Feb 28 2009
Ice Melting Faster and Faster
The ice in Greenland is melting at an ever-increasing rate, with the water disappearing down into a moulin as seen in this video. Are we approaching a point of no return, a tipping point in our climate, after which the sea will rise 20 feet or more? It’s a fact that the glaciers on Greenland are not holding, but melting faster and faster. This dramatic recent video shows a team measuring the flow rate at which this glacier in Greenland is melting. Prognosis: Bad. In this post I will be adding a lot of information about melting glacier and ice stories from several different places last week. More information about this also appears after the break.
Scientists capture dramatic footage of Arctic glaciers melting in hours
Glaciologist Jason Box has been testing a Moulin, a shaft that allows water to travel from the glacier’s surface to its bottom, in a glacier on the Greenland ice cap to find out how fast it is melting. More on this here.
Despite widespread concern over global warming, humans are adding carbon to the atmosphere even faster than in the 1990s, researchers warned last week. Carbon emissions have been growing at 3.5 percent per year since 2000, up sharply from the 0.9 percent per year in the 1990s.
To study how fast melting caused by rising temperatures is happening, a parka-clad band of environment ministers landed in this remote corner of the Antarctic on Monday, in the final days of an intense season of climate research, to learn more about how a melting Antarctica may endanger the planet.
Representatives from more than a dozen nations, including the U.S., China, Britain and Russia, were to rendezvous at a Norwegian research station with American and Norwegian scientists coming in on the last leg of a 1,400-mile (2,300-kilometer), two-month trek over the ice from the South Pole.
The IPCC forecast that oceans may rise up to 23 inches (0.59 meters) this century, from heat expansion and melting land ice, if the world does little to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases blamed for atmospheric warming.
