Green Group discussion

January 21, 2017 it is now a 100 mile crack, only 6 more miles to go before it hits water and cleaves off a chunk of ice the size of Rhode Island.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather...

January 2017 it is a 90 mile crack.
December 2016 it was a 70 mile crack.

There were 4 choices.
#1 is out, the possibilities are now down to 3 choices:
1)Takes forever for the crack to go completely across
2)Crack goes across and nothing else happens for a long time
3)Crack goes across and ice starts to move into the ocean at a noticeable rate.
4)Crack goes across and ice immediately moves out into the ocean, opening a gate for far more ice to follow it.


Strange way to write an article.
The writer of the article waited until the last line to say that "The crack only has about 10 miles left to go."
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-wa...


December 2016

New research by an international team shows that the present thinning and retreat of Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica is part of a climatically forced trend that was triggered in the 1940s.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...

Now it's official: We are the grandchildren who will be adversely affected by global warming

A little more information:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...

The other shoe drops now...

There's a giant crater in East Antarctica, and it's very bad news.

This is on the east side of Antarctica, supposedly much more immune from the melting going on in the western part of Antarctica.

The scientists found out that the eastern side was melting out by merely driving over there and taking a look with real eyes, not by using computerized or technologized monitoring. The problem is that the hole has been there since 1989. This type of melting, top down, is very common on land glaciers but not on glaciers floating in ocean water. In fact, it wasn't supposed to be happening in eastern Antarctica because it was supposedly too cold there.

First it was thousands of years for the water level to really rise up. Then it was a thousand years with a possibility of it happening in two hundred years. Seeing as how all this warming has been going on for probably a couple of hundred years I give it 10 to 20 years more years.

http://www.sciencealert.com/there-s-a...

While technology was not responsible for the initial warming that started the poles on their way to ice free waters, it was technology that moved the starting date up by thousands of years by filling the atmosphere with excessive carbon dioxide emissions. Technology also killed the diversity and health of thousands of different food chains in the oceans, those same food chains kept people healthy by providing clean food and a healthy ocean that kept our eco-sphere healthy. As our eco-sphere disappears it will be be replaced with an equally progressive eco-sphere that will cover the Earth with plenty of life, just not the kind we are familiar with.

Technology also created the roads and land clearing and the huge global runoff system that floods the oceans with all the garbage that isn't nailed down on the land surfaces. And none of it is nailed down. Roads are merely drainage ditches that help carry all the crap off the land and into the oceans. The more natural the land, the more it holds onto everything on it. The more technologically sculptured the land, which is as simple as roofs over our heads, the more garbage runs off of it and into the oceans. It's not a new concept, it has been going on for two thousand years.

So now we have reached the point where words, laws, and machines aren't going to change the real future. People will continue to measure the future as how much more money they will have in the bank when in reality that is a measure of how much less life there will be in our bodies. The life expectancy is decreasing in the US, and it will start to fall in other parts of the world as well as they race to become the number one nation in the world.

The medical industrial complex got rid of polio. But now a new virus, as yet unnamed, is slowly working it's way around the world, slowly wreaking havoc, leaving children with weakened muscles and in some cases with problems being able to simply breath. Apparently we can kill the messenger but not the message. The medium is the message.

We make pills that seem to make us healthier but then it turns out, that new found health is only temporary. We keep trying to keep all the old ways intact by making short term improvements instead of changing the way we look at things. We help people play games on line so the advertising rates can go higher. We share things on line that belong to everyone in the first place. Unless we actually go there in person, we are probably missing a lot more than you will ever know.

10 years ago the two previous ice shelves that broke off the main body of ice at this location broke up immediately into many smaller pieces.

Thanks, scary.

May 2, Latest view of the ice crack in Larsen C ice shelf, Eastern Antartica. It stopped cracking lengthwise, the crack is now 111 miles long. The remaining distance to the water is officially 12 miles. It's only had around 10 miles to go for a few months now but the crack is widening and starting to fork at the tip of the crack, developing a small secondary crack which is heading towards the water. The width of the entire crack has been steadily growing, moving away from the ice shelf, widening 3 feet per day, making the width of the crack 1,000 feet. In 2011, it was 19 miles long and 260 feet in width.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/e...

Thanks Robert. Just studying the dynamics of this must be fascinating.

It certainly does look like it is trying to finally break lose. Its like one of those games where you pull out the sticks or blocks until it all falls down. Since it is already in the water, it won't change the sea level. If it turns out to be the cork in the bottle that is holding the rest of the land ice behind it in place, I would use the word horrifying to describe it. If all the ice in the water surrounding the land based ice were to accelerate the breaking free process, the sea level would rise a lot faster than predicted.

The tip of the newly forked end crack is continuing towards the water and is now only 8 miles away from calving the ice shelf.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-envir...

Probably a weaker area gave under the stress and that was almost waiting to break.

The crack advanced 11 miles in the space of just one week between May 25 and May 31.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtm...

I can almost hear it splintering.

I have been looking for an informative article about the history of the Larsen Ice Shelf.

While this article is from 2004, it gives a good picture of what the ice shelf once looked like.

https://nsidc.org/news/newsroom/larse...

Thanks, that's a very useful site with plenty of links to explanations about glaciers and Greenland.

For those who have not seen it: award winning footage in 'Chasing Ice'. Arctic rather than Antarctic but it explains the dramatic issue well.
http://www.metaspoon.com/glacier-calv...

Surface melting raises new concerns about how long the ice will last in Antarctica.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtm...

Thanks. Scary.
I do like the clip of Antarctic waterfall.
I've read a thriller about a deliberate destruction of the WAIS. We learn that the Russians are behind it, as their land and cities will not be much affected by sea level rise, but everyone else will be. Trident Code

The Russians are screwed by the warming climate as well as anyone else. They are going to have the world's deepest oceans of melted permafrost. The released methane will distribute over the entire planet fairly quickly. It also contains all kinds of organisms and diseases which will be reactivated and come back to life. They will have first contact with that stuff, some of which is a million years old.

Like Spanish Flu.

Clare wrote: "Like Spanish Flu."

Yikes! Climate change inadvertently releasing dormant pandemic pathogens is something that never occurred to me. No sleep tonight! :-(

Climate change inadvertently releasing dormant pandemic pathogens

It goes under the heading of everything on this planet is connected to everything else.

I have a saying, If you can see it, by any means possible [includes TV or web], then you can feel it [as soon as today] because the insulation of time and space has been wiped out by technology.

A lot of people think of the erosion of the insulation of time and space as being related to erosion of the land and other geophysical changes, which use to take many years to have an impact but can now appear overnight.

Money is also meaningless as an insulator against the micro world which houses as many nano worlds in it as there are stars in the universe. Insects represent one of the main intersections of the macro world and the micro world. I wouldn't be surprised if insects are able to successfully implement the wayward micro chips of plastic pollution into their bodies.

If you can see the stuff crawling out of the oceans of melted permafrost, then it is a safe bet it is capable of landing in your area within weeks. It's traveling at the speed of business.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/201705...

“Whole or in pieces, ocean currents could drag it north, even as far as the Falkland Islands,”

Still no estimate of split date, ranges from hours to weeks.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/apos-bergx...

https://www.ecowatch.com/larsen-c-bre...

Going, going... and gone.

The Exxon Knew Ice Sheet, because #ExxonKnew. https://www.commondreams.org/news/201...

Thanks!

An iceberg four times the size of Manhattan broke off an Antarctic glacier. This is the second time in two years a huge iceberg has calved from the area. While ice breaking off is not unusual, the way it is breaking off is the not how it was happening in the past.

This is from the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica, one of the fastest moving glaciers, it cracked away from the middle instead of from the sides which could indicate the ice is melting from underneath. The ice floating in the water is a barrier that prevents a much larger mass of land-based ice from flowing to the sea.

The ice being held back is much larger than what the Larsen Ice Shelf is holding back which lost a piece in July the size of Delaware.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtm...

What is the iceberg that broke off the Larsen Ice Shelf doing and is more on the way?

The new data, says Hogg, shows that the remaining forking cracks in the Larsen C ice shelf are growing in the direction of a feature known as the Bawden Ice Rise – an outpost which supports the ice shelf, a little like scaffolding, or the pillar of a building’s facade. Should the cracks continue in a straight line and the ice shelf break around such a point, she adds, the support would be lost, a result that could greatly reduce the ability of the ice shelf to act as a buttress, and hold back the flow of glaciers into the sea.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/201...

Thanks for those fascinating articles.

Hole the Size of Maine Opens in Antarctica Ice

The holes, called polynyas occur regularly and provide a way for heat and water vapor to get into the dry polar climates, provide breathing holes for mammals, like seals and penguins, and breeding grounds for plankton.

Polynyas normally occur off coastal land in both polar regions. This one is happening over deep ocean water where they occur less frequently. Big holes like these could affect the strong deep ocean currents it is tapping into if they become more common.

There was a smaller hole in the area last year which is why they were looking for another hole to form this year. The last time a hole this big, 30,000 square miles, was seen in Weddell Sea was in 1974 to 1976. Smaller holes were seen in 2010's. Due to the harshness of the Antarctic climate smaller holes in other locations could easily be missed.

The water for this hole is kept open by a vertical circulation where warmer water far under the colder surface water is drawn up, cools off in the cold air, then drops down the hole to be replaced by more warm water rising up from the bottom. It could be happening now because the deep ocean current could be bigger, or closer to the surface, or the ice thickness could be thinner. Or none of the above.

https://phys.org/news/2017-09-antarct...

Characteristics of polynyas:
https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/seaice/c...

Antarctic melting:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...

Amazing images.

Not an event, but further work on the possibility of a live mantle plume under the Antarctic ice. This would explain the lakes beneath the ice sheet. To me it sounds quite likely because Iceland has both glaciers and volcanoes, and only when the glaciers lighten can some of the volcanoes reach the surface.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.ph...

We know the continent of Antarctica has moved around in past aeons and once was at the Equator. No reason it should not come to rest over a plume, unlike Iceland which was created by a plume.
Snowball Earth: The Story of the Great Global Catastrophe That Spawned Life as We Know It

That's only going to speed things up. I have my doubts that the ice shelves sitting in the water are going to just sit there while the water underneath them is slowly rising. If the ice in the water rises faster than the ice it is connected to on the land, the upward pressure might cause it to snap off the land earlier than expected. Without the ice shelves keeping the ice on the land, the glaciers will slide off the land into the water that much quicker.

The iceberg that broke from Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica 2 months ago has now broken up into small pieces.

The place in the ice shelf where it broke off has not been filled in by new ice which might mean that the ice shelf in the water that is preventing the ice on the land from sliding into the water is losing its ability to act as a brake.

Pine Island Glacier is the fastest melting glacier in Antarctica and if it starts to slide into the water faster, the predicted rise in sea level will increase ahead of schedule.

https://phys.org/news/2017-12-giant-w...

Getting a look at the seafloor under the now-broken ice shelf.

https://gizmodo.com/scientists-set-to...

It's probably beautiful down there and at the same time could be a tragedy slowly unfolding. Some of that life needs ice overhead like we need roofs over our heads. The only good thing woulf be no commercial development of any kind. Fortunately it's hard to get down there. But if the way the Arctic is being chewed up is any indication, once the climate down there becomes more friendly to people, it probably won't stay undeveloped. They should put the poles off limits open up the moon for any kind of exploration any one wants to do. Maybe even pay them to go there until they strike it rich.

The Moon, especially the far side, will be littered with rocks from meteor impacts, which will often contain rare and precious metals. I'm not talking platinum necessarily, but iridium, ruthenium, all the rare earth elements. Well worth someone's while walking around with a few supermagnets.
Only problem (aside from, like, space) is the silica dust. But that is perfect for making solar panels.
This is the background to my SF which predicts that we will need to exploit off-Earth resources (asteroids mainly) to sustain our technological civilisation.
As you remark, better there than here.

Originally, one of the worst things for exploring the Moon was the cost of shipping water up there which now seems like it isn't a problem at all. It's one place where frozen mud front property would sell at a premium.

NASA has announced a new study of the cryosphere, which includes Antarctica.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.ph...

"NASA's mission in researching our home planet is to use the vantage point of space to understand how Earth works as a system, and how the different components -- ocean, land, atmosphere, biosphere and cryosphere -- interact and affect one another."

We are looking at a new system, not the old system we grew up with. We are looking at system in disharmony as it changes from one state to another. At least the article is implying that NASA doesn't think the damage can be repaired and everything can be reset back the way it was. This looks more like they are getting ready to estimate the damage that will be done as the changes continues to unravel.

People are beginning to get the message, but it is only because the message is in front of our faces, like doors that won't open anymore. It is no longer under the rugs we swept it all under for the past 500 years.

NASA knows science works.

I wish they did, but they are human like everyone else. They are playing catch up. They are seeing what has been been underneath their feet the whole time they have been there and it's been down there for thousands of years.

They watched the ice sheet expansion and contraction for 50 years from the top and never once thought that it could be melting from the bottom up. That was purely a human assumption that it couldn't be melting. It's called judging a book by it's cover, which is a really big business now as any indie author knows. The rate of the buildup of the sediment tells us how fast the ice is melting above the sediment deposits. Its not rocket science.

People started getting suspicious when the sediment deposits under the outflow of Greenland's ice were seen to be building up at a increasing rate.

It's been recently determined the depth of the ice is determined by melting from rising ocean temperature, erosion from water through the ice and underneath the ice, reflection and absorption of energy from the thickening layer of soot building up on the surface of the ice as it melts, and now it is known the land underneath the ice which is where the sediments have been piling up for thousands of years also effects the ice thickness. These underwater landforms channel the water and sediment flowing underneath the ice and where the ice comes into contact with the sediment mounds they can mechanically grind away the ice.

The amazing sediment information about the Antarctic came from a team of scientists led by the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB, Belgium) and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (Germany).

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...

Thanks for the detailed info, Robert.

I am going to have to read up in more detail about this and the melt going on in Greenland, which one scientist reported being the biggest in the last 5000 years.

Too darn much to learn... and so little time... dang this evil day job!

Here is a weird article about the condition of Antarctica's ice. It says that the Pine Island Glacier halted it's loses compared to the areas next to it.

It sounds good until you look at a map of the Antarctic. The area directly inland from the Pine Island Glacier is a narrow isthmus compared to the areas that are experiencing increasing loss which are connected to a larger area of ice.

Any increases past any of these points would weaken a considerably larger area of ice which could increase the amount of ice going into the water exponentially. It looks more like Pine Island Glacier is a pivot point and not a point of stability.

https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2018...

Another view of the data. This explains what was done.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/na...

The ice is definitely melting in the Antarctic and things are changing but there is still a lot of uncertainty about how it is actually happening and when it started happening.

"One limitation with the current study, however, is that although the researchers have found that deep water is not forming in two key Antarctic regions, they cannot say when a change in these regions occurred. "

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/e...

The deep heavy water is hugely important as its sinking is the engine that pulls more water into the area and starts a current.

This is another one of those slow motion things, like the melting permafrost.

"One sample contained the highest concentration of microplastics ever found in sea ice -- up to 12,000 particles per litre of frozen water."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/microplast...

The latest update from GRACE about sea level rises due to melting ice.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.ph...

Interesting article. Greenland seems to be the hot spot. Wonder if the shifting water also contributes to placing or releasing stress on the fault lines enough to cause or diminish earthquakes and volcanic action.

Scientists have been showing us pictures of this for years, wonder what changed their minds about the time table.

Up to now, scientists have struggled in determining whether Antarctica has accumulated more mass through snowfall than it loses in meltwater run-off and ice flows into the ocean.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/antarctica...

Interesting video of the huge ice berg off Antarctica banging against ice shelf it broke off of. So far, the ice shelf is stronger than the iceberg.

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2018/0...