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| -Signs, Portents, and the Weather- |
| Can't Stop Glaciers from Moving |
| 2008-08-22 |
| In northern Greenland, a part of the Arctic that had seemed immune from global warming, If it does worsen and other northern Greenland glaciers melt faster, then it could speed up sea level rise, already increasing because of melt in sourthern Greenland. I generally save my r's for northern Greenland. The crack is 7 miles long and about half a mile wide. It is about half the width of the 500 square mile floating part of the glacier. Other smaller fractures can be seen in images of the ice tongue, a long narrow sliver of the glacier. I can't see sh ... merde. "The pictures speak for themselves," said Jason Box, a glacier expert at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University who spotted the changes while studying new satellite images. "This crack is moving, and moving closer and closer to the front. It's just a matter of time till a much larger piece is going to break off.... It is imminent." Waitaminute! This glacier is moving? Down toward the ocean? The chunk that came off the glacier between July 10 and July 24 is about half the size of Manhattan and doesn't worry Box as much as the cracks. The Petermann glacier had a larger breakaway ice chunk in 2000. But the overall picture worries some scientists "As we see this phenomenon occurring further and further north - and Petermann is as far north as you can get - it certainly adds to the concern," said Waleed Abdalati, director of the Center for the Study of Earth from Space at the University of Colorado. The question that now faces scientists is: Are the fractures part of normal glacier stress or are they the beginning of the effects of global warming? "It certainly is a major event," said NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally in a telephone interview from a conference on glaciers in Ireland. "It's a signal but we don't know what it means." It is too early to say it is clearly global warming, Zwally said. Scientists don't like to attribute single events to global warming, but often say such events fit a pattern. University of Colorado professor Konrad Steffen, who returned from Greenland Wednesday and has studied the Petermann glacier in the past, said that what Box saw is not too different from what he saw in the 1990s: "The crack is not alarming... I would say it is normal." A voice of moderation? Reported? By AP? However, scientists note that it fits with the trend of melting glacial ice they first saw in the southern part of the massive island and seems to be marching north with time. Big cracks and breakaway pieces are foreboding signs of what's ahead. Further south in Greenland, Box's satellite images show that the Jakobshavn glacier, the fastest retreating glacier in the world, set new records for how far it has moved inland. That concerns Colorado's Abdalati: "It could go back for miles and miles and there's no real mechanism to stop it." |
| Posted by:Bobby |
| #13 Always informative, Joe. Sometimes takes a little time to decode but worth it. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2008-08-22 21:45 |
| #12 PYKRETE [WW2]- good for Glacier- and Global Totalitarianism??? |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2008-08-22 19:45 |
| #11 Went looking for links about surfing in Greenland and found a vid on Youtube of guys surf kayaking. Looks like they were having a blast. |
| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2008-08-22 15:33 |
| #10 Can't wait until I can move to Greenland and start planting sugar cane. |
| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2008-08-22 15:23 |
| #9 I love it when someone tells me "these pictures speak for themselves". I know to examine such a statement with greater skepticism. . |
| Posted by: OregonGuy 2008-08-22 14:09 |
| #8 " ice hemorrhaging off a major glacier, scientists said Thursday. And that's led the university professor who spotted the wounds OMFG! Someone shot the damn glacier with an assault rifle." IOW: The glacier got iced! (sorry, somebody had to say that) |
| Posted by: USN,Ret. 2008-08-22 11:34 |
| #7 Everywhere the Glaciers move to the property values drop. What ya gonna do? Can't stop em from moving. |
| Posted by: Deacon Blues 2008-08-22 09:56 |
| #6 So Greenland is going to return to it's "natural state" that Eric the Red and other Scandinavians lived with hundreds of years ago when they grazed and planted in their colonies there? |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2008-08-22 09:41 |
| #5 As long as I have known, glaciers always crack and break off. Always have, always will despite what the Goreacle and his followers preach. |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2008-08-22 09:30 |
| #4 And if it's a floating glacier, melting will have no impact on sea level. Idiots. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2008-08-22 08:54 |
| #3 And that is news because of? When I was child, there were icebergs bigger tan many inhabited islands. BTW the part of a glacier who has extended over ocean (whose temperature is over the melting point) will sooner or later crack and melt. It can take decades but sooner or later it will happen. The only thing who will never happen is the end of stupidity. |
| Posted by: JFM 2008-08-22 08:32 |
| #2 ice hemorrhaging off a major glacier, scientists said Thursday. And that's led the university professor who spotted the wounds OMFG! Someone shot the damn glacier with an assault rifle. |
| Posted by: .5MT 2008-08-22 08:18 |
| #1 Abgalati sounds a real schill, which is doubtless his job. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2008-08-22 07:28 |