A NASA handout of an iceberg from the Pine Island Glacier separating from the Antarctica continent
Posted on 02/20/2014 4:20:36 PM PST by NormsRevenge
OSLO (Reuters) - A thawing Antarctic glacier that is the biggest contributor to rising sea levels is likely to continue shrinking for decades, even without an extra spur from global warming, a study showed on Thursday.
Scientists said the Pine Island Glacier, which carries more water to the sea than the Rhine River, also thinned 8,000 years ago at rates comparable to the present, in a melt that lasted for decades, perhaps for centuries.
"Our findings reveal that Pine Island Glacier has experienced rapid thinning at least once in the past, and that, once set in motion, rapid ice sheet changes in this region can persist for centuries," they wrote in the U.S. journal Science.
A creeping rise in sea levels is a threat to low-lying coasts from Bangladesh to Florida, and to cities from London to Shanghai. Of the world's biggest glaciers, in Antarctica and Greenland, Pine Island is the largest contributor.
The trigger of the ancient thinning, of about a metre (3 ft) a year, was probably a natural climate shift that warmed the sea and melted the floating end of the glacier, removing a buttress that let ice on land slide more quickly into the sea.
"It seems to be a similar mechanism now ... it could easily continue for decades," Professor Mike Bentley of Durham University in England, a co-leader of the project that included experts in the United States and Germany, told Reuters.
Other studies indicate that a build-up of man-made greenhouse gases, rather than natural shifts, is behind the warmer waters blamed for an accelerating thinning and retreat of the glacier in the past two decades, he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
A NASA handout of an iceberg from the Pine Island Glacier separating from the Antarctica continent
I don’t understand this picture and caption. I thought it was a hand sticking out of an iceberg, and that it was kind of creepy of NASA to have pictures like that.
I saw Dart’ Vader.. O 0ooo.
“...The ice will return .... any millennium now.)”
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Oh no!!! Please, please no. LOL
Every human being on the planet should be required to collect water in gallon milk jugs to prevent the rise of the oceans.
Problem solved.
No, I think it’s an honest description of natural warming that’s been going on a few thousand years now. The professor never mentions AGW and in fact says the melting is a natural climate variation. The AGW tidbit was tossed in by the Reuters hack.
What is... freezes, what isn’t melts...
Which Way is up?
Look’s like a Whampa’s ice cave on the Ice Planet Hoth.
And as Hillary would say, “SO what and who cares after all this time”.
Bond: I like my martini, shaken, not stirred. Two cubes.
Move this sucker to Africa and solve all their water problems.
Ice: When water gets cold.
The dykes in Holland were leaking long before this ice cube moved into town.
Lot’s of useless words above since you can’t stop a glacier from moving when it is time to do so.
The real cause for the glacier moving and melting: Too many Emperor Penguins farting on it, raising the surface temperature enough to heat this sucker up. Methane, Nitrogen gas, and Penguin pee. A powerful mix anywhere a half million penguins get together to party.
Solution: To save a glacier, eat more penguin, the other white meat!
Better ship lots of Depends to the Netherlands for all those leaking dykes!
The natural shifts imperil coastal sea level........ tectonic shifts move the east coast out and down.
A lot of Dutch boys could have fingers back.
“the Rhine River, also thinned 8,000 years ago at rates comparable to the present...”
That must have been Noah’s time.
Well said.
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