Posted on 01/13/2010 5:39:13 PM PST by Free ThinkerNY
A major Antarctic glacier has passed its tipping point, according to a new modelling study. After losing increasing amounts of ice over the past decades, it is poised to collapse in a catastrophe that could raise global sea levels by 24 centimetres.
Pine Island glacier (PIG) is one of many at the fringes of the West Antarctic ice sheet. In 2004, satellite observations showed that it had started to thin, and that ice was flowing into the Amundsen Sea 25 per cent faster than it had 30 years before.
Now, the first study to model changes in the ice sheet in three dimensions shows that PIG has probably passed a critical "tipping point" and is irreversibly on track to lose 50 per cent of its ice in as little as 100 years, significantly raising global sea levels.
The team that carried out the study admits their model can represent only a simplified version of the physics that govern changes in glaciers, but say that if anything, the model is optimistic and PIG will disappear faster than it projects.
Richard Katz of the University of Oxford and colleagues developed the model to explore whether the retreat of the "grounding line" – the undersea junction at which a floating ice shelf becomes an ice sheet grounded on the sea bed – could cause ice sheets to collapse.
Warm seas
Climate change is warming the Amundsen Sea, which is at the southern margin of the Pacific Ocean. As rising sea levels push the warm water beneath the ice shelves, it melts them from below, pushing the grounding line higher up the continental shelf.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
My model says something far different ~ give me the money first.
““As your attorney, I advise you to drink heavily...”
LOL - party on, Garth!
Yes, trees often live a couple of hundred years.
I was thinking of a shorter drive to the beach!
Climate model: sophisticated name for an upscale video game.
“Notice all the bad stuff happens 100 years from now. And the stuff that was supposed to happen earlier has been pushed back due to this inconvinient global cooling.”
Yeah, that’s the ticket - no one will be alive to remind them of their mistakes. Given the quiet sun, one more winter like this one and these clowns will be ducking snowballs at press conferences (which I think would be much funnier than shoes).
25 cm = 9.8 inches - build the Ark now!
...it is poised to collapse in a catastrophe that could raise global sea levels by 24 centimetres.I read about this on the front page as I finished my paper route on Mars yesterday. :')
 |
||
| · join · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post new topic · subscribe · | ||
Area of Earth’s surface:
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/DanielChen.shtml
Not quite! It is only REGULAR 3-D; not Blue Ray 3-D.
Durn, I should have kept my land in Yuma,Az. It will become beachfront property!
It’s “Pants on the Ground” for this glacier!
Hmm... 361800000*.0024=868320 cubic km? That’s a lot of cubic km of water. I think that’s what would be required to raise sealevels 24 cm.
http://www.analyzemath.com/Calculators_3/cube_root_calculator.html
95.40254 is the cube root of 868320.
I think you’re an order of magnitude high. 24 cm = 0.00024 km, not .0024
The volume of a thin shell goes as:
A x dR
A, the area of the earth’s oceans is roughly 3.6 x 10^8 km^2.
dR, the thickness of the shell is 24 cm = 0.24 m = 0.00024 km = 2.4 x 10^(-4) km
So the required volume is 3.6 x 10^8 x 2.4 x 10^(-4)km^3 =
8.64 x 10^4 km^3 = 86,400 km^3.
L&C, GRL, comments on peer review and peer-reviewed comments
Plass and the Surface Budget Fallacy
Global Warming on Free Republic
I recently read that tiny Ceres, at one time the ninth planet, holds more water than all the earth’s oceans.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
