields to Rhode Islands, but Google couldn't help me. Anyone else with a better calculator available?
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
If you look closely, you can see where explosives were planted near the base. There is no way the self could have collapsed on its own. And isn't it strange how no penguins came to work that day?
Canada should totally start rebuilding that ice shelf just to show those terrorists that NOBODY messes with Canada, eh?
While it would be absolutely foolish to dispute the reality of global warming, many of the arguments for it actually being human induced are somewhat specious, simply because global temperature records do not go back for enough to make a statistically meaningful analysis of the cause.
I'm not saying that we aren't the cause, but before the last ice-age this planet was a whole lot warmer than it is right now, and it managed to chill eventually. This whole thing could just be part of the normal geological cycle.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
70 million tons of CO2
Should be 70 million tons of CO2 a day. But I'm sure it's the sun "surging" or something. Let's organize a space mission to toss giant ice cubes into the sun!
I think I see where your going with this ie. is it a new event or just a re-occuring event. I'm a guess and say the first. You figure 30 years ago the ice shelves/glaciers were as much as twice as big as they are now. It all comes down to proportion. let say 30 years ago ice shelves represented about 500 square miles of area (ficticous number) this number proportionally wasnt' much. now lets reduce the total square footage of ice sheets by half, then break of the same amout. Yes it's the same as 30 years ago but proportionally it is significantly larger than in the past.
I don't know, but one event is not enough for a conclusion to be made. I know this is definatelly true.
This is not the same as saying I approve of global warming. I'm merely saying more data is required. I would be quite happy if the US and other lesser polluters stopped ripping into the ecosystem, but last I checked I'm not a global power, so I am unlikely to be able to stop anything the power hungry are doing.
Such feeling aside, my point remains.
Hard to say. There is no standard size hockey rink: just a minimum size and maximum size.
Because 11,000 football fields is easier to imagine than 66 square kilometers.
CC Licensed Serialized Story and Podcast: Ingenioustries
Clearly the cause is Al Gore and his liberal whiners who are jelaous of the success of the hardworking oil industry... :)
What an inconvenient truth.
Warning: Could be fatal if taken seriously
If by "we" you mean "people who aren't educated in climatology", then yes.
Otherwise, no.
Yep, they've seriously underestimated the needed capacity for the International Space Station.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
at the expense of our personal liberties
Funny how on the extremes of both ends, personal liberties are what we lose. How do we stay in the middle? Also a good question if you're stranded on a melting ice shelf...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Yeah - and like the time when they invented the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so they could save us all - at the expense of our personal liberties, of course.
Oh wait - it wasn't the LEFT that did that, was it? It's the extremes that are the problems. True liberals and true conservatives both care deeply about personal liberty.
It's common for the Extreme Right, and their fellow travelers in the Media, to invent disasters from selected data so they can save us all by the application of Fascism, at the expense of our personal liberties, of course.
Extremists are extremists.. plain and simple.
The only difference is which liberties they want you to surrender & why.
To be fair, sometimes they ask you to do it for the common good
and not because of some boogeyman.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Not an environmental scientist, but I am a scientist, accustomed to developing hypothesis and establishing the correctness or otherwise of same.
How many vast Ice sheets have cracked recently? I haven't heard of many. This may be a natural event, it's certainly on a scale we are not normally accustomed to envisaging. To definatelly point to a cause for a thing, it must be seen more then once, preferably many times. What if, for instance, Ice sheets crack constantly? Until the 19th century there was little interest in keeping an eye on Ice in the arctic, that's not much time for events on such a large scale to be observed.
Ice is melting all over the arctic it seems, and there are tentative links to global warming. However no-one has proven that these are not natural events slightly speeded up.
I'm not interested in getting the facts from whatever group can shout the loudest, or who succeeds in worrying the most people, I'm interested in knowing the precise cause, or combination of causes, before resorting to being scared to voice a variant opinion.
This is aside from my views on pollution. Even if it weren't allegedly messing with Ice sheets I'd still think pollution was a bad thing. I am very wary of jumping to conclusions though.
Maybe he should have worked there longer. Follow this link.
. pdf
http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic39-1-15
In 1984 this study was done in Canada. The first page kind of says it all.
" Between 1959 and 1974 a total of 48sqkm calved off from Milne and Ayles ice shelves. In addition, the Ayles Ice Shelf moved about 5km out into Ayles Ford"
Not quite 66 sqkm but close. And it sounds as if the shelf broke off rather recently within a few decades, and somehow reattached itself. No mention of that in the story, but there is a significant emphasis that the ice is 3000 years old and ancient. Making it seem as if this has been the same for 3000 years. Next at the bottom left of the first page.
"The largest observed ice calving occurred at Ward Hunt Ice Shelf (just north of Ayles) where almost 600SQKM, broke off between 1961 and 1962.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
If you're going to lash out with a really big number, at least put it in perspective, yes?
Well, you didn't bother to. Why should I?
The point of my post is that we have fewer carbon sequestering plants each day while the rate of CO2 deposition into the atmosphere is growing each day. There's evidence the CO2 deposition into the oceans is causing them to become more acidic, affecting calcium carbonate-dependent sea life - i.e. all of it.
Yes, oceans and trees absorb CO2 - at a constantly declining rate due to the finite capacity of water to hold dissolved carbon at atmospheric pressure and biological constraints - and in case you hadn't noticed, there are fewer trees globally every year - and usually because they're burned, which puts that C)2 right back into the atmosphere.
The earth's capacity to self-sequester C02 is declining at an increasing rate while we are depositing CO2 into the atmosphere at a constantly increasing rate. Is that clear enough for you?
How does asking a sensible question and thinking critically make you an idiot?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Is there a good phot of this anywhere, with a helpful set of outlines or what? I am seeing the news article photo, and yet somehow I see a bunch of craggy areas, a bunch of brown areas, a bunch of snow.
Oh the horror!!!
Which way is anything here?
Somebody please draw a diagram on this image which indicates 1) the north pole, or the direction it is in, 2) the island, 3) the shelf, and 4) the direction of said shelf's geologically-sudden departure....
~
I would have to mention that realclimate "debunked" the global cooling myth. It was never considered as a mainstream scientific belief, it only existed because of the popular press. The press gets most things wrong, can't distinguish between global dimming and global cooling. As for Nuclear Winter - thats the least of our worries if that many nukes were to be detonated in order to either cause an effect or not cause like that. It is a doomsday scenario, quite unlike global warming.
I have for a long time realised that categorizations like left or right don't make sense in the case of 80% of the population, especially across countries. Some of my ideas for an optimal society have socialist touches, but I also believe that personal liberties are not contradictory with them, quite the opposite. Even though the classification is quite flawed, I have to add that most of the civilized world is "extreme left" compared to the USA. Facts have a liberal bias and all that.
Anyway, back to the topic. Global warming is not the popular opinion. Or if it is, it is irrelevant. It is the peer reviewed mainstream scientific consensus. Science is powerful, and self checking. Many scientists have tried to falsify the conclusion that global warming is happening, but didn't manage to, thus we accept it as our standing theory in relation to the projected temperature change of the planet. That's how science works, by testable theories.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years...
We had global warming 30 years ago? I thought we were all supposed to fear global cooling back then.
Seriously, if we had an event of this size a mere thirty years ago, it obviously isn't the one-of-a-kind end-of-the-world-in-twenty-years event the media is portraying it to be. What is the frequency of such events?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Puhlease.... It takes more than 20 years for ice this thick to melt to a shelving point.
No, it doesn't. All it takes is for some surface meltwater to percolate down through the ice. Below the ice, it can act as a lubricate, allowing fast movement.
The sea level will probably not rise from this, actually. (much) If it was an ice shelf, then that usually means that it is a large floating mass of ice, connected to a land mass. That means that it is mostly being supported by water already, and so when it melts, the amount of new water it adds will be offset by the fact that there is no longer that much ice sticking in to the ocean. Floating ice melting never changes water level. (Watch ice melting in your soft drink, for examples of this.)
Not to mean that we shouldn't be concerned about this however... If this sort of thing is happening, then sooner or later ice that IS on land will start melting... And while all of the north pole could melt with no change in sea level, (since it is floating) once Antarctica starts to go, (since it has land under it) that's when it's time to start seriously considering selling any beach front property you might own...
The English vineyards bit is a standard contrarian talking point. The problem is that (a) it's not clear that vineyards tell you anything about climate (rather than economics) and (b) at any rate there's far more wine growing in England now than there was in the past.
6 /07/medieval-warmth-and-english-wine/
See the discussion here
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/200
I have never seen a reference that claimed that English wine was "better" than French wine, so that seems to be new and made up.
That is not the point, global warming is a fact, global warming is the cause of melting ice, global warming is the cause of warmer oceans. That is not what is being contested.
What is being contested is the cause of global warming. There are two podiums here, one is for arguing the cause is man made, the other is for arguing that it is a naturally recurring event.
The first has little evidence to support it other than (slightly) higher co2 levels in the atmosphere. The second of which has strong evidence recorded in, what else but the ice itself as well as in fossil records.
You cannot argue that there have been global warming events in the past but you can argue that man couldn't have been the cause then.
So I guess we are in agreement? Global warming is a CLEARLY OBVIOUS FACT.
Let me put that football measurement into something a slashdotter can relate to. It had the area of screen on a 728,000 inch monitor.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
How many vast Ice sheets have cracked recently?
I believe that the Larson A and B ice sheets, in Antarctica, broke up within the past decade.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
At the north pole, isn't every direction south?
When you're dead, you don't know you're dead. It only affects the people around you. Same thing when you're stupid.
And you have evidence for this claim?
7 .shtml
Yes, of course I do, otherwise I would not have posted the claim. Here is an example.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2004GL02138
"Evidence for subglacial water transport in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet through three-dimensional satellite radar interferometry"
I think the appropriate question here is, given that this is a well-documented and understood phenomenon, what are your political motives for questioning it?
It seems like an unlikely scenario in any case. Water doesn't exactly make a good lubricant for sub-freezing ice, it has terrible viscosity performance below 32F!
That is not the point. It has to do is have better viscocity performance than pure ice.
Are you claiming it snowed in the summer there in Australia? That's like it snowing in the Northern Hemisphere on June 25th. Ergo, I'm assuming you must either live in the mountains and/or very far south. Even if you live in Tasmania that's not as far south as Minnesota is north. I'm not at all familiar with Australian weather, so forgive any ignorance on my part. (Actually, I'm not really familiar with Minnesota weather, either.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The only, somewhat small, caveat (besides salinity differences between sea ice and sea water) is that if the north pole is devoid of ice then most of Greenland, Baffin Island and Ellesmere island will also be devoid of ice raising the sea level 20 feet at least.
Say goodbye to Miami, most of southern Florida, a lot of Manhattan, and whatever is left of New Orleans.
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Are people really so dumb as to need every size estimate in "football fields?"
Or 1/50th the size of Rhode Island
Which one seems bigger to you?
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
I tried to convert the area to square smoots but then my calculator collapsed into a horizontal line and I couldn't read the answer.
In Soviet Russia a beowulf cluster of these things imagines you welcoming your new, neural-network overlords.
I find it depressing how each relevant news item causes an almost identical repeat of circular arguing from the standard positions on Global Warming. Nothing as yet has caused a "tipping point" of reconsideration from the average population. I'm just not hearing it from the charismatic speakers of divergent groups that Yes Indeed This Is A Problem.
This doesn't cause me to doubt it exists, or that we've caused it. It causes me to doubt that anything will seriously change. Business As Usual.
This shelf detaching (and then refreezing later) is a potential for Greenland. If we get a sudden few feet in ocean water (unlike an ice shelf, Greenland's ice will move from land to ocean), then an extended European winter, mass fishing industry havoc and the economic ripples everywhere - it may wake everyone up.
Or it may not. History has shown that death itself is the most effective societal teacher.
Imagine you could contain the pure water from a fully melted iceberg inside a sphere. In the same way an iceberg floats and sticks out of the sea, the ball of pure water would float in the sea with 2.5% of its volume sticking out above the sea surface. If you let the water out of the sphere, the 2.5% volume of pure water that was above the sea level inside the sphere will spread out across the planet's oceans, raising the global sea level.
The iceberg mentioned in the article was 40metres thick and 66 square kilometres in area, so the ice volume is 2.6 billion cubic metres. Ice is 8.3% less dense than pure water liquid , so when the iceberg melts, the volume of pure water will be 2.4 billion cubic metres and 2.5% of that is 60 million cubic metres. The world has 360 million square kilometers of ocean, so adding 60 million cubic metres of pure water will raise average global sea level by 0.17 microns (thousandths of a millimetre)!
Scroogle
Warming of the earth in the recent past is a fact. "Global Warming," or human initiated carbon emission based climate change, is up for debate contrary to conventional wisdom.
;-)
Actually, you're about 50 years behind the research. Global warming has been documented for over a century, and 50 years ago there was a lot of scientific debate over the causes. But two significant things have happened over the past several decades: The warming has accelerated rapidly, and scientific evidence has accumulated to the point that there's no longer scientific debate over the basic explanation (though there are still lots of fine details that will make for many dissertations).
The warming up to 50 years ago was probably mostly due to natural cycles, though human input had a small effect. The warming of the past few decades is not due to natural cycles; it is almost entirely due to human input. (Some models say that we cause around 110% of the warming; the planet should be cooling slightly now.
When I was a kid in the Seattle area back in the 50s, something I read repeatedly was that the general area (from northern California to mid British Columbia) had been cooling slightly for some decades, and local glaciers had grown longer. This was considered interesting because it was well known that most of the world was getting warmer. Nobody knew why that small area and a few others had been cooling. But around 1970, the cooling stopped, the glaciers started retreating, and the area joined the rest of the world's warming trend.
People who think this is something new to scientists simply haven't been paying attention. We do have much better data for the past 30 or 40 years, but there's enough data from previous centuries to make the story fairly clear. A lot of scientific work has been done examining the data and building theoretical models to explain the data. It's now difficult for scientists to go along with the desires of politicians to ignore the growing problem that's mostly of our own making. The "debate" now in scientific circles is over the fine details of what's happening to the planet.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Tell you what: let's have one Earth where GHG emissions are eliminated, and a second Earth where GHGs continue to be produced at their current, increasing, pace. Then we can see if it is a precise cause, based on whether or not each Earth becomes uninhabitable.
You can live on the second one.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Is it just me who is wondering why these GW denier posts are continually being modded up. I'm shocked at the way these skeptics arguments seem to dominate any discussion here. Are we nerds really this stupid?
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)