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!