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
Eight weeks of food?
Some of us have got more than that just in “internal stores”!
When the sunspots disappeared during the Maunder Minimum, the Little Ice Age kicked-in within a decade or so.
Game of Thrones got it right “Winter is Coming!”
Cooling in the past have been accompanied by famine as crops failed.
Since it never gets above freezing in about 95% of the Antarctic, ain’t nothin’ gonna melt!
It does.
If on water, melted ice REDUCES water level!
Which is a bigger threat to humanity: Ice a mile thick across North America, or temperatures warming by two degrees over the next century? Liberals don’t see either as a threat, but they do see milder weather as an opportunity to grab more power.
That's true. It's already happening, as we enter this new solar minimum. Wheat yields were off a full third in some places during 2017. This is going to increase, as the minimum gets deeper.
By some estimates, we won't begin to come out of it until 2050.
They finally figured out how to tax everything....including the air that you breathe..
Good for you. We’ve got about a month’s worth of food set aside, and need to get busy increasing our stores.
Most folks have nothing set aside. They’re going to be in dire straits when the temps suddenly plunge.
Of course not. No amount of evidence could ever do that.
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More fake news!
Ice has been growing at Antarctica for as long as we have been measuring it.
Its rate of growth has also consistently increased during that period.
Ocean levels have been falling since the mid ‘70s and the rate of fall increased in the mid ‘80s.
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The only thing that could bring on a second ice age would be a warming of the oceans, and the resulting increase in precipitation. It is not happening.
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Point taken, but ice core samples have a resolution down to the exact year, which (coupled with historical accounts) slow massive, sudden drops in temperature during previous solar minimums.
Some researchers claim that the current solar minimu began in 2013. The noticeable effects are slight in the beginning, but there comes a tipping point of sorts when the bottom falls out, and the cooling impacts to all life forms become dramatic, and (seemingly) sudden. Such impacts are now being forecast to arrive within the next 24 months.
Prepare yourselves.
Or, an ice age could be brought on by cooling, eventually causing the winter’s snowfall to not melt over the course of the following summer, causing a continuously increasing snowpack, increasing reflection of the sun’s energy, causing further cooling...
The remainder is left as an exercise to the reader.
The sun’s overall level of magnetic activity has been observed to be trending downward for several decades now.
“The researchers should lower Al Gore into the hole and let him check things out personally.”
Al is too busy planting portable heaters along the ice shelf, desperately hoping it melts. LOL.
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There is nothing to cause cooling sufficiently to create an “Ice Age.”
The first Ice Age was caused by the hot ocean left behind after the hot water from the “Great Deep” burst up to the surface during the Genesis 6 flood.
Hot oceans cause heavy snowfall.
We’re presently very short on Hot Oceans, and the solar energy that produces them.
Our future looks like cool dry deserts everywhere unless somthing happens to change that.
Skis will sit untouched at garage sales.
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