Antarctic Ice Bridge Finally Breaks Off

GreennMann writes "An ice bridge linking a shelf of ice the size of Jamaica to two islands in Antarctica has snapped. Scientists say the collapse could mean the Wilkins Ice Shelf is on the brink of breaking away, and provides further evidence of rapid change in the region. Sited on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, the Wilkins shelf has been retreating since the 1990s. Researchers regarded the ice bridge as an important barrier, holding the remnant shelf structure in place. Its removal will allow ice to move more freely between Charcot and Latady islands, into the open ocean."

Comments

Well,

[palegray.net]

that's certainly one way to break the ice in a tense situation like this.

Re:Well,

[Forge]

How much is that in Football fields?

Seriously, We don't play American Football in Jamaica so I'm a little Hazy as to what 4,244 sq mi (10,991 sq km) translates to in more standard SlashDot measurements.

Re:Well,

[maxume]

Including the endzones, 2,054,096 football fields. Excluding the endzones, 2,464,915.5 football fields.

Blame me

[DaHat]

Given my SUV driving has yet to save me in a crash (I've not had one since buying it)... I'm glad to see it has contributed to something productive at least.

Re:Blame me

[Thanshin]

Given my SUV driving has yet to save me in a crash (I've not had one since buying it)...

Don't feel bad; maybe you've crashed multiple times against bikes and pedestrians and simply didn't notice.

Re:Not that it matters ...

[palegray.net]

Now, I'm gunna drive my SUV 65 miles to work tomorrow and feel ok about it.

You may feel okay about it, but I feel bad for your gas card :).

This isn't the tip of the iceberg...

[__aaclcg7560]

Once the ice bridge falls away, scientists will find one pissed off ice troll.

Re:As I've Said Before

[linhares]

If you really, really wanted to save the polar ice caps, you'd create a time machine and travel back..say, 19,000 years ago. Back when the polar ice cap extended down into what is modern day Illinois. Which predates SUVs and industrialization by around...19,000 years or so.

You could also increase the number of pirates.

Whew, no problem then

[ryanov]

Thank god we have the average mook on Slashdot or I might have thought this were cause for concern. I guess all of the scientists who have agreed that there are man-made effects on climate are completely incorrect, but this website is the last bastion of sanity?

Re:Whew, no problem then

[TapeCutter]

The intellectual coward has it the wrong way around. The "It's natural" red-herring is stage two of the standard psudeo-skeptical denial that comes when they can no longer deny the globe is warming to a particular audience. The next stages include, "it's good for us", "economic armageden" and "god wouldn't allow it to happen".

Re:Whew, no problem then

[biscuitlover]

All those scientists that disagree? Sure, there's some disagreement, but we're talking about a very small percentage of scientists here.

The fact that a lot of people are happy to selectively discount a clear majority of scientific opinion worldwide because it doesn't fit in with their world view or political standpoint never ceases to amaze me.

Re:Whew, no problem then

[Mark Hood]

Someone once brought this home to me quite nicely - he said if 9 out of 10 doctors said your child had appendicitis, and only 1 said it was trapped gas, would you go home and 'wait and see'?
Even if you were nervous about the risks of an operation, the risks of ignoring it are much worse - if it turns out to be appendicitis.

Sure, it might be nothing, just like global warming might not be our fault, but would you take the chance?

Mark

Re:Whew, no problem then

[khayman80]

Most scientists agree that humans have contributed a small change to the climate, but all agree that the majority of the change is due to natural cycles (solar, long term atmospheric fluctuations etc). The only people claiming that humans are the sole or majority cause of climate warming/change are involved in politics, vote gathering, and selling 'technology' concepts to 'save the planet' in order to bilk the public out of money.

I am a climate scientist. I've never been in politics and I've never sold anything (professional student here). I also think you're completely wrong. My experiences at the 2008 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union are that most (9/10) of the scientists I met agree with the IPCC report on abrupt climate change.

But you've made an even more fundamental mistake. Science isn't democratic-- it's about evidence. Open up the IPCC reports yourself and focus on what's really important, instead of trying to count how many people are on each side.

For example, Vostok ice core data confirms that for nearly half a million years, the climate has changed cyclically. But in all that time, the maximum CO2 concentration never went above 300 ppm. (It's hit higher levels millions of years ago, but that was a slow and gradual change. Plus the Earth was essentially a different planet back then, with a different solar luminosity and biosphere so comparisons across that much time are tricky.)

You're right to say that natural variations are evident in the data, but the most prominent cycles over geological time are governed by (among other effects) Milankovitch cycles which are caused by periodic variations in the earth's orbit.

But, CO2 concentrations are at 380 ppm today. That's a level it hasn't hit in the last half million years. If we're seeing natural variability alone, it's quite a coincidence that it occurs right when we started excavating fossil fuels to fuel a billion cars.

Plus, the Vostok data is a little difficult to analyze in this manner, but it seems like at Vostok the CO2 always increased 600 years AFTER the temperature started to increase. At least, that's the way it used to work. Right now, the CO2 concentration is at an unprecedented level but the temperature is barely above normal. Again, that suggests that we're not facing natural climate change, we're dealing with anthropogenic abrupt climate change.

Re:Whew, no problem then

[alexibu]

The Antarctic as a whole is not cooling, but warming with the rest of the world, some data from some places showed it was cooling and of course this was expounded by denialists as proof that warming wasn't global.

see : http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/state-of-antarctica-red-or-blue

The Antarctic's ice is melting much less than the arctic because the antarctic gets a lot of it's coldness from it's altitude (mountains etc), whereas the arctic is just floating ice, and is also adjacent to more land and less water - water stabilises temperature - so this makes the arctic more sensitive to temperature changes. But the edge bits are melting.

I think the ice shelves breaking is more likely to be caused by sea level rise though. Where the sea level cracks the ice off from the land. Which shows the non linear nature of ice melting. We don't just get ice melting linearly with temperature increases, we can get whole chunks breaking off and floating away

Re:Whew, no problem then

[khayman80]

Yes, I've seen those bizarre claims as well. I don't think any physicist seriously doubts the warming properties of CO2. The spectrum of the sun, absorption lines of CO2 and their relevant thermodynamic relationships are simply too well established. They're freshman-level homework problems, not cutting edge research areas.

I brought that up because I'm concerned about the fact that current warming is highly atypical in that regard. What happens when the natural positive feedback of CO2 adds to what we've already dumped into the atmosphere?

Re:Whew, no problem then

[m4cph1sto]

I'm a scientist too, and I judge theories based on merit, not popular opinion.

As a rule, scientific theories are not accepted by the scientific community until they have done two things: (1) explained known observations in a more simple or fundamental way than alternative theories, and (2) made a prediction about something that is currently unknown and that other theories don't predict, which is then confirmed by observation.

Global Warming theory has met neither of those requirements. The main statement of Global Warming is something like this: "small changes in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere cause large changes in global temperature". Despite this theory, there is absolutely no evidence that a change in CO2 has ever caused the temperature to change, over the entire billions-years history of the planet. So GW theory doesn't explain past observations.

It doesn't explain current observations either: CO2 concentration has steadily increased over the past 100 years, while temperatures have gone up, then down, then up again, then down again (as they are currently). There is no dramatic warming trend as predicted by GW theory.

Finally, GW has not made any unique predictions that have later been confirmed as true. It predicted more and bigger hurricanes; that hasn't happened. It predicted significant temperature increases; that hasn't happened. In fact, the theory seems totally based on computer models that have failed to make a single correct prediction about the climate ever since I first started following the issue, in 1998.

To summarize, GW theory does not meet the standards of scientific acceptance, not by a long shot.

Re:Whew, no problem then

[TapeCutter]

Total ignorance is rare but you seem to have pulled it off with that 'insightfull' post.

Re:Whew, no problem then

[NeutronCowboy]

Since so many people here think that they're Nobel Prize worthy, I'm sure it won't be hard for those who want to brush me off for not linking to a source to find exactly what I'm talking about.

No. I brush you off because I've got links to Nobel Prize winners and the results of studies of other world-renowned scientists available. You, on the other hand, are doing some handwaving about the little ice age, which is only tangentially related to the current issue of Global Warming. You seem to take yourself far more seriously than you even accuse the rest of Slashdot to be.

Re:Whew, no problem then

[hey!]

I'm not a scientist myself, but my wife is an Earth scientist. We've been following the climate change story now for twenty five years or more in Eos and other journals.

As an interested outsider, I think one of the reasons that scientists took so long to get off the dime when it came to sounding the alarm was that most of them were waiting for the other shoe to drop. There has not been another scientific story like climate change in generations. Not since evolution.

One of the things my wife often said over the years was, "the evidence is too good." And I'm sure she's not the only one. It goes against scientific training to get behind a theory until it's been given a serious beating, and nobody has been able to lay a glove on this one.

What people who don't have a real live Earth scientist available for observation need to understand is that even proponents of the theory would love to see the skeptical position put up a decent fight. Data this unambiguous doesn't seem scientific. It's spooky. They'd rather see the theory knocked down onto the mat, then get up to fight another round and win by decision.

People waited around for the skeptics to give this theory a solid hit, and in over twenty five years the skeptics have failed, over and over and over. First they argued that climate wasn't changing, and although they did manage to discredit some data sets, that position failed. Next they tried to explain the data in terms of non-anthropogenic causes; at best they've forced some changes in models and in the predicted ranges of change. So far as I know, no attempt to explain the changes in climate data over the last fifty years in terms of natural cycles or statistical artifacts has held up to scrutiny.

I understand that science is not a democracy; but it's not driven by individual data sets either. You have to look at how robust an hypothesis is, how it stands up under stress. Thus far, nobody has been able to seriously set the theory back. Who wouldn't want to do this, if they could? Discrediting anthropogenic climate change would be Nobel caliber work. It would be an immense service to humanity, comparable in importance if not greater than the discovery of the vaccine for polio, or penicillin was in medicine.

Re:Somewhere in the USA...

[One Louder]

I'm waiting to see the live video footage of that scene where the poor sweet little baby polar bear is trapped on an ice floe which shrinks until he falls off to be eaten by sharks or some garbage like that *splash*

It would be quite remarkable to have video footage of polar bears in the Antarctic.

Re:As I've Said Before

[TapeCutter]

So by your reasoning we Aussies should not be arresting arsonists who are responsible for starting about 1/3 of all our bushfires. We should let them continue with their bussiness as usual because we know that the other 2/3 of bushfires are started by natural causes.

BTW: This particular environmentalist doesn't care if you drive an SUV, a sherman tank, or a skateboard.

Re:the main concern...

[Schemat1c]

Speaking from naval experience here...

What does your bellybutton have to do with icebergs?

Re:Not that it matters ...

[palegray.net]

Now you've gone and ruined his nefarious plot to continuously drive his SUV until he's the proud new owner of oceanside property. In these uncertain economic times, how else is a fella supposed to increase his property value? Huh? Huh? Bastard.

Re:the main concern...

[Cassius Corodes]

Can we really discount the possibility of ice having stealth technology?

Re:Not that it matters ...

[interkin3tic]

"See doc, there's a natural progression to blood pressure. High low high low. It's going up,BFD.

Now, I'm gunna eat this bag of potato chips and get a big mac and feel okay about it."

You have to love it how some people cling to the first rationalization that allows them to keep doing what they want, from the time they're kids right up to when they die.

Re:Not that it matters ...

[CRCulver]

The building of new ports takes years. They aren't something you can just knock up in a day.

Re:Not that it matters ...

[tezbobobo]

Sure - five years to build a port. Then start on the next for when that port is drowned.

SUVs are not safe.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_01_12_a_suv.html

That might be true, but

[varghan]

the country I live in, the Netherlands, has one fourth of the land below sealevel by as much as 48 feet already. I guess we can handle a few additional feet of water. More water spurs great engineering, and has done so since medieval times. That doesn't mean you can't leave your SUV at home and take your bicycle to work today, though.

Re:Metric

[badfish99]

For us Europeans, could somebody say how many Belgiums there are in a Jamaica, please?

Re:Not that it matters ...

[LordVader717]

Most estimates don't account for melting of continental Ice (Antarctic). That is because most expect the antarctic climate to be stable. The observed melting of Ice is worse than the estimates suggested by climate models.
This causes concern that the antarctic climate could be much more dynamic than we think.

A change in the climate of Antarctica could lead to large amounts of continental ice melting, which would lead to sea level rises much more than a couple of feet.

The Article Makes a good point

[Lifyre]

It mentions that a lot of the dynamics of this situation are poorly understood. Whether or not you believe in global warming or what you think is causing it we don't know what the results are going to be.

There are so many possibilities with some scientific basis and the whole environment as a system is so complex that we can't predict details. We can paint broad strokes of the future but saying the sea level is going to raise 2.37 feet and believing that the sea will raise exactly 2.37 feet put blinders on you just like believing that a Divine Being created the universe in 6 days.

We have an idea of what MAY happen but there is so much complexity that we don't know what WILL happen. Right now it looks like shit is going to get warmer, ice is going to melt, sea levels will get higher and who knows the Gulf Stream may stop flowing causing Europe to get cold.

Some of you seriously need to stop beating the Global Warming Manifesto like it is a Bible.

Re:Not that it matters ...

[linuxrocks123]

You laugh, but...

http://www.physorg.com/news5619.html

---linuxrocks123

Tabacoo science.

[TapeCutter]

Con job and spin are the correct terms for that particular web site.

This is the second time this site has popped up in the last few days. It's run by one J. D'Aleo who is paid to do so by the "Science and Public Policy Institute", they are in turn backed by "Frontiers of Freedom" which is the lobbying brain child of this guy. They have a donate button on their site but their funding is otherwise obscured.

Older readers may recall the "Frontiers of Freedom" also backed the tabacoo industry in their anti-science campaign.

Disclaimer: I don't have anything against lobbyists or politicians until they pretend to be something they are not.