Posts Tagged ‘ice melt’

Ice 4x Size of Manhattan Breaks off Greenland Glacier

Saturday, August 7th, 2010

A 100-square-mile block of ice 600 feet thick has calved off one of the largest ocean-bordering glaciers in Greenland. The Arctic hasn’t lost a chunk of ice that big since 1962.

“In the early morning hours of August 5, an ice island four times the size of Manhattan was born in northern Greenland,” oceanographer Andreas Muenchow of University of Delaware said in a press release August 6. “The freshwater stored in this ice island could keep the Delaware or Hudson rivers flowing for more than two years. It could also keep all U.S. public tap water flowing for 120 days.”

Read More at Wired Science

How big?  Very big.  Very thick.  Very rare.

For great from-space views of glaciers in their natural states go here.

Greenland Rising

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

Thought you’d like to know….

The ice is melting so fast in Greenland that the giant island is rising noticeably as the weight is lifted. In some spots, the land is rising 1 inch per year.

A vast ice cap covers much of Greenland, in some places up to 1.2 miles (2 km) thick. The ice, in place for eons, presses down the land, making the elevation at any given point lower than it would be sans ice.

Scientists have documented on Greenland and elsewhere that when longstanding ice melts away, the land rebounds. Even the European Alps are rising as glaciers melt.

Now, scientists at the University of Miami say Greenland’s ice is melting so quickly that the land underneath is rising at an accelerated pace.

Live Science

2 Trillion Tons of Ice — Gone

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

“New satellite data presented by NASA scientists shows the loss of an estimated 2 trillion tons of ice from Greenland, the Antarctic and the North Poll: proof positive of global warming’s dramatic effects, they claimed.

“‘More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA’s GRACE satellite,’ said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke, in a report by the Environmental News Network.

The Greenland melting, added Luthcke, appears to be accelerating.

One immediate effect of this progressive melting is a spike in the intensity and frequency of massive wildfires in the American West, according to one expert who says more than half of the region could be claimed by fire in the next century.

Tom Swetnam, a leading fire ecologist at the University of Arizona, told CBS’s 60 Minutes that a temperature increase in the West of just one degree had contributed to a four-fold increase in fires in the area.”

Raw Story

One thing I haven’t seen talked about is where the ex ice has gone to. Is it ocean water, and thus accounts for the sea rise? Is it atmospheric water and does that contribute to, or diminish heat entrapment? If in the atmosphere what determines its distribution and does the greater load in some places contribute to the increased rain we are seeing? Does a greater load have an effect on the major wind patterns?