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Cracks Signal Massive Iceberg Forming In Antarctica
Several readers have submitted news (as covered by an AFP article carried by the Sydney Morning Herald) that a massive iceberg is forming in the Antarctic. The rift in the PIne Island Glacier "is widening at a rate of two metres a day, said NASA project scientist Michael Studinger. When the ice breaks apart, it will produce an iceberg more than 880 square kilometres, said Mr Studinger, who is part of the US space agency's IceBridge project. But the process is not a result of global warming, he said." Also at the BBC.
Global warming isn't shrinking the icebergs, its creating new ones!
Will it move into warmer waters (and melt?)
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
Does it bother anyone else that they had to say this? It's like doing a report on spring runoff and pointing out that it's not a result global warming. Are people really that ignorant of how natural processes work?
In recent years, satellite and airborne measurements have recorded a marked thinning of the PIG, which may be related to climate changes.
From The Syndey Morning Herald:
When the ice breaks apart, it will produce an iceberg more than 880 square kilometres, said Mr Studinger, who is part of the US space agency's IceBridge project. But the process is not a result of global warming, he said.
The BBC also conveniently did not include that last sentence from the source. I don't know what this tells you, but to me it appears as if the BBC intentionally wanted to scare its readers with global warming. Seems like the BBC is also illiterate and can't write properly (they write Nasa instead of NASA, yet PIG instead of Pig).
It's a continent. There is land under all that ice. As opposed to the Arctic, which is just ice all the way down until it becomes ocean. You can send a submarine under there right to the pole.
A popular theory says that the thinner ozone layer has increased the polar vortex winds. The vortex acts as a barrier to block warmer air from the rest of the planet.
Both of those are real things, one of them leads to the other.
No sig today...
When the GW and now CC crowd couldn't get enough money by begging, taxing, and creating tariffs to e.g. stop cutting the forests near the equator, they resorted to taking it in the form of carbon credits. It's all about stealing from future generations and making them serfs. The GW and CC crowd are just pawns and they don't even know it. Maybe they know it and they think they will be rewarded, sadly no.
Along the same lines have you been watching Greece lately? The plan is for the ESM(European Stability Mechanism) treaty to force countries to take out loans which they don't want and can't repay. Did you know the people that run the ESM are immune from prosecution, immune from taxes, immune under any court of law? Did you know the 2 people who are in line to be Prime Minister of Greece are already part of the ESM elites, banksters. With other upcoming elections around Europe, it will be interesting to see who gets put in power. Watch as more than half will be banksters and the ESM will be guaranteed.
You can clean up the world without taxes. Why do that when you can own it? Why do that when you can make everyone a serf?
Global warming, and local climate change. Past winters were actually warmer than usual, even though people remember them as cold. That's because they only look in their back yard, and not at the world as a whole.
Past winter, it was warm in South America, North Africa, the Middle East, and it was exceptionally warm in the Arctic. All averaged out over the whole world, including oceans, it was +0.43 degree Celsius warmer than the 1951-1980 baseline.
The winter of 2009-2010 was even warmer, at +0.68 deg C, even though the US and Europe were below average.
On this image of antartic elevation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AntarcticBedrock.jpg you can see alot of what we think of the continent of Antartica would actually be open ocean if the ice wasn't there. (As it's below sea level.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Bipolar antarctica sad about recent news.
yeah, it's the penguins and the polar bears, they've been lighting fires.
As one of the readers who mentioned this in a submission: http://video.stv.tv/bc/ITN_041111_worldICEBERG04/?redirect=no is a good short video story version on this, including some graphics on ice flows and pictures of the crack. Quite well done. Not this isn't a GW/CC event, but it is a chance to see the formation of a crack in progress, which we do not always catch. All icebergs start with this cracking process, and icebergs form in warm and cold periods of history. Understanding the ice dynamics of how flows of build up turn into stress is the ice equivalent of studying plate tectonics: the science of large solid plates bending, cracking, and then failing.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Spring snow melting has nothing to do with this though. It's a frozen sheet of ice, slowly sliding into the ocean, and when it's gets too big and thin, a piece breaks off. The last time this happened was in 2001.
What would happen if something that size hit a country or continent at say, 1 meter per second? I'm not sure of the magnitude of that kind of catastrophe at all.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Shouldn't it be measured in cubic kilometers?
What if you moved your baseline to, say, 1920-1950? How's that trend look then?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The period 1920-1950 was about 0.1 deg C less than 1950-1980, so all the numbers would go up by that amount. Why ?
It isn't that that Antartica is isolated from the rest of the globe, it is that the process of cracking and calving icebergs is part of the normal hydrologic cycle: glaciers crack, calve, form icebergs, the icebergs melt, lowering the salinity of the ocean, which evaporates and produces new precipitation. Some of this lands as snow, and an equilibrium is reached. Yes, periods of warming and cooling change this equilibrium, including natural and human driven changes.
However, before we can make intelligent investigation into how human activity changes the process, we have to understand the process, often much better than we do. The reason this event is important is not because we can ascribe it to a greenhouse gases, but that we are looking at a major calving event from very early on. It is like looking for star formation, or cracks that become volcanic eruptions. It's natural forces in action, and a chance to improve our theories of ice flow and formation, which, in turn, will improve our models of climate.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
I thought their utopia was owning an unregistered coal mine in China? No regulations and you can call the Army in to drag away any workers that give you trouble.
Here's a great site that lets you compare the various temperature reconstructions (as well as CO2 and solar output). woodfortrees.org
There are many regions around the world, particularly in India and Africa that are desperate for fresh water. Why not send a tanker up there with a legion of laborers to harvest these icebergs? Instead of just letting it melt into the ocean.
People may not know this, but before modern refrigeration, workers used to manually harvest big blocks of ice out of lakes with saws. Then your local Ice-guy would walk up to the side of your house, open a little door and stick a smaller block of ice through your wall, and into your icebox. This was how you kept food relatively cool.
Cracks have been seen as far north as central Oklahoma! lol
Fata viam invenient.
nature is fighting back, creating an army of icebergs to sink all our ships!
You have to PAY the Army somehow to drag away the lazy workers who don't like the money YOU say that they earned. Later, the Military MIGHT say they deserve more money because beating skulls in is hard work.
Only the people who benefit, can actually BE Libertarians in this scenario, so I suppose, it fits in perfectly with a free market dictatorship like China.
but the lack of pollution controls, means that there is nobody down-wind, and you cannot benefit from screwing up the environment -- because it is already screwed.
>> Face it; China LOOKS like a Libertarian utopia, but it's already BEEN a Libertarian utopia and there is nothing left to squeeze. The USA is actually a better Libertarian Utopia, because we still have a few suckers who can lower wages, we still have some clean water supplies that can get privatized, and GE can still can up clean air and sell you that while they fill the rest with smog.
We need to be more grateful for the USA for all the great things it has -- until of course, it is "utopia'd" into the ground.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Now you're getting it - warlords instead of peasants or slaves. Paying one way or another doesn't matter - it would be a wet dream for Koch et al if it was possible to bribe the Army to take action on their behalf just like a Chinese mine owner. Those pushing this form of anarchy think they can end up as the warlords if they think it through at all.
To an extent the USA started as a lot of attempts at Utopia but it universally sucked if you were somebody that didn't fit into a paticular model of Utopia or they needed somebody to do the manual labour. Instead of staying with that something better happened which inspired the democracy in my country and many others - which is one reason I'm pissed off with anti-democratic movements like the anarchists that wrap themselves in a flag and call themselves Libertarians to hide what they really are.
However I should be writing about icebergs instead because they are so unbelievably cool. Snow that dropped around a million or more years ago and thousands of kilometres away is floating out to sea in a huge chunk with enough water in it to supply a small country for a while.
A new graph by the team at SKS shows that the entire globe has actually been cooling - decade after decade - since at least 1973! http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/SkepticsvRealistsv3.gif