NASA
NASA’s QuikScat satellite detected extensive areas of snowmelt, shown in yellow and red, in west Antarctica in January 2005.
Posted on 05/15/2007 10:50:21 PM PDT by neverdem
While much of the world has warmed in a pattern that scientists have linked with near certainty to human activities, the frigid interior of Antarctica has resisted the trend.
Now, a new satellite analysis shows that at least once in the last several years, masses of unusually warm air pushed to within 310 miles of the South Pole and remained long enough to melt surface snow across a California-size expanse.
The warm spell, which occurred over one week in 2005, was detected by scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA and the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Balmy air, with a temperature of up to 41 degrees in some places, persisted across three broad swathes of West Antarctica long enough to leave a distinctive signature of melting, a layer of ice in the snow that cloaks the vast ice sheets of the frozen continent. The layer formed the same way a crust of ice can form in a yard in winter when a warm day and then a freezing night follow a snowfall, the scientists said.
The evidence of melting was detected by a National Aeronautics and Space Administration satellite, the QuickScat, that uses radar to distinguish between snow and ice as it scans the surfaces of Greenland and Antarctica.
There have been other areas in Antarctica where such melt zones have been seen, but they are not common so far inland, said Son Nghiem, a scientist at the NASA laboratory who directed the analysis with Konrad Steffen, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Some melting also occurred at an elevation of more than 6,000 feet, in regions where temperatures usually remain far below freezing year-round.
It is too soon to know whether the warm spell was a fluke or a portent, Dr. Nghiem said.
“It is vital...”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
NASA
NASA’s QuikScat satellite detected extensive areas of snowmelt, shown in yellow and red, in west Antarctica in January 2005.
"...But we here at the NYT are going to infer it's a portent anyway, and then move from that inference to the perfectly unsupportable conclusion that human activity is responsible for it."
-ccm
Beautifully stated. Modern journalism defined in one paragraph.
Yeah, in our five whole years of collecting complete data on Antartica from space, we've only seen this twice before!
What you said.
How do they know that the melting of the polar ice caps is not how more moisture/water is taken into the water cycle? Just maybe the ice caps are the world's water storage system and as part of the blasted cycle they thaw out on occasion for the earth to use the water. Weren't "they" complaining a while ago about there being a water shortage on the planet?
"They" are so full of it.
Pediatricians Call for Support for Adult Stem Cell Research That's from the horse's mouth, and it seems identical. Will the AMA excommunicate the ACP?
Heavy multivitamin use may be linked to advanced prostate cancer
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There’s little meat on this bone.
Not much. The deal is, a “California sized expanse” of the Antarctic is like talking about Rhode Island or something.
Antarctica is big. Very freakin big.
Every now and again, I'm sure there is a little melting. But it is certainly going to freeze back again a few days later and certainly in Antarctica's winter when there is NO SUNLIGHT for 6 months.
There is certainly melting around the coasts of Antarctica in the summer months. If there wasn't, the glaciers would just keep expanding northward forever.
Right now, Antarctica is nearing the peak of winter darkness and the sea ice has frozen solid as much as 400 kms from the coast.
While much of the world has warmed in a pattern that scientists have linked with near certainty to human activities......the rest of the scientists, as well as most of the human race, knows history well enough to know that the climate is 100 per cent natural, 100 per cent of the time. :') Thanks Neverdem.
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My sediments exactly! What baffles me is that people can't seem to wrap their minds around the fact that the Earth is a living, breathing thing, and will continure to go in cycles as it has since it was formed. We need less people like Glob Al Warming, and more who think for themselves.
In the late 1990s (circa 1999) the NY Times published a ridiculous claim from unnamed scientists who went to the North Polar area during the months-long daylight and found open seas (no ice), and further claimed that it was the first time that had happened in 20 million years. Letterman was sufficiently partisan, er, disturbed by this that he used it in his monologue every day that week. In fact, the Slimes repeated the story over and over.
Finally, it was pointed out in the pages of the Slimes that during polar summer, the ice melts, basically every year since people have been going there, and it isn’t a big deal. So Letterman on that Friday said so. I went to the archive (the NYT gets microfilmed each day, with only the current issue avaiable in hardcopy, due to storage constraints) and found (if memory serves) six iterations of the bogus “first in 20 million years” propaganda piece, including one iteration of it *after* the de facto retraction had appeared.
Am I to infer from this article that ice melts when temperatures rise? Amazing!
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