When we looked at the collapse of the Wilkins ice bridge the experts thought it could make the remaining ice unstable. My own expectation since we are heading into winter was that things would ice over for the period.
Well, since last Friday some 270 square miles (700 square kilometers) of ice have dropped into the sea, according to satellite imagery.
The ice shelf which is as big as Jamaica is now expected to lose more.
Over the next several weeks, scientists estimate the Wilkins shelf will lose some 1,300 square miles (3,370 square kilometers) — a piece larger than the state of Rhode Island, or two-thirds the size of Luxembourg.
Continue reading ‘Wilkins on the move’
The Australian has carried its war on science another step, step 35 according to Deltoid. This time they have published an article Revealed: Antarctic ice growing, not shrinking by Greg Roberts, plus another Change is a cold certainty. If you’ve read my post on the Wilkins ice bridge I can tell you there is nothing new here, move on.
The first article is a muddle of mixing up sea ice east and west, ice sheets east and west, and not a mention of the Antarctic Peninsula. The second is more informative, but contains some straight errors. On the day I heard quoted scientist Ian Allison saying multiple times on the ABC that overall the continent was in fact losing ice. Harry Clark does a good job on these articles, on the Australian’s promotion of the Ian Plimer book and what he calls “a truly monstrous piece of distortion by Christopher Pearson.” Incredibly, Pearson sees Plimer as the watershed in the AGW debate:
As far as the progress of what passes for national debate is concerned, in all likelihood 2009 will be seen as the turning point and divided into the pre and post-Plimer eras.
But he is just warming up when he said that. Unless you particularly want to keep up with the antics of the Oz tribe, I recommend you give the whole thing a miss.
Of much more interest, I think, is an article in the New Scientist which states that “the West Antarctic ice sheet has collapsed and regrown over 60 times in the past few million years” and reports on a new technique studying how such events occurred.
Continue reading ‘The West Antarctic ice sheet really can collapse and regrow’
It had been long expected. It happened on Sunday, 5 April 2009.
Where is it, what happened and what significance does it have?
The first is easy. The Wilkins ice shelf is between three islands off the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula:
Continue reading ‘Wilkins ice bridge shatters’
Recently I’ve seen and heard a number of stories saying that the winter sea ice levels in the Arctic are right back at 1979 levels, so what’s to worry? On the polar bears thread I expected this story to appear, and didn’t have to wait long. First Mark and then Jono obliged. Thankyou to sjk and MikeM for setting them straight while I was otherwise engaged. For the record, from the National Snow and Ice Center, the 2008 story looks like this:
Tamino at Open Mind tracked down the source of the story.
Continue reading ‘Science, denialism or unconscionable fraud?’
Since we last looked at the Arctic ice coverage the equinox has been passed, the sun has set and the sea is icing up again quite nicely considering the ice loss fell just short of the 2007 record.
Continue reading ‘Arctic update II’
Al Gore talked about some scary stuff with respect to sea level rise, but didn’t in fact put a time limit on it. James Hansen has suggested that multimetre sea level rise by 2100 is highly probable. At least twice in recent times he has nominated two metres by 2100. In the Huffington Post he said:
West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are vulnerable to even small additional warming. These two-mile-thick behemoths respond slowly at first, but if disintegration gets well under way, it will become unstoppable. Debate among scientists is only about how much sea level would rise by a given date. In my opinion, if emissions follow a business-as-usual scenario, sea level rise of at least two meters is likely within a century. (Emphasis added)
He said the same thing in his 2008 testimony to Congress.
Now scientists at Colorado, Montana and Scripps (Pfeffer et al) have suggested that two metres, while possible, is extremely unlikely. 80 centimetres is “more plausible”. More than 2 metres would be physically impossible.
Continue reading ‘Sea level rise: how much by 2100?’
The above image from NOAA via The Oil Drum shows us that the temperature of the Eemian interglacial about 125,000 years ago was persistently above that of our times for several thousand years (oldest data is on the right). Hansen tells us that when the temperature was 1-2C higher than now during the Eemian the sea level was 4-6 meters higher. The frightening bit is that CO2 levels apparently did not go above 300ppm.
At 386ppm we should worry.
Continue reading ‘Greenland, Antarctica and sea level change’
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