Posted on 02/25/2018 11:37:47 AM PST by Red Badger
Scientists were surprised by the results of their study.
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In November, scientists from New Zealand used a hot water drill to go deep into Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf. The shelf, which can be up to 10,000 feet thick, is the largest of several that hold back West Antarctica's massive amounts of ice. If these were to collapse, global sea level would rise by ten feet.
Drilling a hole and lowering a camera and thermometer inside is a way for researchers to understand the history of the shelf, and what is happening to it now. In measuring the temperature and currents below the shelf, they expected to find that the ice was melting.
Instead, the water appeared to be crystalizing and freezing. In the video from National Geographic below, you can see the white dots of ice crystals as the camera is lowered towards the dark sea below. If the shelf was melting, the hole at that level would have smooth sides.
“It blew our minds,” Christina Hulbe, the glaciologist from the University of Otago in New Zealand, who co-led the project, told National Geographic.
Scientists have left instruments deep in the hole to measure currents and temperatures below the shelf for the next few years. Though the freezing seems to be a promising sign for the shelf's stability, it doesn't tell the whole picture. Scientists also hope to learn whether the ice shelf has melted in the past due to other climate shifts.
Though results of this study were unexpected, that doesn't change the larger trend of accelerated warming and icecap melting. In fact, NASA just confirmed we are losing ice in Antarctica at a faster rate every year. The reasons for these odd Ross results probably won't become clear until much more research is done. But for now, at the very least, it's a decent sign that catastrophic melting of the Ross Ice Shelf won't occur in the near future.
Source: National Geographic
Maybe this is because global cooling is reality while global warming is politics?
It is only weird if one fell for the AGW hoax, otherwise it is not weird at all.
It’s not weird. Nature is not weird. Some closed-minded humans have formed opinions of what nature “should” be doing, and when it doesn’t do it, they can only find the word “weird.”
Makes more sense to admit that one’s preconceived ideas were wrong.
> Drilling a hole and lowering a camera and thermometer inside is a way for researchers to understand the history of the shelf <
Cameras are notoriously unreliable under those conditions. The researchers should lower Al Gore into the hole and let him check things out personally.
If one looks to Mars, we’d observe the polar ice caps on the north and south pole accumulate and wane over time, with each the complete opposite of the other. So why would the same effect be surprising here on Earth?
Ping!..................
I re-froze the Ross Ice Shelf using One Weird Trick!
It’s Antarctica. It’s at the bottom of the world. The Sun never shines there for 3 months of the year. It’s a land mass, you know, rocks and dirt. It’s freaking cold down theee on a summer day. Gee whiz.
Why? These ice shelfs are already in the ocean, aren't they? So their volume is already accounted for in total volume of water of the oceans. Just like a glass full of ice-cubes and water doesn't overflow when it melts.
Click-Bait!..........................
This goes completely against the whole global warming climate change narrative, and will be denounced by the cult of climate change on CNN shortly, with calls to have the heretics who engaged in this study to be executed in the court of gaia.
They don’t have science classes in journalism schools..................
Global warming? Sounds like another shot at the Medieval Climate Optimum. Oddly enough, the warm climate of that era earned the name “optimum” because it was good for humanity. Another interesting observation is that we didn’t lose half the species on the planet. Anything that survived the Medieval warm period will do just fine in the event that the trivial “Global Warming” projection is real.
Global cooling? That’s my nightmare scenario. Give us an ice age and all bets are off. We’ll have another round of extinctions, including many people. We’ll have agriculture failures that lead to starvation. If we spiral into an ice age, food will be so hard to produce that even liberals may have to do productive work if they want to eat!
Of course.
Conclusion, first.
Evidence, later.
And ignore any evidence which proves inconvenient.
Liberals will be the first to die..........................
The shelf is already floating, but if it were to melt, scientists fear continental ice masses would also slide into the sea.
“So their volume is already accounted for in total volume of water of the oceans. Just like a glass full of ice-cubes and water doesn’t overflow when it melts. “
Yup. 90% of the Ross ice shelf is already under water.
Their ‘theory’ is: if it melts then the land ice will flood into the ocean.
The problem with that theory is...actual science: The Antarctic land ice, because of its weight, sits in a bowl. Ice doesn’t flow uphill.
Consistent with a rise in sea levels.
CAGW is still working.
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