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Huge Pool of Ice-Free Water Discovered Under Greenland Ice
The BBC reports that researchers have discovered a huge pool of meltwater beneath Greenland's ice sheet, trapped "in the air space between particles of ice, similar to the way that fruit juice stays liquid in a slush drink."
From the article, based on research published in Nature Geoscience (abstract): "The scientists say the water is prevented from freezing by the large amounts of snow that fall on the surface of the ice sheet late in the summer. This insulates the water from the air temperatures which are below freezing, allowing the water to persist as liquid all year long. Other researchers believe this discovery may help explain disparities between projections of mass loss by climate models and observations from satellites."
Hrrrmph.
Given our current level of technology, I'm always amazed when we discover large scale things like this. We have out cities mapped and photographed down to the meter, but we keep finding things like this.
So when the worldwide population multiplies, will water be the new oil?
Sorta like the bulk of the oceans remain liquid under the ice that forms in the northern oceans.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
...said the physics teacher.
Under pressure, the freezing point of water is lowered. The more pressure, the lower the ice point. To demonstrate:
Assume that a container is indestructible (let's say, a sphere with a perfect seal). It is full of water with no gas in solution or loose in bubbles or anything like that. Just pure water. Now, stick it in a deep freeze. Wait.
Water has the odd property of expanding at around 4C at normal (sea level) pressure. By the time it freezes at 0C under those same pressure conditions, it has expanded to fill 1/8 more volume than it did as a liquid. This is why icebergs float. This is why distilled water ice cubes also float. The liquid water does its thing and... you know the rest. Titanic.
The water in the sphere is prevented from freezing for the simple reason that it has nowhere to go. It has no space to expand into. If it cannot expand, it cannot freeze. How low can you go? I have no idea, having no access to magnetocaloric equipment. But I daresay, you wouldn't meet the conditions required to get the volume of water to contract to the point where it can solidify in the available space, outside of a suitably equipped laboratory or in the shadow of an outer planet.
Further reading suggests temperatures approaching/lower than about 70K (-203C) to achieve this. Further reading.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Other researchers believe this discovery may help explain disparities between projections of mass loss by climate models and observations from satellites
Or maybe not. For all we know that slush has been there since the last ice age.
At Summit Greenland the ice is in excess of 3000 meters thick!
The effect of the layer of daily or monthly snow on top has nothing to be with ice at bottom (its the weight of the total column) nor the daily or monthly variation of water between the ice and the rock bed.
Sorry ICE guys! You're fucked! You blew your own dicks by removing a vertebra from your spineless backs.
Snicker snicker.
Cue the usual conga line of climate change denying assholes trying to use this as evidence for their delusion.
So there was a discrepancy between prediction and observation for the AGW model. Why haven't we heard about that before? Only now that the observations are consistent with theory do we find out about it. Yet more evidence that climate scientists are not real scientists.
What makes you think that scientists have hidden this discrepancy? They haven't, and every anti-AGW promoter has been shouting it from the rooftops (while they ignore or misrepresent all the evidence that supports AGW.)
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
If that water underneath the ice made it possible that the entire sheet of ice could slide off in one go, that would make projections of melting time somewhat irrelevant. Might just nead a bit of an earthquake to get things moving...
Lol most idiotic post in ages, lies and bad spelling.
If this slushy effect is real then update the model, recalculate the figures for the previous years data and see how accurate it is.
Don't waste everyone's time making predictions using a model that doesn't work on previous years data.
That is exactly how the models work; when new facts are found they plug that into their models and calibrate it against past data. They also compare the predictions against new measurements, and if there is a discrepancy then they try to figure out why - as was the case here. This is why the models are getting more accurate as the years go by.
How's this for an analogy. Just because science can't pin down when you are going to die to the minute does not mean that you are immortal.
Is that a clear and polite enough response to your "intellectual honesty" accusation of lying? Do you even understand that it is an accusation of lying or are you just a parrot repeating propaganda that you have heard?
...This water is in the firn [wikipedia.org] which occurs down to a depth of around 50 meters [nationalgeographic.com]..
Is it just me, or is everyone else appalled by the idea of citing the wiki and the Nat.Geog. as authoritative sources?
They are unable to predict the future though, and always have been.
That is a pretty unsupportable statement considering that the scientists are well aware of how much certainty their models have, and so give a large error range such that it was nearly impossible to get it wrong. Your claim that they all have been falsified by observations is a complete lie.
How do you know the margin for error on something that you have no idea exists?
I'd love to hear the statistical process that generates that margin to any confidence level.
It's only because now they have an ad hoc explanation to explain why their predictions have failed. Never play darts with a climate scientist. He will throw the darts at the wall opposite of the target and then one of his buddies will go by and paint bulls-eyes around each of the darts where it landed.
Easy - model predicts Y, actual data is in the range X to Z. That's your margin for error. As the model improves the error bars become smaller. That's the way it works for *all* of science. Even something as "simple" as Earth's gravity - the first approximation, let's call it 10m/s2 was okay, thousands of experiments later we know the average value is closer to 9.80665m/s2. Of course that's only the average, and changes based on your altitude and the density of the Earth beneath you - and those factors can't really be incorporated into the model, they depend on real-world confounding factors. For most purposes though 9.8, or even 10m/s2 is plenty accurate enough, and a *lot* easier to work with, so for most purposes we just say "the model is that Earth's surface gravity is 9.8m/s2 +/-0.7%"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_of_Earth
Of course climate science does suffer from the fact that controlled experiments are essentially impossible to conduct, and repeatability is not an option on human timescales. However, to people saying that means it's unscientific and shouldn't be used as a basis for social policy, consider this: Despite all their errors the climate models are still *far* more accurate and reliable than any economic theory ever proposed, and *those* theories get used as the basis of far more expensive and potentially destructive social policies as a matter of course without any serious objections.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
NASA has know for years about Antarctica's below freezing water.
It is not overstating the case because the trend is even more obvious now than when a conclusive report about it was placed on President Johnson's desk. The exact details of how and why are less obvious.
It's as if you are arguing against the effect of gravity just because we don't know the details about how it happens. We can see things falling when we drop them so we can notice the trend instead of assuming they will change direction in mid fall.
The temperature rise is ongoing, it's history now, not just prediciton, and there really is no point denying what has already happened so far.
I've seen it before - I think it was one of "Lord" Monckton's little jabs from his science denial roadshow.
Let's see if you can guess mine:
Marduk T-Shirt, military boots, necklace with an inverted pentagram, leather jacket with stickers of Immortal, an inverted crucifix a Church of Satan button, heavy duty working trousers... hmm, difficult, very difficult to guess.
\m/
-- 29A the number of the Beast
So, that's were they were hiding... and holding the rest of the world for a fool making us believe that they were our there in the icy wilderness freezing their balls off with nothing to eat but live baby seals while they actually were enjoying Martinis and banana splits in their underground climatized giant pool!
-- 29A the number of the Beast
That water moves around in both solid (porosity under a couple of %) ice and less compacted snow (let's call it "firn", because Wegener was German) is well known. Sometimes it moves in large channels - look up "joukullhlaup' for some fun figures - sometimes in small or microscopic ones. But always it remains hydrogen oxide, and so has a very large specific latent heat of crystallisation. So large, in fact, that if you try to freeze a cubic metre of water at zero centigrade into ice at zero centigrade, you relaese enough heat to melt almost a cubic metre of ice (at zero centigrade) into water (at zero centigrade).
So, once you get away from radiative cooling (to space, via the atmosphere) and evaporative cooling (to the atmosphere), then you've only got the relatively slow conductive and convective cooling routes to get rid of that latent heat of crystallisation. Since ice - as solid ice, or as compacted snow or firn - is actually a pretty decent insulator (build a snow hole and see!), then it's not really astonishing that water can persist as a pore fluid in ice for long periods.
Moderately interesting science, reasonable TFA ; terrible TFS.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"