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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.
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
Ah it shouldn't be hard to get drinking water from the ocean if we had to. The key is there is a water problem now. It is because many people live in poverty and no one helps them build the basic infrastructure for sanitation. The modern man should see what resources he needs to live on, living a frugal life even, then give the excess to help the poorest of the poor. For people with hearts, we don't need big time luxuries when there are poor people dying who can be helped at 33 cents a day. If you're celebrating Christmas, and all your friends and family have what they need to live on, consider giving to a reputable charity.
God spoke to me
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.
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...
You mean, a thing that there is plenty of that we're constantly being told is just years away from being completely gone?
Are there really people denying "climate change"? It's a pretty accepted thing. Maybe not that it is due to man, but that there is change, sure. Of course, we also can't decide if the change is global *warming* or global *cooling*. It was only a couple decades or so ago that we were told pollution was sending us over the edge of unavoidable ice-ages.
I suppose you can sort of understand their skepticism. If I was born in 1990 and all I had ever heard was "global warming global warming AND IT IS ALL OUR FAULT!", I'd be terrified, too. If I was born in 1970 and had lived through "global cooling global cooling AND ITS ALL OUR FAULT!", I would probably be extremely skeptical of the claims, since I'd have been alive long enough to remember it the first time around.
they keep saying that, but the one's that keep yelling it the loudest are usually running a water investment scam.
I got some fresh water to sell to you... ... ... the only catch is that the water is in Finland. just figure out how to move it to sahara cheaper than drilling the water there and you'll make a bundle! promise!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The only difference between salty wateer and fresh water is energy - we just need to harness fusion power.
You can understand their skepticism even more when you consider that moneyed interests -- who stand to lose a lot if carbon emissions are seriously restricted -- have been pouring a ton of money into PR campaigns to discredit AGW and the scientists who promote it. Their wholly-owned media arm includes Fox News, the National Review, and propaganda outlets like the Rush Limbaugh show.
Sadly, many gullible conservatives would rather believe in a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy which promotes AGW in order to... umm... do something... than the simple truth of oil/coal corporations protecting their profits.
Are there really people denying "climate change"? It's a pretty accepted thing. Maybe not that it is due to man, but that there is change, sure. Of course, we also can't decide if the change is global *warming* or global *cooling*.
Lemme check... Yep. You're right, not just man made; Woman also contribute. Blood pressure indicates a trend in warming that can't be ignored. Forecasts predict no end in sight for this Eternal September.
There's lots of fresh water on the planet (including all the fresh water stored as ice). The problem is getting to a place where it's useful. Most places have to make do with the fresh water that's available locally. A notable exception being Southern California which imports water from the north and from the Colorado River. I doubt you'll find knowledgeable people saying fresh water would be completely gone (except perhaps for some overtaxed aquifers). Instead they are saying there will be more demand for fresh water than there is supply available to fill that demand in the future. Getting fresh water from Greenland to any place useful would be difficult and expensive.
And if you were born before the '70's you'd remember how bad the pollution was and how some scientists wondered if global dimming might counter act the rising CO2 levels that by themselves would increase the greenhousing that keeps the Earth currently at habitable temperatures. Most people don't seem to realize the Earths average temperature would be close to minus 20 Celsius without the greenhouse gases warming the Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
And yet despite the fact that the global cooling story made the covers of Time and Newsweek in the mid-70's, between 1965 and 1979 there were 6 times as many papers published on global warming from CO2 increases than global cooling in the scientific literature. I was born in 1952 and I don't remember being very alarmed by global cooling in the 1970's.
Exactly, it constantly amazes me that some of the posters here who rely on science in almost every aspect of their lives can be convinced by either the media or their own self interest to deny reality with the thoroughly debunked skeptics arguments. There's a sucker born every minute apparently.
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.
Scientists wonder a lot of things. That's the point of science. Fortunately the state of tech has advanced significantly since then, and they can wonder about things closer to current reality. Also, speculating about earth without greenhouse gases is pointless - we'd not exist if earth had no greenhouse gases. There's a balance/cycle of balances and the question is how far off we've hosed up the balance.
While noble in intent, there is a major problem with most charities as well, especially those that target the immediate, obvious needs like food: by artificially increasing the available food supply you increase the population that can be sustained, and the population will grow until it hits the new limits. Limits which now *require* charity in order to be maintained. An influx of free resources also undermines local markets, thus reducing the sustainable carrying capacity of the society even further. Basically you're making someones life better today, at the expense of making the problem even worse tomorrow. Many of the current population catastrophes in Africa can be traced directly to the well-intentioned generosity of foreign aid during a period of drought and famine several decades ago.
That said their *are* things we can do to help, provided we're collaborating with the locals. One of the best long-term investments in terms of proven elimination of suffering due to poverty is educating women, providing family planning education, and making birth control cheap and ubiquitous. Believe it or not most people don't want to have too many children to feed, they just don't have a lot of other options (and no, denying one of the most powerful biological drives is not a realistic option) Enough medical access that people can count on their children mostly reaching adulthood is also important in getting the birth rate down, and after the first generation people are mostly doing well enough that they can mostly pay for their own needs. Significantly though *we* can't really do anything beyond providing money to the right people - the details must be handled by locals who are intimately familiar with the specific cultural obstacles and opportunities and can navigate them effectively.
Another effective technique in promoting the broader social welfare is medical care to restore the productivity of adults who have limited ability to work (or are about to). Again though the most successful programs have mostly been started by locals, and are often actually for-profit initiatives - things like the fellow that started a vision restoration franchise in India based on the McDonald's limited-skill worker model. People are taught to administer eye exams or fit lenses to glasses in a mobile production-line setting that can be driven between remote communities - to the point that eye surgery in the central facilities occurs with machinery designed to pivot between two chairs - when one patient is done the next is already prepped and in position just a few feet away. Already they have restored the vision and livelihood of millions of people, with hundreds of millions still to go. And apparently quite profitably despite all services being provided on a "pay what you can" basis. Or the fellow that designed a $20 artificial lower leg that lets minefield victims run and climb trees. Or the private ambulance fleets in... okay I forget where.
The point is there's lots of stuff that can do real, long-term good in the world, but it's mostly being done by locals working to improve their country. No doubt many could benefit from an influx of foreign funds, but the feel-good charity programs rarely have any association with such "commercial" endeavors. Instead we do things like just putting food and medicine directly in the mouths of starving children, which is great for the kids, but ultimately just means there will be one more adult working to produce the next generation of starving children.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
In this case it's probably just you. Rather than attack my sources why don't you attack my information?
For simple noncontroversial things like the definition of the term "firn" Wikipedia is about as good as anything. I felt the need to provide the reference since firn is not a common word in everyday conversation.
After spending a half hour searching for information about how deep the snow had to get before it became glacial ice I found lots of papers and such that said, "When the snow gets deep enough it compacts to ice from the weight of snow above it" but the National Geographic article was the first one I found that put an actual number on it so I went with it. Based on past experience I expect NG is better than the average web page in this regard.
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.
I'm not intending to get personal here, but this increasingly common fuzzy relativism with a lack of absolutes seems to indicate a lack of understanding of what should be high school level maths, physics and chemistry. I don't think you are quite in that situation but your are annoyingly dumbing things down and writing as if you are. An open mind is fine - a hole big enough for brains to leak out is not.
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
Ice (and snow) is / are highly variable materials ; you can get easily tied up in trying to be over precise.
It doesn't surprise me that the journalists and copy editors of the NatGeo were brave enough to put a number on it ; they don't have to be held accountable for what they write.
Personally, I'd go for "firn is when you need to put crampons on, or start cutting steps, to make progress up a 45deg slope. But I woudn't fight over 15 degrees, or the length of the crampon claws, because I don't think it's important.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
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"