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Rapid Greenland Glacial Melt Shown By ESA Satellite
Some of the last images from ESA’s ERS-2 satellite have revealed rapidly changing glacial features in Greenland. In its final days, the veteran satellite gave us frequent views of the Kangerdlugssuaq glacier and its advancing ice stream.
Before it retired on 6 July, ESA’s ERS-2 Earth observation satellite entered an orbit to capture radar images of the same area on the ground every three days, rather than its previous 35-day cycle.
Images of the Kangerdlugssuaq glacier in eastern Greenland taken from March to May 2011 show that the ice stream was Read more…
Melting glaciers store up trouble
by Julia Slater, swissinfo.ch
As the alpine glaciers shrink they will affect the flow of Europe’s biggest rivers, impacting areas of the economy ranging from shipping to power generation.
Glaciologist Matthias Huss of Fribourg University has discovered that right down to the sea, the Danube, Rhine, Rhone and Po contain a larger proportion of water from glaciers than previously thought.
For example, more than a quarter of the water that flows from the Rhone into the Mediterranean in August has its origin in alpine glaciers. At its mouth in the Netherlands seven percent of the water in the Rhine is Read more…
Stronger Ocean Currents Speed Melting Of Antarctic Ice
Stronger ocean currents beneath West Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf are eroding the ice from below, speeding the melting of the glacier as a whole, according to a new study in Nature Geoscience. A growing cavity beneath the ice shelf has allowed more warm water to melt the ice, the researchers say—a process that feeds back into the ongoing rise in global sea levels. The glacier is currently sliding into the sea at a clip of four kilometers (2.5 miles) a year, while its ice shelf is melting at about 80 cubic kilometers a year – 50 percent faster than it was in the early 1990s – the paper estimates.
A major glacier is undermined from below: upwelling seawater along parts of Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf has carved out caves in the ice and drawn wildlife like this whale.
Credit: Maria Stenzel, all rights reserved.
“More warm water from the deep ocean is entering the cavity beneath the ice shelf, and it is warmest where the ice is thickest,” said study’s lead author, Stan Jacobs, an oceanographer at Read more…
Walking on thin ice
AntarcticaIcebergs break away as the melting Antarctica landscape yields to glabal warming. Photo: Angela Wylie
Every now and then the magnificent, mute marble coast of Antarctica will suddenly find a voice and let out a shattering exclamation – like a gunshot. The noise travels far and wide, thundering uninterrupted across crystal space until sheer distance exhausts it.
It is the sound of an ice cliff collapsing into the ocean. Or maybe of a new iceberg cleaving itself away from the continent and setting sail. It is part of the natural soundtrack of planet history, though it is only rarely, and recently – in geological timescales – heard by humans.
In little remote scientific communities like the Australian Antarctic Division’s Casey Station, on the East Antarctic coast, a roar from the ice might briefly interrupt the labour or conversation of the scientists and tradesfolk who are resident there, working on some aspect of deciphering the climate story. For those lucky enough to be among them, to hear it, it sends a shiver of humility through your bones. You are, after all, at the mercy of this grumbling giant. The cryosphere Read more…
New report confirms Arctic melt accelerating
FILE - In this July 19, 2007 file photo an iceberg is seen off Ammassalik Island in Eastern Greenland. A new assessment of climate change in the Arctic shows the ice in the region is melting faster than previously thought and sharply raises projections of global sea level rise this century. (AP Photo/John McConnico, File)
STOCKHOLM (AP) — Arctic ice is melting faster than expected and could raise the average global sea level by as much as five feet this century, an authoritative new report suggests.
The study by the international Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, or AMAP, is one of the most comprehensive updates on climate change in the Arctic, and builds on a similar assessment in 2005.
The full report will be delivered to foreign ministers of the eight Arctic nations next week, but an executive summary including the key findings was obtained by The Associated Press on Tuesday.
It says that Arctic temperatures in the past six years were the highest since measurements began in 1880, and that feedback mechanisms believed to accelerate warming in the climate system have now started kicking in.
One mechanism involves the ocean absorbing more heat when it’s not covered by ice, which reflects the sun’s energy. That effect has been anticipated by scientists “but clear evidence for it has only been observed in the Arctic in the past five years,” AMAP said.
The report also shatters some of the forecasts made in 2007 by the U.N.’s expert panel on climate change.
The cover of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean, for example, is shrinking faster than Read more…
Sea level rises the fastest in 350 years
MELTING mountain glaciers are contributing to the fastest sea level rise in 350 years, according to research by Welsh scientists.
The team from Aberystwyth University, the University of Exeter and Stockholm University undertook a survey of the 270 largest outlet glaciers of the south and north Patagonian icefields of South America.
They mapped changes in the position of the glaciers since the Little Ice Age, which was the last time in the recent past when they were much larger.
The team calculated the volume of ice lost by the glaciers as they have retreated and thinned over the past 350 years and compared these volume losses to rates of change over the last 30 years.
They found that the rate at which the glaciers are losing volume over the past 30 years is between 10 and 100 times faster than the 350- year long-term average.
The study, which has been published in the journal Nature Geoscience, concludes the mountain glaciers have rapidly increased their melt rate in recent years and consequently their contribution to global sea level.
Lead author, Professor Neil Glasser of Aberystwyth University, said the work was based on a longer timescale than any earlier glacier research conducted.
The second author Dr Stephan Harrison of the University of Exeter, said: “The work is significant because it is the first time anyone has made a direct estimate of the sea-level contribution from glaciers since the peak of the Industrial Revolution.”
Pace of polar ice melt ‘accelerating rapidly’: study
(AFP)
WASHINGTON — The pace at which the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting is “accelerating rapidly” and raising the global sea level, according to findings of a study financed by NASA and published Tuesday.The findings suggest that the ice sheets — more so than ice loss from Earth’s mountain glaciers and ice caps — have become “the dominant contributor to global sea level rise, much sooner than model forecasts have predicted.”
This study, the longest to date examining changes to polar ice sheet mass, combined two decades of monthly satellite measurements with regional atmospheric climate model data to study changes in mass.
“That ice sheets will dominate future sea level rise is not surprising — they hold a lot more ice mass than mountain glaciers,” said lead author Eric Rignot, jointly of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California, Irvine.
“What is surprising is this increased contribution by the ice sheets is already happening,” he said.
Under the current trends, he said, sea level is likely to be “significantly higher” than levels projected by Read more…
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