All In One Boat

Update Below

“The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that’s twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists. It is 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, floating where few people ever travel, in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii.”

Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The problem has been growing for years, in the Pacific most notably but in other oceans and bays as well.

PlasticDebris.org , Algalita Marine Research and GreenPeace are good resources.

The SF Chronicle covers the Great Pacific Garbage Patch on Tuesday 30th, including a few remarks from National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) about the possible clean up.

Of all the arctic ice melts that should worry the world Greenland has to be in first place. If ice floating in water melts, sea levels do not rise. If ice on land melts and that water joins the ocean — big problems.

“The rate of melting [in Greenland] is just phenomenal,” said Robert Correll, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, an international scientific monitoring project. “We’re adding freshwater to the ocean at a much more rapid rate than predicted” by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent estimates, which are based on data through 2005.

Studies show that Greenland is undergoing a rapid meltdown, one with severe consequences for global sea-level rise and the 56,000 people who live on the world’s largest island. Scientists report that glaciers draining the ice cap are picking up speed, while Arctic sea ice shrank this summer to its smallest extent on record, defying computer models that suggested such changes would not occur for decades.

“Arctic sea ice looks like it’s reached the tipping point,” said Robert Bindschadler, a polar ice expert at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “The suddenness of these changes we’ve seen in the Arctic over the past five years have really startled us, and we’ve been struggling to understand what is going on.” …

Scientists say the accelerated melt will have decidedly negative effects for the globe, as it is certain to boost sea levels. The most recent assessment by the U.N. climate change panel forecast a surge of between 8 inches and 2 feet by 2100, but scientists say the rapidly melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica have already rendered those estimates obsolete.

Correll, who was in Greenland last month, described one such effect at work on the island. Just a few years ago, scientists didn’t think meltwater could penetrate to the bottom of the ice sheet, but in recent years that’s exactly what moulins have done.

“These holes have been built by all this swirling, melting water, and they are going straight to the base, where the water lubricates the bottom,” he said. “It’s as if we put oil on the bottom of the ice, so it’s moving much more rapidly.”

As for sea-level rise, Correll said most scientists in the field would argue that it will be “the upper part of a meter” (3 feet 3 inches) this century, roughly twice the current estimates, though nobody knows exactly how the Greenland ice sheet will behave as water intrudes underneath.

“We can’t discount the possibility of an abrupt change, the equivalent of a sudden avalanche of snow,” Correll said. “We don’t think that will happen here, but there are these possibilities.”

Greenland Ice Melt