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A Hole Opens Up Under Antarctic Glacier -- Big Enough To Fit Two-Thirds of Manhattan (nbcnews.com)
Scientists have discovered an enormous void under an Antarctic glacier, sparking concern that the ice sheet is melting faster than anyone had realized -- and spotlighting the dire threat posed by rising seas to coastal cities around the world, including New York City and Miami. From a report: The cavity under Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is about six miles long and 1,000 feet deep -- representing the loss of 14 billion tons of ice. It was discovered after an analysis of data collected by Italian and German satellites, as well as NASA's Operation IceBridge, a program in which aircraft equipped with ice-penetrating radar fly over polar regions to study the terrain. The discovery is described in a paper published Jan. 30 in the journal Science Advances. The researchers expected to see significant loss of ice, but the scale of the void came as a shock.
No, puny human, the entire ice shelf is thousands of time larger than the hole that was discovered.
However, the undermining of the ice shelf has advanced more than expected and portends the entire ice shelf, as well as the glaciers behind it melting out to sea.
I'm asking a serious question here, help me understand how this is possible...
The melting is at the BOTTOM of the glacier, where the effects of climate change are at the absolute lowest, being isolated from the air above by many feet of ice, snow and other stuff. Plus, the ice that's now melted was frozen and buried centuries ago. Plus, this is now a void, so one presumes that the conductive water flowing between the rocks below and the ice above is gone.
How is this due to global warming?
Seems to me that this void would be from the earth below is warmer at this spot than in others... But that's geothermal changes, not climate change. Is that wrong? If so, how do we know what caused this?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
"representing the loss of 14 billion tons of ice."
So they KNOW for a fact that ice has always been there? Or are we just assuming it was there because we did not find this until now? There are a lot of assumptions going on here... and because of the "Cult of Global Warming" it is now impossible have have responsible discussion.
Was the ice there before? Why is that information not being provided? Oh wait... I get it... just like people of faith are required to accept the existence of their Gods, the GW Cult expects all the deniers to take what they think on faith too!
Science these days is starting to require more faith than many religions.
This post is unintentionally hilarious. It is indeed impossible to have a responsible discussion, when one side of it doesn't even bother to know the facts. If you had read the article you would know that the researchers have been watching the area for years and have recorded an increase in the size of the void. How can you expect to be taken seriously when you can't be bothered to do some basic research?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I understand it's hard to grasp the scale of what we're talking about here. Just to give you a sense, the glacier in question has an area of 166,500 km^2 or roughly the same size as the country of Tunisia, and is about 300 meters thick. The area covered by Manhattan is only about 3/100 of 1% of that.
The volume of missing ice represents probably less than 1/500th of the ice in the glacier. It's not the volume lost already that's the concern, it's what the void says about the vastly larger volume of ice in that glacier. Internal melting means that there is some kind of water flow occurring, which could destabilize the entire glacier. That's over 45 gigatons of ice, enough to raise global sea level by over 1/10 of a cm.
Of course that's not very much. If this is the *only* land-based ice sheet or glacier that were unstable, it's not a sea level rise issue; it's equivalent to about one year's contribution of ocean thermal expansion to sea level rise.
This is kind of like finding a crack in an individual Airbus A380 wing; it's not very big compared to the wing's 420 m^2 area, and this is just one wing on one out of hundreds of A380 in service. That doesn't make it a small deal.
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