Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Antarctica's Ice Flow Fully Mapped For the First Time

Posted by samzenpus on from the check-out-all-that-ice dept.

tvlinux writes "Antarctica is a big continent, so mapping all of its ice flow isn't exactly a piece of cake. But for the first time scientists have been able to get the complete picture of the southernmost continent's ice flow, from the South Pole to the shoreline. From the article: '"This is like seeing a map of all the oceans' currents for the first time. It's a game changer for glaciology," said Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the University of California (UC), Irvine. Rignot is lead author of a paper about the ice flow published online Thursday in Science Express. "We are seeing amazing flows from the heart of the continent that had never been described before."'"

13 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Useless... by riverat1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Oh, there's enough ice there it will take several thousand years for all of it to melt. But the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could slide into the ocean pretty fast which would be a problem. A collapse if the WAIS would amount to over 15 feet of sea level rise.

  2. What happened to geology for its own sake? by tp1024 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There was a time, way back, when geologists would have presented this kind of finding and said:

    "We finally have a map of how the ice in Antarctica moves. We don't quite know exactly why it moves the way it does, but at least now we know some of the questions we should ask ourselves."

    Instead we get scaremongering drivel along the lines of: "That's critical knowledge for predicting future sea level rise. It means that if we lose ice at the coasts from the warming ocean, we open the tap to massive amounts of ice in the interior."

    1. Re:What happened to geology for its own sake? by KeensMustard · · Score: 3, Insightful
      This would only be scaremongering if it weren't true.
      1. Have you evidence that it is not?
      2. Surmising (on presently available evidence) that sea rises due to melting ice is likely, how can talking about it be bad? Surely more knowledge is a good thing?
    2. Re:What happened to geology for its own sake? by tp1024 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      > This would only be scaremongering if it weren't true.

      No. If you keep repeating "truths" out of all proportion, it is still scaremongering. That's why there are so many more people who feel perfectly fine driving a car to the airport and getting scared as soon as they board the plane - than there are people who are a paranoid, nervous wreak behind the driving wheel and relax upon boarding the much safer airplane (as it is indeed the case).

      All that because news about airplane crashes are presented way out of proportion. If any passenger airplane crashes down anywhere on this globe - be it in Washington State, Siberia or Lagos, Nigeria - you'll know it. And they are all real. Not one is counterfeit or a fabrication. It just so happens, that 100% are being reported.

      If there were as many dead people in airplane crashes as in car accidents, you'd need to have one major plane crash each day with over 100 dead people on average in the USA alone! Yet, much less than 1% of the car accidents with dead people are reported.

      That's not to say anybody would be lying about the number of car accidents - but the biased reporting is very obviously having the effect of making airplanes appear much more dangerous than they actually are. The worst is, however, that it makes people talk and fight like idiots about airplane safety whenever there is a crash - but they all forget about the dreadful danger that car traffic is. There are far over a million dead people in car accidents each year worldwide. But nobody cares.

    3. Re:What happened to geology for its own sake? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      "What happened to geology for its own sake?"

      People insisted that scientists show how their work is relevant to things of concern to taxpayers, because taxpayers are often funding part of the research. That pretty much sums up the reasons why the broader implications of a study get mentioned in journalistic reports no matter how interesting the regular scientific aspects are on their own. Science is the accumulation of a lot of smaller studies that incrementally add up. Individually they usually aren't some great revolution in understanding. But journalists love to increase the drama.

      And it's not scaremongering. It's kind of like the grounded coastal ice is acting as a dam for ice moving from the interior. Remove it (by melting and/or breakup), and the ice streams will move much further inland and tap into the main parts of the cap, meaning you haven't just removed the coastal ice and added it to sea level, you've accelerated the movement of the entire land-based icecap into the sea. This is not scaremongering, it's the natural result of a better understanding the dynamics of ice motion in Antarctica. Having a map of the current ice motion over the entire continent is a big advance, and it also means the whole thing can be monitored for longer-term changes.

    4. Re:What happened to geology for its own sake? by tp1024 · · Score: 2

      Are you emotionally invested in a pro-AGW point of view? The article didn't strike me as particularly objective.

      I have never seen a volcanologist writing something like:
      "That's critical knowledge for predicting future volcanic eruptions. It means that if we lose the lava dome of the volcano, we open the tap to massive amounts of magma in the interior."

      Neither have I seen an astronomer writing something like:
      "That's critical knowledge for predicting future super-novae. It means that if we lose the carbon-fusion in the core of the star, we open the tap to massive amounts of neutrinos, gamma rays and heavy nuclei."

    5. Re:What happened to geology for its own sake? by Arlet · · Score: 2

      People will just naturally move inland as the water level rises

      I live in a low lying river delta, together with a few million other people. It's a very profitable region of the country, and I can assure you it's not going to be moved anytime soon.

      What happens instead is that the levee system will have to be upgraded, which means a $ multi billion investment. Or, worse, the threat isn't taken seriously enough, the upgrade is delayed, and the entire area is flooded during a huge storm surge.

  3. Re:New discovery??? by chromas · · Score: 2, Funny

    No, prior to this breakthrough, it was believed the ice just grew legs and walked off.

  4. Lovely Science by msevior · · Score: 2

    Congrats Guys!

    This is lovely Science. From this I guess we can map the underlying topology of Antarctica.

  5. Re:"...isn't exactly a piece of cake." by riverat1 · · Score: 2

    Taxes are the dues you pay for a civilized society.

  6. How it was done... by ignavus · · Score: 4, Funny

    Apparently up until now, a lot of the penguins wouldn't let the Google camera vans drive onto their glaciers.

    Now that's been sorted out (yep, Google bought out the penguins AND got Motorola into the bargain), so Google has been able to map the whole Antarctic glacial flow.

    A random picture from a glacier's street view is below:
    |
    |
    |
    |
    |
    |
    |
    |
    |
    |
    (Sorry about the blizzard)

    --
    I am anarch of all I survey.
  7. Re:Jet Propulsion by vbraga · · Score: 2

    Jet propulsion, ice flows, everything is a part of "Transport Phenomena" the sub field of classic physics that includes aerodynamics, for example.

    --
    English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
  8. Re:Jet Propulsion by riverat1 · · Score: 2

    The data was collected by a coalition of researchers from around the world, mostly not from the US. The JPL merely took the data from many studies and using their super computers put it together in a comprehensive whole for Antarctica.