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 ...
BTW, I'll be speaking to a group of teenagers on the subject of global warming this coming Friday. Thanks for all the pings and follow-up comments as thanks to you and others, the kids will have a lot of information with which to answer the alarmists.
Thank goodness, it’s almost over.
Look, if we’re all going to die soon, do I really need to continue to pay my bills?
Thank goodness, it’s almost over.
Look, if we’re all going to die soon, do I really need to continue to pay my bills?
I live at 3800 feet. Got 2 spare bedrooms, but rent won’t be cheap!
“Under Penalty of Treason Against the People of the United States”
I would like to see some people indicted, but what would such a law wreak with a scumbag like the Bamtard in power?
“86,400 km^3”
Do you know how much water is frozen up in the PIG?
;>) LOL
Water expands when it is frozen and varies in density, I doubt even these calculations are correct.
Even the densest ice doesn’t yield a cubic foot of water for a cubic foot of water.
http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/conversion-factors-for-ice-and-water-mass-and-volume/
Perhaps the Hudson Mountain Subglacial Volcano is sparking up again.
bump
BTW... I love that song. I love all of her work. She has such an angelic voice that has only gotten better as she matures.
ROM calculation. (Rough order of magnitude.)
Thanks LiM!
According to Wikipedia about 350,000 km3, so it would require about a 25% reduction to raise sea levels about 24 cm or about 9.4".
Why is it that when an ice cube melts in a glass of water, the water level doesn’t change, but when a floating ice shelf (large ice cube) melts in the ocean, sea levels rise, continents are submerged, and we are all going to die?
Just wonderin’
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