Even The Antarctic Winter Cannot Protect Wilkins Ice Shelf

Even The Antarctic Winter Cannot Protect Wilkins Ice Shelf

www.sciencedaily.com

ScienceDaily (Jun. 14, 2008) — Wilkins Ice Shelf has experienced further break-up with an area of about 160 km² breaking off from 30 May to 31 May 2008. ESA’s Envisat satellite captured the event – the first ever-documented episode to occur in winter.

(visit the link for the full news article)

this is pretty scary given what else the article has to say.

In February 2008, an area of about 400 km² broke off from the ice shelf, narrowing the connection down to a 6 km strip; this latest event in May has further reduced the strip to just 2.7 km.
New images highlight the rapidly dwindling strip of ice that is protecting thousands of kilometres of the ice shelf from further break-up.

Who cares weather you think Al Gore is right or just in it for the carbon cash.....i remember him and other saying this would happen. And it is.
Why.......

The Antarctic Peninsula has experienced extraordinary warming in the past 50 years of 2.5°C, Braun and Humbert explained. In the past 20 years, seven ice shelves along the peninsula have retreated or disintegrated, including the most spectacular break-up of the Larsen B Ice Shelf in 2002, which Envisat captured within days of its launch.

Global Warming.www.sciencedaily.com...



www.sciencedaily.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

[edit on 15-6-2008 by atlasastro]

Thank you for this post!!!


Starred and Flagged!!!

We better all get out our water wings....
Messing with the Earth we are going to get what we have coming, and now it's looking like sooner than later. I just wish my baby had got to see what the place looked like before. All the places I remember going to as a kid are gone....humans just keep expanding and consuming.

Seems like this has happened at breakneck speed the last few years. We are witnessing the extinction of the polar bear in our generation. I almost hope the earth shrugs us off just for the good of all the other life on this planet.

Well, it is happening and right now there is nothing we can do to stop it. Even if we put all of our efforts into cooling the planet off right now, how long would it take to see any result at all? So, if things continue this shelf will break up regardless of who or what is to blame.

I wonder what the consequences are and how we plan on handling them. We need to stop playing the blame game and start working on solutions to the problems that are coming.

Originally posted by Karlhungis
Well, it is happening and right now there is nothing we can do to stop it. Even if we put all of our efforts into cooling the planet off right now, how long would it take to see any result at all? So, if things continue this shelf will break up regardless of who or what is to blame.

I wonder what the consequences are and how we plan on handling them. We need to stop playing the blame game and start working on solutions to the problems that are coming.

Well said, but unfortunately while we have people continueing to bicker, the problem is only worsening. There is even arguement over weather or not this ice melting will infact raise sea levels......so you can see how reidiculous this situation is getting.

And just on this bit

Originally posted by Karlhungis
. Even if we put all of our efforts into cooling the planet off right now, how long would it take to see any result at all?

Such occurrences are "more indicative of a tipping point or trigger in the climate system," said Sarah Das, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

"These are things that are not re-forming," Das said. "So once they're gone, they're gone."

www.huffingtonpost.com...

Originally posted by Grafilthy

Seems like this has happened at breakneck speed the last few years. We are witnessing the extinction of the polar bear in our generation. I almost hope the earth shrugs us off just for the good of all the other life on this planet.

www.whoi.edu...

Polar bears have a low reproductive rate. To feed themselves and their cubs, they rely on sea ice for platforms to hunt for their main source of food: seals. (Photo by Chris Linder, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

The Department of Interior’s imminent decision on whether to place polar bears on the federally protected endangered species list has focused attention on a recent study that documents for the first time the way that Arctic sea ice affects the bears' survival, breeding, and population growth. If current ice melting trends continue, the bears are likely to become extinct in the southern Beaufort Sea region of Alaska and adjacent Canada, the study concludes.

How sad is that. And we are going to be able to watch it happen......and still people will argue that global warming is a myth......well we can add the Polar Bear to those mythical tales soon as well.

We will soon be telling our grandchildren what rhinos looked like, just as I asked my grandfather what dinosaurs looked like.

reply to post by Grafilthy


Are you kidding me? The human race is obviously full of itself it we really think that WE are going to influence the PLANET. Seriously people, YOU are NOT that important to the planet. Guess what, if and when the planet does get warmer or freezes over or whatever the heck happens, do know know what will still be here??? THE PLANET@!!!

Get a life and stop being such a dolt!

Jebus! Look at this...
it's sat photos that document the last few months development for the Wilkins shelf. It's pratically breaking up as we speak now....:

ESA

Amazing? Yes

Man-Made? Marginally.

Is imposing a global carbon tax to fund the PTB under the pretext of helping the earth going to change anything? No

Is Al Gore still a douche? Yes

Originally posted by vegno
Amazing? Yes

I'd call it alarming. Amazingly alarming.

Man-Made? Marginally.

Thanks for your fact based assertions.

Is imposing a global carbon tax to fund the PTB under the pretext of helping the earth going to change anything? No

What do you suggest we do to halt this "marginal environmental impact".
Do you offer any proof that a carbon tax will not help positive change in relation to CO2 emmisions(the majority of CO2 come from burning fuels that release carbon these being coal, oil, wood, hence the tax on it) and Global Warming and climate change? No
In fact, have you offered this thread anything of value at all? No.

Is Al Gore still a douche? Yes

Is Attacking Al Gore going make the melting and collapse of the Wilkins Ice shelf go away? No.

He may be a douche(i'll have to take your own personal insight into being a douche as evidence that Mr Gore is one too), but so far he has been right about what we would see happening due to GW and climate change.

And all of this is happening at Solar Minimum which causes cooler than average temperatures. Just wait to the next solar max to see how warm things get.

Originally posted by flice
Jebus! Look at this...
it's sat photos that document the last few months development for the Wilkins shelf. It's pratically breaking up as we speak now....:

ESA

thanks for the update flice. I thought this was pretty interesting.

Prof. David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said: "Wilkins Ice Shelf is the most recent in a long, and growing, list of ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula that are responding to the rapid warming that has occurred in this area over the last fifty years.

"Current events are showing that we were being too conservative, when we made the prediction in the early 1990s that Wilkins Ice Shelf would be lost within thirty years - the truth is it is going more quickly than we guessed."

Studies on Global warming here in Australia, in relation to droughts, and predictions based on GW models have also seen prediction come true alot earlier than expected. This is more data calling for attention that won't see the light of day in the mainstream.

reply to post by airteck

i know. I have read alot of GW sceptics that have claimed that GW was solar related and unrelated to Co2 etc. Just goes to show you how wrong they are.
Cheers.

reply to post by atlasastro


Not caused by Global Warming

From www.theregister.co.uk...

Global warming cleared on ice shelf collapse rap -
Natural causes to blame, expert claims

The high-profile collapse of some Antarctica's ice shelves is likely the result of natural current fluctuations, not global warming, says a leading British expert on polar climates.

This surprising finding is supported by analysis of data from the European Space Agency's ERS-1 satellite, according to Duncan Wingham, Professor of Climate Physics at University College London. The data, measuring changes in ice thickness across the Antarctic ice sheet using the polar orbiting satellite, show areas of growth from snowfall are as common as areas of decline.

This is a contrasting picture to one based solely on the northern Antarctic Peninsula - a shark's fin of land jutting out from the body of the continent, and reaching to just 750 miles from Chile - where there has been a drastic increase in temperature, thinning of ice sheets and collapse of ice shelves. The Larsen A ice shelf, 1600 square kilometres in size, fell off in 1995. The Wilkins ice shelf, 1100 square kilometres, fell off in 1998 and the Larsen B, 13,500 square kilometres, dropped off in 2002. Meanwhile, the northern Antarctic Peninsula's temperatures have soared by six celsius in the last 50 years.

"A lot of attention and research has focused on this relatively accessible area of the Antarctic Peninsula, but satellites are giving us a picture of the continent as a whole," Wingham told the Register. This broader picture shows evidence of growth and decay from place to place, a picture more in line with natural variations in snowfall and ocean circulation. The Antarctic is to some extent insulated from global warming because to its north are zonal flows in the atmosphere and ocean, unimpeded by other landmasses. This insulates the continent from warmer events further north and leads one to suppose it is better protected from global warming.

"Taken as a whole, Antarctica is so cold that our present efforts to raise its temperature might be regarded as fairly puny. Change is undoubtedly occurring: in the collapse of the northerly Peninsula ice shelves, and elsewhere in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where the circumpolar current appears to reached the ice edge and is eating away drastically at the ice shelves. One cannot be certain, because packets of heat in the atmosphere do not come conveniently labelled 'the contribution of anthropogenic warming'.

"But the warming of the Peninsula has been going on for a considerable time, and the pattern of regional change is variable, and neither of these is favorable to the notion we are seeing the results of global warming".

At the US station at the South Pole, temperatures have in fact fallen by a degree since 1957. "The Antarctic Peninsula is exceptional because it juts out so far north," Wingham explained.

The professor continued: "I am not denying global warming. For instance, Greenland, in the northern hemisphere, does seem to be going. But Greenland's ice cap - Greeland is quite far south - is a last survivor from the ice age and only its height protects it. The more that cap melts, the more it will continue to melt as it gets lower and warmer. But Antarctica is different. Even in the Arctic I am sceptical of some claims that 40 per cent of the sea ice has already vanished, and that what remains is drastically thinning.

"Sparse data from subs in some parts of the Arctic do seem to show a thinning trend, but our preliminary observations using satellite data point to large growth and decay from year to year and place to place, by as much a meter in just a few years. Here too natural variability is considerable. No one doubts that the ultimate fate of Arctic ice looks a grim one, but I believe we have too few data to be confident of how fast it will meet its fate."

Prof Wingham, who is the Director of the UK's National Environmental Research Council's Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, spoke to us after a European Union Space Conference in Brussels. He attended in his capacity as the Project Scientist of the European Space Agency's 130M euro "Cryosat" satellite mission, to be launched later this year and dedicated to spotting climate change in the polar zones.

Earlier media reports after a conference on climate change in Exeter suggested it was "unclear" whether the collapse in the Antarctic ice shelves was due to global warming or not. Although the melt and collapse of the ice shelves does not raise sea levels initially, there is fear these shelves act as corks whose disappearance could lead to an outflow from landbased glaciers - which would increase sea levels.

I dont know...
while it is melting in Antarctica, north pole, wherever...it was a colder summer here.
Im waiting to see how frozen and long this winter will be.

Would be convenient for Russia to have a cold winter for europe so they can drive up gas prices. over $100 a month, and if we didnt have gov. help it would be well over $200 for winter gas.

Maybe the earth is flipping.

Peace

dAlen

Carbon taxes are a joke. History will repeat itself again and again. There is nothing you can do about this situation. Even if people pay taxes for using oil how will that help stop the melting of the ice? Maybe we can cover the ice with all the money we make from the carbon taxing and say we tried.

The earth cycle and sun cycles both effect the climate as well. Instead of taxing everyone, why not just help stop the wars and use up the money from the war to help everyone on the planet.

I find it amazing that science is in dispute over what causes "global warming" and yet we can plaster one article on here and say that thats the whole story.

Global Warming is a major shift in Earths Balance......Man is not the only cause of the shift and to think that we can stop it is crazy.

This Earth is som complex that we can have one of the coolest years on record.....yet the panic on ice melt is bigger than its ever been.

I urge people to realize that we have at most between 100-200 years of actual data as far as temps go for this world and Earth is just a tad older that that.

This could all be normal......just wait and see.