Posted on 11/28/2016 1:54:42 PM PST by heterosupremacist
“It’s generally accepted that it’s no longer a question of whether the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will melt, it’s a question of when,” said Ian Howat, associate professor of earth sciences at Ohio State.
“We may see a significant collapse of West Antarctica in our lifetimes.”
In 2013, a gigantic rift began forming within a valley in the ice of the Pine Island Glacier.
Then, in 2015, a 225-square-mile iceberg broke off and floated away. Discovered a massive crack across the Pine Island Glacier, in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Extending for 19 miles, the crack was 260 feet wide and 195 feet deep.Photo: NASA
Howat said this could indicate that the massive slab of ice was being eaten away from the inside out.
“Rifts usually form at the margins of an ice shelf, where the ice is thin and subject to shearing that rips it apart,” he added.
“However, this latest event in the Pine Island Glacier was due to a rift that originated from the center of the ice shelf and propagated out to the margins.”
“This implies that something weakened the center of the ice shelf, with the most likely explanation being a crevasse melted out at the bedrock level by a warming ocean.”
The ice sheet has previously been described as an “awakened giant” and is mostly made up of glaciers sitting on top of a layer of bedrock.
If it melts, it would add vast amounts of water into the oceans, sending sea levels rocketing to dangerous heights.
“The really troubling thing is that there are many of these valleys further up-glacier,” Howat added. “If they are actually sites of weakness that are prone to rifting, we could potentially see more accelerated ice loss in Antarctica.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
And Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle. . .
To quote Instapundit:
“Faster, please. . . “
Usually when the sheets break off it is because of current flow shifting, or because the sheet is growing rapidly.
NY, FL, California, ok ba bye now
I'm not going to lose sleep over the guess work of an associate professor.
Crack kills
I stopped reading after the first sentence.
He looks earthy......
Excellent post. I guess that’s why they call it climate change. They can’t make up their minds.
As a weather forecaster once said “If you don’t like the weather today, it will change tomorrow.”
And all this time I thought it was all those dogsled SUV's.
As is Richmond County, a.k.a. Staten Island.
If it melted at the bedrock, wouldn’t that mean the rock warmed, not the ocean?
The WAIS is classified as a marine-based ice sheet, meaning that its bed lies well below sea level and its edges flow into floating ice shelves. The WAIS is bounded by the Ross Ice Shelf, the Ronne Ice Shelf, and outlet glaciers that drain into the Amundsen Sea.
The WAIS is classified as a marine-based ice sheet, meaning that its bed lies well below sea level and its edges flow into floating ice shelves. The WAIS is bounded by the Ross Ice Shelf, the Ronne Ice Shelf, and outlet glaciers that drain into the Amundsen Sea.
The WAIS is classified as a marine-based ice sheet, meaning that its bed lies well below sea level and its edges flow into floating ice shelves. The WAIS is bounded by the Ross Ice Shelf, the Ronne Ice Shelf, and outlet glaciers that drain into the Amundsen Sea.
Sounds like a job for Ghostbusters.
I agree - just “mocking” the papers understanding of God’s power.
“Human Sacrifice....Dogs and Cats living together...Mass Hysteria.”
This "sudden" melting of the Antarctic ice would take hundreds if not thousands of years. Just warn your family to warn their great, great grandchildren to leave New York, and then go read a nice book or something and consider it fixed.
Could be worse. Could be the target of a Holy Hand Grenade.
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