A lot of stories erupted this morning due to NASA satellite analysts' revelation yesterday that they just saw something on Greenland they had never seen before: water everywhere. That is, it's still pretty much white. It is still mostly covered in a glacial mass reaching thousands of feet in thickness. But...
Category: Greenland ice sheet
A lot of stories erupted this morning due to NASA satellite analysts' revelation yesterday that they just saw something on Greenland they had never seen before: water everywhere. That is, it's still pretty much white. It is still mostly covered in a glacial mass reaching thousands of feet in thickness. But the sunny part on top was abruptly melting, north to south, east to west. One imagines an unbroken wetness of sheets and rivulets and rivers and probably more noise from the maws of those ice-boring waterfalls called moulins that drain to the bedrock beneath. One supposes it could be an instrument error. But the folks running the multiple satellites at work say they checked. Ergo, the twinned images of ice v. melted-on-top, taken just four days apart earlier this month, are in wide circulation.
It's a peculiar thing and is unavoidable news. It could not last of course. Nobody should think a tipping point or something else drastic-sounding is upon us that...
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Lewis Page, at the UK tech news outlet The Register, is a standout largely on the strength of his devotion to all things boffin. Some others at the Register including Lester Haines -here's a strange, stiff(y) non-boffin one from him the other day,...
And the icemelt goes on.
In...
And the icemelt goes on.
In Geophysical Research Letters a man who works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and at UC Irvine (and his colleagues at NCAR and in the Netherlands) report that satellite and other observations, gathered by two separate techniques of measurement over the last few decades, reveal a markedly quickening loss of mass by the ice sheets of Greenland and of Antarctica. Their shrinking is about to overtake what had been the primary source of cryosphere contribution to rising sea levels, the melting of smaller mountain glaciers and ice caps elsewhere in the world and mostly at lower latitudes. Ergo, they conclude, sea level rise in this century is likely to be at or beyond the top end of the...
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