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NASA Discovers Mantle Plume That's Melting Antarctica From Below (newsweek.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Newsweek: Researchers at NASA have discovered a huge upwelling of hot rock under Marie Byrd Land, which lies between the Ross Ice Shelf and the Ross Sea, is creating vast lakes and rivers under the ice sheet. The presence of a huge mantle plume could explain why the region is so unstable today, and why it collapsed so quickly at the end of the last Ice Age, 11,000 years ago. Mantle plumes are thought to be part of the plumbing systems that brings hot material up from Earth's interior. Once it gets through the mantle, it spreads out under the crust, providing magma for volcanic eruptions. The area above a plume is known as a hotspot.
[I]n a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Seroussi and colleagues looked at one of the most well studied magma plumes on Earth -- the Yellowstone hotspot. The team developed a mantle plume model to look at how much geothermal heat would be needed to explain what is seen at Marie Byrd Land. They then used the Ice Sheet System Model (ISSM), which shows the physics of ice sheets, to look at the natural sources of heating and heat transport. This model enabled researchers to place "powerful constraint" on how much melt rate was allowable, meaning they could test out different scenarios of how much heat was being produced deep beneath the ice. Their findings showed that generally, the energy being generated by the mantle plume is no more than 150 milliwatts per square meter -- any more would result in too much melting. The heat generated under Yellowstone National Park, on average, is 200 milliwatts per square meter.
[I]n a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, Seroussi and colleagues looked at one of the most well studied magma plumes on Earth -- the Yellowstone hotspot. The team developed a mantle plume model to look at how much geothermal heat would be needed to explain what is seen at Marie Byrd Land. They then used the Ice Sheet System Model (ISSM), which shows the physics of ice sheets, to look at the natural sources of heating and heat transport. This model enabled researchers to place "powerful constraint" on how much melt rate was allowable, meaning they could test out different scenarios of how much heat was being produced deep beneath the ice. Their findings showed that generally, the energy being generated by the mantle plume is no more than 150 milliwatts per square meter -- any more would result in too much melting. The heat generated under Yellowstone National Park, on average, is 200 milliwatts per square meter.
A "bimbo of a deal" is not a phrase a native English speaker would use.
I will bet you would also write a thousand dollars as, "1000$". Isn't that right, golubushka?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Until a gamma-ray burst or a wandering black hole takes us ALL out. Or maybe just a stay rock or "lone-wolf" terrorist messes up your day.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
It's the climate change deniers, they think that a mantle plume in the antarctic means they can blame climate change on that plume. But that would require the plume to start around the industrial revolution (to match the CO2/temp data), and be a worldwide effect, both poles, north and south, and all ice sheets around the world, every glaciers. A plume under each one.
I view it as positive, the usual denial for the ice melts is to pretend there is no melt. A discovery of a plume that help explains why the ice is breaking up faster than predicted in Antarctic, and the latching onto that by the trolls, is really acceptance that the ice is melting. The trolls accept the ice is melting, but shift the excuse of the cause.
So ice melting faster than expected in the south pole, how much faster do we need to implement the sea defenses. What are the consequences? What is the effect on the sea defenses predictions, is there any desalination species die-off possible, as from the North pole melt etc.
The usual denial hasn't been to deny melting for like thirty years at least. Instead, it's posited that the melting is due to a natural cycle; we're coming out of an interglacial period and back into bed normalcy. The ice caps haven't existed for most of Earth's history, you know.
Some of the people who don't buy AGW are actually scientists who modify their theories occasionally, believe it or not. That's where the crazy conspiracy shit comes from. There are some sound ideas in mainstream ecology, but so much stock has been put into shutting out legit dissenters that it makes them indistinguishable from dissenting crackpots. It should be obvious to everyone that this movement is more financially motivated than anything else.
It makes little difference if Trump personally supports the Paris agreement or not, since it was an aspirational target, the states, companies and people still support it. The people who implement it, still implement it.
You mean we don't need the government to save the planet? I completely agree. People don't need the government to mandate anything to save the planet. People can do this on their own, assuming the government is not preventing this in any way.
The problem with government is that it picks winners and losers. One example are these stupid CFL lightbulbs. There's a government subsidy on them, maybe it's gone now, but they suck. I don't know anyone that buys them any more. People will get LED lighting now, or use one of those new "efficient" incandescent bulbs. Maybe the mandate sped up the adoption of LED because people wanted something better. Maybe it slowed it down because money that was dumped in CFL was not invested in bringing LEDs to market.
Another problem with government is that it is slow. The CFL subsidy is also an example of this, it became obsolete almost as soon as it became law. If someone developed cold fusion tomorrow then it'd be tied up in all kinds of outdated regulations before it could come to market. At a minimum it'd have to compete with already subsidized wind and solar. Subsidies rarely help anything, it can just as easily hurt.
Trump did the right thing on getting out of this agreement. It did nothing that we could not do on our own without it. I believe that we'd be better off if the government had a lighter hand on the environment. Sure, keep the air and water clean, but there is a thing as taking it too far. The EPA did a lot of good things in the past, but it became an agency without much to do very quickly. Instead of shrinking to fit the much smaller role it needed to fulfill, it grew and created new "problems" to solve. The US Department of Energy was created 40 years ago with the mandate to provide energy independence for the USA. They failed. I suspect that they will always fail because the people within the department will always have the suspicion that if they actually solve the problem then their jobs are at risk. Just like the DEA will never ever "win" the "war on some drugs". US DHS will never "win" the "war on terror". Has the Department of Education ever actually educated anyone? If people learned anything from them then it can't be anything good.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Indeed, new data appears every day. The debate would be over tomorrow though if people accepted the economics of anything related to CAGW.
The reason we burn coal, oil, and natural gas is because they are cheap. We can say they are abundant, reliable, and energy dense but that's just another way of calling them cheap. Solar power is expensive because it's unreliable, diffuse, and not necessarily abundant where it's needed. People tend to want energy when it's cold and/or dark where they are, and this tends to happen with then sun isn't shining. Storing, moving, and converting energy adds costs which only adds to the expense of already expensive solar power.
How do we solve this problem? Look to energy sources that have a history of being cheaper than coal, oil, and natural gas. Those are wind, hydro, and nuclear. Wind and hydro suffer from many of the same problems as solar, such as not always being available where and when it's needed, which can add to the cost. Nuclear doesn't have this problem, it can be placed most anywhere we need it. We've even put this energy source to work on ships at sea.
I guess we could say the debate is in fact over, use more nuclear power. We do that then we have cheap and clean power and we'll just have to find something else for congresscritters to prop up as a bogeyman to get us to vote them back into office again and again.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
People don't need the government to mandate anything to save the planet. People can do this on their own, assuming the government is not preventing this in any way.
Isn't going to work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The usual denial hasn't been to deny melting for like thirty years at least.
It's weird then, that we haven't seen any climate contrarians responding to the denialists who say that volcanism is triggering the melting of the polar caps: and the related theory, that volcanism is causing the climate to warm. DOn't you guys care about this misrepresentation of your 'usual' theory?
What IS this theory anyway? Is there evidence to support this theory?
Instead, it's posited that the melting is due to a natural cycle; we're coming out of an interglacial period and back into bed normalcy.
(a) What natural cycle?
(b) Does this cycle appear in the climate record?
(c) What triggered this cycle to start just when the industrial revolution started?
(d) What suppressed the (experimentally proven) warming that otherwise would have occurred due to increased concentrations of CO2? Is the CO2 we released somehow different to the CO2 that was there before? How?
Some of the people who don't buy AGW are actually scientists who modify their theories occasionally, believe it or not. That's where the crazy conspiracy shit comes from. There are some sound ideas in mainstream ecology, but so much stock has been put into shutting out legit dissenters that it makes them indistinguishable from dissenting crackpots.
On numerous occasions I've asked denialists here on Slashdot to provide evidence for their posited theories, and they have not done so. I've been here for more than 10 years, asking for evidence. No evidence has been forthcoming. You want to know why people don't believe you?
That's your answer.
...
You know.... No, you obviously doesn't...
How about this: polar bears often starve. That is well documented since people first saw one. The conditions where they live are generally pretty hard even for something so well-adapted. Polar bears also often seek out the edge of ice-fields in order to increase chances of getting some food. That means that they are prone to located on "LITTLE CHUNKS OF ICE". Most time they can swim back to solid ice - sometimes they can't.
The rest of your idiotic crap I'll not touch. Anybody that thinks Al Gore have anything to do with anything really should get their brain examined.
I believe I'll join you in that exercise, my friend. Trumptards and other mouth-breathers who spend mod points here won't have them to spend on real science somewhere else.
The thing is, it's not even trolling to point out that these right wing ultra-conservatives cheapen and demean every site they visit. But in that brief, shining moment when decent people have given up and gone elsewhere, they still have the spurious legitimacy still clinging to the site.
It never lasts, of course. Before long, decent people understand the site has become just another bastion of anti-science, anti-technology conservative fucktardery.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.