100-Sq.-Mile Ice Island Breaks Off Greenland Glacier

suraj.sun sends word of a 100-sq.-mile (260-sq.-km) ice island that broke off of a Greenland glacier on Thursday. "The block of ice separated from the Petermann Glacier, on the north-west coast of Greenland. It is the largest Arctic iceberg to calve since 1962... The ice could become frozen in place over winter or escape into the waters between Greenland and Canada. ... [NASA satellite] images showed that Petermann Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 70-km-long (43-mile) floating ice shelf. There was enough fresh water locked up in the ice island to 'keep all US public tap water flowing for 120 days,' said Prof Muenchow." The Montreal Gazette has more details and implications for Canadian shipping and oil exploration, along with this telling detail: "the ice island’s thickness [is] more than 200 metres in some places... [or] half the height of the Empire State Building." The NY Times has a good satellite photo of the situation.

Comments

Re:Clearly a sign of AGW

[Rei]

And, BTW, ice cover has increased since 2007... is that a sign of Global Cooling?

Oh, I just love this argument. It's based on the fact that arctic sea ice is declining to unprecedented levels according to studies using every piece of data and proxy data known, as documented in dozens of peer-reviewed studies, but at the same time, Antarctic ice is increasing, and at times, the combined average is higher than the previous combined average. Never mind that Antarctic sea ice increase is a *forecast* of AGW due to the increased snowfall and increase in flow rates of its glaciers, while Artic sea ice is declining, as expected.

The argument can basically be summed up as this:

Nurse: Doctor! The patient in room 1 has a temperature of 103.6! And the temperature of the patient in room 2 is down to 93.6!
Doctor: Perfect -- they average out to normal!

Re:Clearly a sign of AGW

[Rei]

First off, the frog thing is just a myth. Second, life can adapt, but only with time.

Re:Clearly a sign of AGW

[Artifakt]

It's probably true, however unlikely it seems to you, but one of the best proofs doesn't come from animals. Plants don't wander around - Once a tree grows in a spot, it's committed. Some plants in particular drop heavy nuts or seeds that will only get transported as far as animals will move them at the very most, and some spread by runners or similar methods that mean the offspring will always be close to the parent and moving across large distances takes many generations. For one example that's been particularly useful to biologists, evergreens that live on tops of mountains above the deciduous tree line usually stay there unless the climate gets so warm that tree-line moves higher than the mountaintop. Climate change at one rate may let some of these species relocate, but at a faster rate will simply wipe them out locally. In the same way, some plant diseases may spread widely only if the tree-line becomes so low, the mountain peaks are all connected. That's a distinctive, temperature related effect. We can look at plant fossils and make some pretty good estimates of how long it took for prehistoric changes, in particular, there are formulas based on longevity and reproductive frequency that hold if species X stays viable in some area for Y time, the rate of change had to be slower than Z. I't's a pretty good argument if species are now going locally extinct at 10xZ or 50xZ rate, that nothing like that has happened in pre human times, or we wouldn't have living examples of those species. Because some of the currently observed rates can be tens or more times faster than the prehistoric rates, rather than just, say 50% faster, it's considered an unambiguous type of evidence.
        To be fair, even this line of reasoning takes a lot of crosschecking. Plenty of legitimate scientific disputes exist over just how big a locale is meaningful, or how many different species should be checked before the results deserve a certain level of confidence, or whether the scars left by a particular plant disease are uniformly distinctive. For some cases, scientists do have to consider other events that may have happened that fast in prehistoric times (Dinos weren't the only thing clobbered by that asteroid 60 million years ago). So, it may be only fair to say, "unless the Cretacious extinctions were really caused by some sort of warming cycle and not a massive shield volcano super-eruption, asteroid impacts, or alien trophy hunters, nothing like this, this fast, has ever happened before." But, within limits such as that, the evidence is mounting.