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390 Billion Tons of Snow and Ice Melt Each Year As Globe Warms, Study Suggests (usatoday.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today, highlighting the key findings from a new study published in the journal Nature: Thanks to global warming, our planet's glaciers continue to melt away, losing up to 390 billion tons of ice and snow per year, a new study suggests. The largest losses were glaciers in Alaska, followed by the melting ice fields in southern South America and glaciers in the Arctic. Glaciers could almost disappear in some mountain ranges by the end of the century, including those in the U.S. The world's seas have risen about an inch in the past 50 years just due to glacier melt alone, according to the study. Since 1961, the world has lost 10.6 trillion tons of ice and snow, the study reported. Melted, that's enough to cover the lower 48 U.S. states in about 4 feet of water.
Contrary to what many American believe, the total surface area of world is much larger than the USA. So the 4 ft of water are just distributed a lot more across the many oceans.
No, it isn't because, as you know, the US isn't under 4 feet of water.
Your comment is hard to follow. The "lower 48" U.S. states comprise about 3 million square kilometers. The surface area of the Earth is a little over 500 million square kilometers. The meltwater from melting glaciers doesn't only go to the lower 48 US states; it equilibrates all around the world.
This is a visualization analogy intended to give the public a quantitative feel for what 10.6 trillion tons of water is. Sort of like expressing data in terms of libraries of congress. It is not anywhere a statement that the melted water did cover the lower 48 U.S. states, and no other part of the world.
Or maybe they mean "lost" like they can't find it, but given the rest of the summary they seem to mean it's melted.
Most native English speakers can understand the different uses of the word "lost". Especially when the very next sentence uses the word "melted". In this case "lost" means lost by melting, the way your ice water loses its ice when it sits on the table. Gone, in the form of ice, but the water comprising the ice is still here.
Nope, the warming from the last ice age peaked about 8000 years ago, and turned into (very slow) cooling, until last century when global warming accelerated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Depending on who you believe, the average sea level is rising somewhere around 2mm per year. Around 1mm per year is attributable to thermal expansion of the oceans. The rest must be melt water from glaciers and snow on land.
So, check my math: The surface area of the oceans is 3.4 * 10^8 square kilometers, or 3.4 * 10^14 square meters. Each millimeter of sea level rise then corresponds to 3.4 * 10^11 cubic meters, which happens to be 340 billion tons of water. Pretty close to their 390 billion tons.
So their figure makes sense. I suppose it's useful as confirmation, but it's hardly anything new or unexpected. But the big numbers impress clueless journalists...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
That this post was voted 'interesting' is a sad indictment on our public education system (and slashdot posters in general.)
Your study is about Antarctica, the study in the article is about the entire world.
The ongoing rise in sea level confirms that there's a net loss of ice in the world.
Everyone knows the hockey stick is bogus manipulation of data
Nope, the hockey stick graph has been confirmed by several studies. You can find plenty of references in the wikipedia page above. And if you dismiss all of the data, then what are you going to use to show that "we are still coming out of an ice age" as GP tried to claim?
Because a few hundred years is going to provide reliable trend information about a hundred thousand year trend
Why not ? When the sun goes down at night, it only takes hours for noticeable cooling to happen. It's a fallacy to think we need to wait hundred thousand years for the Earth to respond to changes in inputs. The reason that ice ages take thousands of years is because they are triggered by equally slow changes in orbital characteristics. CO2 changes happened in the last century, and the atmospheric warming responds right away (although equilibrium will take a bit longer due to longer time constant of ocean heat)
You are like the guy who sells all his shit because the stock market goes down on Monday.
If somebody claims that nothing special happened because "the stock market has been going down since the last ice age", and we can show that it actually has been going up this whole time, but suddenly crashed on Monday, then his claim is invalid, and we know something new must have happened.
Oceans rise and fall, old cities are abandoned and new ones are built. Humanity survived Meltwater Pulses 1a and b, and it will survive this one too.
I don't think there is any doubt that humanity will survive global warming but that is an incredibly low bar to set. Humanity also survives earthquakes, air disasters etc. but that does not mean that we don't try to reduce and/or protect ourselves from them. Improving the safety of planes costs money and increases ticket prices but, overall, is far better than having planes fall out of the sky and people die.
Global warming is the same. We will survive but there are likely to be significant famines, droughts, floods and huge migrations caused by it if we do not act to reduce the effects. Even ignoring the humanitarian aspect of this, purely economically we are going to be better off developing new technology to reduce and mitigate the effects than we are just dealing with the full impact of a significant temperature increase.