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."

Comments

Re:How "An Inconvenient Truth" can it get

[hey!]

Well, not yet, and that's from somebody who thinks that anthropogenic climate change is probably a true hypothesis.

For one thing the thinning or melting of sea ice itself has no direct effect on sea level -- just like melting ice cubes don't change the level of water in a glass. The picture the article paints is far more complex. In a nutshell, thinning Arctic ice may allow winds to mix colder surface water with warmer deep water. This would cause more ice thinning faster than changes in the atmosphere (if any) could drive change. Any effect on sea level would be indirect.

What I'm much more concerned with is human responses to this development -- or rather *political* responses. Russia is making territorial claims in the Arctic Ocean based on some creative interpretation of international law, because they think that climate change may open the Arctic to resource exploration. If they find oil up there, there could be a polar conflict between Russia the US and strained relations between Canada and the US.

Re:How "An Inconvenient Truth" can it get

[rwa2]

Ice occupies more space than water. Melting of sea ice results in a drop in ocean levels, not an increase. only melting of land based ice results in a rise in sea levels.

But ice also floats on water. If you have ice floating in a glass of water, and the ice melts, the level of liquid stays the same.

But salty water is more buoyant than freshwater! So the icebergs would sit a tad lower as the salinity of the water decreases.

But TFA says it's mostly caused by the wind gyre that sucks everything up with a low pressure system. And the main effect has nothing to do with rise or fall of ocean levels, but with ocean currents that keep the North Atlantic relatively warm, but could plunge it into an ice age if the currents reversed (as was the case during the last ice age). Fun and amazing stuff.

Re:How "An Inconvenient Truth" can it get

[ArcherB]

Climate change is real, global warming is real and the cause for this is real. This has been established by practically all scientists in the field. Denying it is as futile and idiotic as the few that still refute the theory of evolution based on their personal religious or political ideas.

Just curious... Can you tell me how many of these scientists predicted a fresh water plume, stirred by iceberg moved by high winds, would cause more ice to melt? I can't seem to find that prediction anywhere. I did, however find that high winds will cause the water to cool quicker via evaporation, which should have fixed that pesky iceberg problem, made the water saltier, thereby fixing that overabundance of fresh water problem that started this whole discussion. That was on the Wiki page for Thermohaline circulation. It says, "Wind moving over the water also produces a great deal of evaporation, leading to a decrease in temperature, called evaporative cooling. Evaporation removes only water molecules, resulting in an increase in the salinity of the seawater left behind, and thus an increase in the density of the water mass. In the Norwegian Sea evaporative cooling is predominant, and the sinking water mass, the North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW), fills the basin and spills southwards through crevasses in the submarine sills that connect Greenland, Iceland and Great Britain. It then flows very slowly into the deep abyssal plains of the Atlantic, always in a southerly direction."

Also, is CO2 the only gas stored under glaciers? I mean, if the atmospheric CO2 concentration at the time the glaciers formed was so high that releasing a fraction of that gas would be enough to heat the world... wouldn't the planet have been too hot to form these glaciers in the first place?

I'm not trying to be smart ass, but if you don't question, you never learn. And you never EVER give up your freedom of the word of someone else without at least asking a few questions and pointing out gaping logical holes.