Slashdot Mirror
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!
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?
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.
From wikipedia:
About 98% of Antarctica is covered by ice that averages at least 1.6 kilometres (1.0 mi) in thickness.
From summary:
it will produce an iceberg more than 880 square kilometres.
From wikipedia:
Surface area
510,072,000 km2[12][13][note 5]
148,940,000 km2 land (29.2 %)
361,132,000 km2 water (70.8 %)
From google:
((880 (km^2)) * (1,6 km)) / (361 132 000 (km^2)) = 3,89885139 millimeters
Answer: About 4mm.
The end of the glacier is much thinner than the average antarctic ice sheet, and it's already floating in the water, still attached to the glacier. If it breaks off, it's not going to raise water levels any more.
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.
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
The same thing that happens when similar sized bergs hit land, as they do all the time in the polar regions.
They ground in water which is about 100-200ft depth, and leave big gouges in the bottom.
you'll also end up with a warm Gin and Tonic, but who said you didn't have to suffer for science?
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
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 ?
You should look up the epic of iceberg B-15, for a time "the largest floating thing on the planet." It was one of the Icebergs that calved from the break up of the Ross Ice Shelf, and 11,000 km^2 – that's the size of Jamaica, Bylot, or Bloshevik Island, and larger than the "big island" of Hawai'i. It broke apart several times, bashed into the Drygalski Ice Tongue, gouging out an 8km^2 piece, and floated on, breaking into smaller pieces, though some of its remains are still wandering around the Antarctic Ocean.
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/ESAAQTTHN6D_index_0.html [ESA]
The ESA has a great deal of imagery on it.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
There are some small differences though. The ice is mostly fresh water, and the surrounding seas contain salt. The melting will cause a small, net rise in sea level. This is a very small effect, though.
Also, the local gravity field from the ice pulls the surrounding sea water closer to the pole. If the pole loses mass, the water will spread out more.