Greenland Glacier Breakup Suggests Imminent Disintegration (Petermann Glacier Break-Up Alert!)

LiveScience.com on Yahoo ^ | 8/21/08 | Andrea Thompson

[NormsRevenge]

New satellite images reveal that a massive ice chunk recently broken away from one of Greenland's glaciers, which researchers say will continue to disintegrate within the next year.

Scientists at Ohio State University monitoring daily NASA satellite images of Greenland's glaciers discovered that an 11-square-mile (29-square-kilometer) piece of the Petermann Glacier broke away between July 10 and 24. The chunk was about half the size of Manhattan.

They announced their finding today.

Glaciers are large, slow-moving rivers of ice, formed at the poles and in alpine regions by layers of compacted snow. The Petermann Glacier is one of the approximately 130 glaciers that flow out of the Greenland ice sheet and into the sea, where large chunks of ice fall off, or calve, to form icebergs.

The Petermann Glacier has a floating section of ice about 10 miles (16 km) wide and 50 miles (80 km) long -an area of about 500 square miles (1,295 square km).

The last major ice loss to the glacier occurred when 33 square miles (86 square km) of floating ice fell off between 2000 and 2001.

[B4Ranch]

Google these words and look for Ventura County

California 2 acre 800 degrees

[ETL]

No, I haven’t seen the movie.

Speaking of movies, anyone remember this one...

"The Land That Time Forgot"

"Negotiating an underwater tunnel [beneath the ice] to gain the island's interior, those aboard U-33 are amazed to discover a tropical prehistoric world kept warm by volcanic forces. Here dinosaurs that should be long extinct live and roam, as do a curious race of humanoid savages that appear to exhibit all the various phases of Man's evolutionary development. To survive long enough to repair and replenish the U-boat, wartime enemies must put aside their differences and cooperate with one another. But not everyone is playing from the Kumbaya songbook... The Land That Time Forgot is a thoroughly old fashioned sci-fi/fantasy adventure of the type they weren't really making anymore even in 1975. A lot of this has to do with the script sticking to Burroughs' Victorian style. (His Caprona tales were first published in 1918; as late as World War II he'd still be cranking out novels in the writing style of the 19th Century.) The film's a throwback to the likes of the original King Kong and potboilers such as Unknown Island (1948) and The Land Unknown (1957), only in color."
http://www.eccentric-cinema.com/cult_movies/land_time_forgot.htm

[Repeal The 17th]

“...anyone remember this one...”
- - -
Yes.
Yes.
Sadly, I do.
Didn’t they find a natural oil seep
and manufacture fuel for their submarine
so they dould leave? Wasn’t there a hot native
prehistoric chick in the plot somewhere?

[steelyourfaith]

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !

[ETL]

Google these words and look for Ventura County California 2 acre 800 degrees

Perhaps there's tar or oil burning beneath surface?

Ventura County hot spot puzzles experts

The hot spot in Los Padres National Forest is attended to by firefighters, who first responded the area a month and a half ago when observers noticed a haze of smoke, but no flames, rising from the parched scrub.

A two-acre patch of land north of Fillmore has heated up to 800 degrees, and firefighters and geologists are unsure why
By Joanna Lin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 5, 2008

A patch of land in Ventura County's section of Los Padres National Forest where the ground recently heated up to 812 degrees continues to puzzle firefighters and geologists after weeks of monitoring.

"It's a thermal anomaly," said Ron Oatman, spokesman for the Ventura County Fire Department.

* The Earth is Heating Up in Ventura County
* Video: The Earth is Heating Up in...
* Map
* Map

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/ventura/la-me-hotground5-2008aug05,0,4448557.story

[Citizen Tom Paine]

As I recall Petermann glacier is a large glacier with a slightly dipping slope into the ocean. Hence, it tends to calve large, tabular icebergs. I would evaluate the report as a normal calving for a large, tabular iceberg.IMHO

[ETL]

Wasn’t there a hot native prehistoric chick in the plot somewhere?

I think so. But I doubt if she was better looking than this one from Planet of the Apes.

"In Planet of the Apes (1968), Nova is a beautiful (and ultimately tragic) primitive girl who is captured by the apes when they attack her village. American astronaut George Taylor is also captured. They are taken to Ape City where they are paired up in a cell. Taylor, having been shot through the throat by a gorilla, is unable to speak, but when his speech returns he befriends the chimpanzees Zira and Cornelius. They eventually help Taylor and Nova escape to the Forbidden Zone where Taylor learns the truth about the planet."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_(Planet_of_the_Apes)

[ETL]

Wasn’t there a hot native prehistoric chick in the plot somewhere?

Or this one...

[Repeal The 17th]

Yeah, Nova would make me want to speak monkey-talk.
Remember Raquel Welch in 1 million years b.c.?

But, hell, who am I to judge?
I even thought Dr. Zira (Kim Hunter) was hot in Planet of the Apes...
In a cute monkey-like sort of way...

[4yearlurker]

I have “1 Million Years B.C.” on DVD. I watch it for the...uh... special effects. Yeah,that’s the ticket!

[Repeal The 17th]

I see that we agree.
Those plot lines all had to have
a hot prehistoric chick
just to make them interesting.

[Repeal The 17th]

I’d be willing to bet that dinosaur hide bikinis
would tend to cause a terrible rash.
If I ever get the chance to go back in time
I hope I am thoughtful enough to take a couple of bottles of aloe.
I’ll make a fortune.

[ETL]

I see that we agree. Those plot lines all had to have a hot prehistoric chick just to make them interesting.

It certainly helped. But I think they were pretty interesting anyway.

[hattend]

AP weighs in:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080821/ap_on_sc/sci_greenland_glaciers

At top of Greenland, new worrisome cracks in ice By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

1 hour, 11 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - In northern Greenland, a part of the Arctic that had seemed immune from global warming, new satellite images show a growing giant crack and an 11-square-mile chunk of ice hemorrhaging off a major glacier, scientists said Thursday.

And that’s led the university professor who spotted the wounds in the massive Petermann glacier to predict disintegration of a major portion of the Northern Hemisphere’s largest floating glacier within the year.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.”

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.”

[ETL]

I even thought Dr. Zira (Kim Hunter) was hot in Planet of the Apes... In a cute monkey-like sort of way...

LOL! We DO think alike!

[hattend]

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 note they don't say how much it's risen and where this rise was measured... a millionth of an inch? A thousandth?

[Repeal The 17th]

I’d hit it.

[ETL]

I have “1 Million Years B.C.” on DVD. I watch it for the...uh... special effects. Yeah,that’s the ticket!

[ETL]

wow! would you look at those rock formations in the background! ...why they must be from the Triassic Period!

[Repeal The 17th]

I’d like to sell her some aloe.