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Huge Freshwater Bulge In Arctic Ocean
New submitter turkeyfish writes "UK scientists are reporting today in the journal Nature Geoscience that a huge bulge of freshwater is forming in the Western Arctic Ocean caused by a large gyre of freshwater. The gyre appears to indicate that the ice is becoming thin enough over the Arctic Ocean that the wind is beginning to affect the motion of water under the ice. A sudden release of this water or its emergence to the surface will greatly accelerate the melting of the remaining polar oceanic ice and likely alter oceanic circulation in the North Atlantic."
Read more about the thermo-haline cycle on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation.
The fact that there was someone there to look at the formation of the plume means that it is not entirely unexpected, as in "someone got their project funded, and thus made a reasonable case for it".
Of course this would be found/discussed in fairly technical papers. If you trust journalists to do science reporting right, I have a bridge on the Moon to sell.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0924796395000062 for example dates from 16 years ago.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1034/j.1600-0889.2001.530504.x/abstract is from 11
years ago and directly related. Hint: sciencedirect or google scholar are a better way to get scientific information/papers than plain google.
Predictions are rarely that specific. They're not going to tell you that's there's a fresh water "plume" as TFA so indicates. What predictions do is give you trends, and the effect of these trends on the overall system. The predicted effects are also not specific, but instead the prediction of more trends.
Reality is a little different. There's a lot of noise in the system. The variances of what happens and is expected to happen can be extreme. But the average--the predicted trend--will remain barring unaccounted for variables that may make things much worse or much better. This plume may be a part of the trend. Or it may be one such deviation from the system. Or it could be an unaccounted for variable that's about to accelerate the glacial melt timeline significantly.
Only time will tell whether the initial predictions still hold after this. And if the data doesn't support it, it will be revised. But I can't imagine that 20+ years worth of data supporting the predicted trend will be outright reversed by one event. To even fancy such a notion so would be wishful thinking indeed. More likely, things will either get a little better, or a little worse.
Of course, there actually is a point of no return that we are quickly approaching, and even if things go better than expected for us and the predictions are on the high side, we'll still end up there if we don't change our lifestyles. There's a huge amount of methane stored in the Siberian tundra. Methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2. It's a missile compared to the bullet that the trapped CO2 in glacial ice would be. As the tundra begins to defrost, methane gets released into the atmosphere. When the climate reaches the point where the permafrost is no longer permanent, no amount of CO2 emissions cuts will be able to prevent the sudden release of greenhouse gas into the environment. And at that point, everyone might as well start staking their turf on high ground.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."