Sign of things to come? Arctic ice shelf breakup reported

[Chewbacca]

Story

WASHINGTON, Sept. 22 — The largest ice shelf in the Arctic, a solid feature for 3,000 years, has broken up, scientists in the United States and Canada said Monday. They said the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, on the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada’s Nunavut territory, broke into two main parts, themselves cut through with fissures. A freshwater lake drained into the sea, the researchers reported. LARGE ICE ISLANDS also calved off from the shelf and some are large enough to be dangerous to shipping and to drilling platforms in the Beaufort Sea. Local warming of the climate is to blame, they said — adding that they did not have the evidence needed to link the melting ice to the steady, planet-wide climate change known as global warming. Warwick Vincent and Derek Mueller of Laval University in Quebec City, Canada, and Martin Jeffries of the University of Alaska Fairbanks lived at the site, flew over it and used radar satellite imaging for their study. Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Vincent’s team said all of the fresh water poured out of the 20 mile (30 km) long Disraeli Fjord. This in turn has affected communities of freshwater and marine species of plankton and algae, said Mueller, a graduate student who has studied the tiny creatures. Only 100 years ago the whole northern coast of Ellesmere Island, which is the northernmost land mass of North America, was edged by a continuous ice shelf. About 90 percent of it is now gone, Vincent’s team wrote. The area has been getting warmer, they said. A similar trend in the Antarctic has caused the break-up of huge ice shelves there. “There’s a regional trend in warming that cycles back 150 years,” Mueller said in a telephone interview. “I am not comfortable linking it to global warming. It is difficult to tease out what is due to global warming and what is due to regional warming.” Records indicate an increase of four-tenths of a degree centigrade every 10 years since 1967. The average July temperature has been 1.3 degrees Celsius or 34 degrees F —just above the freezing point — since 1967. Climate change has affected ocean temperature, salinity and flow patterns, which also influence the break-up of ice shelves in the Antarctic. “It’s not just as simple as it gets x degrees warmer and the ice melts this much,” Mueller said. Warmer temperatures weaken the ice, leaving it vulnerable to changed currents and other forces.

[Xen]

Yep. We have done so much damage to this planet and now we must accept the consequences. It has been proven that temeprature of our air/planet raises for 2 deegres every year...

[ 09-23-2003, 04:04 PM: Message edited by: Xen ]

[Stratos]

Originally posted by Xen: Yep. We have done so much damage to this planet and now we must accept the consequences. It has been proven that temeprature of our air/planet raises for 2 deegres every year...

2 degrees every year!? Is that degree Celsius or Fahrenheit?

Sorry, but that information can't be correct. 2 degrees (Celsius) every year would mean that withing 50 years we will all be fried. Every hundred years, perhaps, but not every year.

[Skunk]

No it isn't correct. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the temperature has risen by 1° Fahrenheit in the last 100 years and are predicting that by 2100 it will have risen anywhere between an extra 1.8&#176F to 6.3&#176F

That may not sound like a lot but, as you are aware, water expands when it warms and add this to the effects on the ice caps and you will see sea levels rise dramatically.

[Yorick]

Bad news.

[Skunk]

Originally posted by Yorick: Bad news.

Especially for the Netherlands!

[Azred]

Global warming again? Every time some piece of ice breaks loose it seems like alarmists scurry around predicting our imminent death by heat within the next 50 years. Our current "warming trend" is part of the natural temperature cycle that has existed for millenia; unfortunately the alarmists are simply too short-sighted to understand this.

The Sahara used to be grassland and much of North America used to be covered by glaciers. Everything is cyclic, so just ride this out and worry about something really important for a change. [img]graemlins/petard.gif[/img]

[Donut]

Originally posted by Azred: Global warming again? Every time some piece of ice breaks loose it seems like alarmists scurry around predicting our imminent death by heat within the next 50 years. Our current "warming trend" is part of the natural temperature cycle that has existed for millenia; unfortunately the alarmists are simply too short-sighted to understand this. The Sahara used to be grassland and much of North America used to be covered by glaciers. Everything is cyclic, so just ride this out and worry about something really important for a change. [img]graemlins/petard.gif[/img]

That's easy for someone living high up to say. This has real and serious consequences for some of us. It is important.

[Barry the Sprout]

Originally posted by Azred: Global warming again? Every time some piece of ice breaks loose it seems like alarmists scurry around predicting our imminent death by heat within the next 50 years. Our current "warming trend" is part of the natural temperature cycle that has existed for millenia; unfortunately the alarmists are simply too short-sighted to understand this. The Sahara used to be grassland and much of North America used to be covered by glaciers. Everything is cyclic, so just ride this out and worry about something really important for a change. [img]graemlins/petard.gif[/img]

Well, first off it doesn't matter whether or not its natural if its going to be harmful. Cancer's natural, it doesn't make it good.

Secondly its just not correct to say that this is entirely natural. For that to be the case human activity would have to be proven to have no effect on the atmosphere. You can't say that this is part of the natural cycle if you also admit that human action is influencing the process. And it seems clear to me from the reading I've done on the issue that human action is having a very noticeable effect.

What I'm trying to say is that we may be living in a natural period of global warming, but that doesn't make our actions ineffectual by a long way.

[Black Baron]

Go to live in the mountains [img]smile.gif[/img]
i live near jerusalem so i do not realy care.
On more serious note-If usa, holland etc, will go under water, we will be all stuck deep in %&#$, regardless of our location. So jerusalem will not help a lot