Eideard

An unusually hot melting season in 2010 accelerated ice loss in southern Greenland by 100 billion tons – and large portions of the island’s bedrock rose an additional quarter of an inch in response. That’s the finding from a network of nearly 50 GPS stations planted along the Greenland coast to measure the bedrock’s natural response to the ever-diminishing weight of ice above it.

Every year as the Greenland Ice Sheet melts, the rocky coast rises, explained Michael Bevis, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Geodynamics and professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University. Some GPS stations around Greenland routinely detect uplift of 15 mm or more, year after year. But a temperature spike in 2010 lifted the bedrock a detectably higher amount over a short five-month period – as high as 20 mm in some locations…

Because the solid earth is elastic, Bevis and his team can use the natural flexure of the Greenland bedrock to measure the weight of the ice sheet, just like the compression of a spring in a bathroom scale measures the weight of the person standing on it…

In scientific parlance, a melting day “anomaly” refers to the number of extra melting days – that is, days that were warm enough to melt ice – relative to the average number of melting days per year over several decades. In 2010, the southern half of Greenland lost an extra 100 billion tons of ice under conditions that scientists would consider anomalously warm.

Though this is described as an anomalous event, an increase in the frequency and quality of such events is predicted by some scientists. The most recent addition to paleoclimatic research at NASA comes to that conclusion.

They all vote. And in most of the enlightened West, opposition to reactionary politics still lies mostly in the hands of fumble-fingered Centrists and Liberals who would rather make nice – instead of making sense.

Since the Cold War, Denmark has staked its claim to northern Greenland – and its untapped mineral wealth – with dog sledge patrols. This is the Sirius Patrol in numbers…

Each autumn, six dog sledge teams – each manned by two soldiers from the Royal Danish Navy – spend up to six months patrolling an area of 160,000 sq km. They are the only people in a vast wilderness about three times the size of Denmark, or the equivalent of Britain and France combined.

During winter the sun disappears for two months. The average yearly temperature is -10C and the mercury can dip as low as -55C – the lowest recorded temperature in the area.

There are up to 14 dogs in each team, and a day’s patrol will typically cover 30km. At night the soldiers retire to a hi-tech tent. The dogs sleep outside, even in the depths of winter.

The unit selectively breeds Greenlandic dogs for endurance and strength. Each dog works for five years. By the time it retires, a dog in the Sirius Patrol will have pulled sledges for more than 20,000km.

During a two-year placement with the unit, the soldiers are paid a monthly salary of 22,000 Danish kroner after tax. That’s a little over $3,700. Their arctic training includes dog handling, building emergency snow shelters, and hunting for food…

In 1950, with the Cold War cooling international relations, Denmark decided to establish a permanent military presence. Initially christened Operation Resolut, it was renamed Sirius in 1953 after the brightest star in the dog constellation.

The Cold War has long since ended, but Greenland remains a desirable territory, rich in oil and precious metals. The environment is too extreme for current mining technology, but the patrols secure Denmark’s claim to this valuable wilderness simply by their presence.

Their presence is tolerated by the newly independent government of Greenland. It’s handier than spending your own money on the military. The dogs are always welcome.

The setting midnight sun lights a massive arched iceberg from the Ilulissat Kangerlua Glacier

“Several of the shots remind me that I’m lucky to be alive. There was a massive arched iceberg in Greenland that captivated me,” says Paul. “The midnight sun lit the arch with this amazing orange light, but the only way to photograph it was to motor inside it. The berg was shaped like an enormous hollow molar, and I sucked up my courage to dash in with my boat, shooting the scene as fast as I could. The light was fading fast and I was pretty worried that the whole thing could collapse, roll over, dump me in the ocean. I kept listening for the thunderclap that would mean the end for me. A tour boat from the nearby village motored past and watched in disbelief. I could hear the guide telling them how very, very dangerous this was. When I was done, I yelled across to them, “Please don’t tell my mom!“

While I’ve never cared to work at being a professional photographer, I’ve known a few. Specialists in everything from food to motorsports. Truly tempting way to earn a living recording truth, beauty – or seemingly unimportant moments.

Talent like Paul Souder’s deserves a special level of recognition.

The Times Atlas of the World exaggerated the rate of Greenland’s ice loss in its thirteenth edition last week, scientists said. The atlas, published by HarperCollins, showed that Greenland lost 15 percent of its ice cover over the past 12 years, based on information from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado in the United States…

However, a number of scientists disputed the claim.

“We believe that the figure of a 15 percent decrease in permanent ice cover since the publication of the previous atlas 12 years (ago) is both incorrect and misleading,” said Poul Christoffersen, glaciologist at the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) at the University of Cambridge. “We concluded that a sizable portion of the area mapped as ice-free in the Atlas is clearly still ice-covered.”

Other scientists agreed.

“These new maps are ridiculously off base, way exaggerated relative to the reality of rapid change in Greenland,” said Jeffrey S. Kargel, senior research scientist at the University of Arizona…

Professional pundits and ideologues – pretending to be science-based skeptics – rarely understand the function of peer review includes every conceivable aspect of evaluation and judgement.

Scientists exposing what they perceive to be an unscientific exaggeration – even if it supports a portion of a widely-held thesis like climate change – is unacceptable because it’s bad science. Not that any flavor of lying makes a difference to the know-nothings.

In August 2010, a section of ice about four times the size of Manhattan broke off the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland. This was the largest glacial calving event ever seen in Greenland, according to polar researcher Jason Box of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University.

Now, Box and other researchers are warning that another massive chunk of ice is close to breaking off from the same glacier, speeding the Petermann’s already rapid slide into the sea. Ice is melting all over the planet, but it’s what happens to land ice, such as the vast Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, that will largely determine how high sea levels rise during the coming decades.

In recent years, that fate has started to look increasingly dire: new research shows that glacial melting has sped up lately, a development that Box calls a telltale sign of global warming.

Box and his colleague Allun Hubbard of Aberystwyth University in Wales have released high resolution before-and-after images that reveal the scale of the ice loss at Petermann, with open water interspersed among scattered pieces of ice where solid ice used to be.

Even though they knew about the breakup event, Hubbard said it was nevertheless a shock to see firsthand. “I was still unprepared for the impact I felt of the scale of the breakup which rendered me speechless,” Hubbard said…

Box recently coauthored a study in the journal Annals of Glaciology that found that 39 of Greenland’s widest glaciers collectively lost an area of nearly 593 square miles between 2000 and 2010, with the greatest loss recorded at Petermann. The study found that the vast majority of the losses in area have occurred in northern Greenland, which matches with climate data that shows the climate is warming more significantly in that region…

Although the Arctic seems far-removed from everyday developments in the United States, Box notes that what happens there will eventually affect those in lower latitudes. “People should care because climate change in the Far North is occurring faster than down where we live… and what happens in the Far North affects us via sea level.” He noted that Hurricane Irene may have caused more damage via coastal flooding since sea levels have already risen by about a foot along the East Coast during the past century.

“Ice is nature’s thermometer, and if it melts away, we know that something has occurred. Ice doesn’t pay attention to politics, it reacts to temperature and that’s it.”

Way too rational for partisan politics.

Fascinating – if you’re not one of the stuffed shirts stuck into the ideology of so-called climate skepticism.

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating pace, according to a new study. The findings of the study – the longest to date of changes in polar ice sheet mass – suggest these ice sheets are overtaking ice loss from Earth’s mountain glaciers and ice caps to become the dominant contributor to global sea level rise, much sooner than model forecasts have predicted…

The nearly 20-year study reveals that in 2006, a year in which comparable results for mass loss in mountain glaciers and ice caps are available from a separate study conducted using other methods, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets lost a combined mass of 475 gigatonnes a year on average. That’s enough to raise global sea level by an average of 1.3 millimeters (.05 inches) a year. (A gigatonne is one billion metric tons, or more than 2.2 trillion pounds.) Ice sheets are defined as being larger than 50,000 square kilometers, or 20,000 square miles, and only exist in Greenland and Antarctica while ice caps are areas smaller than 50,000 square km.

The pace at which the polar ice sheets are losing mass was found to be accelerating rapidly. Each year over the course of the study, the two ice sheets lost a combined average of 36.3 gigatonnes more than they did the year before. In comparison, the 2006 study of mountain glaciers and ice caps estimated their loss at 402 gigatonnes a year on average, with a year-over-year acceleration rate three times smaller than that of the ice sheets.

“That ice sheets will dominate future sea level rise is not surprising — they hold a lot more ice mass than mountain glaciers,” said lead author Eric Rignot, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, and the University of California, Irvine. “What is surprising is this increased contribution by the ice sheets is already happening. If present trends continue, sea level is likely to be significantly higher than levels projected by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007. Our study helps reduce uncertainties in near-term projections of sea level rise.”

Rignot’s team combined nearly two decades (1992-2009) of monthly satellite measurements with advanced regional atmospheric climate model data to examine changes in ice sheet mass and trends in acceleration of ice loss…

The team found that for each year over the 18-year study, the Greenland ice sheet lost mass faster than it did the year before, by an average of 21.9 gigatonnes a year. In Antarctica, the year-over-year speedup in ice mass lost averaged 14.5 gigatonnes…

While this provides one indication of the potential contribution ice sheets could make to sea level in the coming century, the authors caution that considerable uncertainties remain in estimating future ice loss acceleration.

The inherent conservatism of bona fide scientists once again accounts for the element of a “surprising” rate of melting. Not that it means much to pundits or politicians committed to fossil fuel funding. Or, sadly, a populace in general that’s hardly past WW2 in terms of general understanding of science.

The flywheel effect is so strong that even when people are pushed far enough, no longer being able to ignore reality – it will take generations to begin to halt and then reverse the effects of global warming.

A North Atlantic current flowing into the Arctic Ocean is warmer than for at least 2,000 years in a sign that global warming is likely to bring ice-free seas around the North Pole in summers.

Scientists said that waters at the northern end of the Gulf Stream, between Greenland and the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, averaged 6 degrees Celsius (42.80F) in recent summers, warmer than at natural peaks during Roman or Medieval times.

“The temperature is unprecedented in the past 2,000 years,” lead author Robert Spielhagen of the Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Literature in Mainz, Germany…

The summer water temperatures, reconstructed from the makeup of tiny organisms buried in sediments in the Fram strait, have risen from an average 5.2 degrees Celsius from 1890-2007 and about 3.4C in the previous 1,900 years.

The findings were a new sign that human activities were stoking modern warming since temperatures are above past warm periods linked to swings in the sun’s output that enabled, for instance, the Vikings to farm in Greenland in Medieval times.

“We found that modern Fram Strait water temperatures are well outside the natural bounds,” Thomas Marchitto, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, one of the authors…

The Fram strait is the main carrier of ocean heat to the Arctic.

The authors wrote that the warming temperatures “are presumably linked to the Arctic amplification of global warming” and that the warming “is most likely another key element in the transition to a future ice-free Arctic Ocean…”

Even the stodgy Brits prepare for the future like good little Ants. Meanwhile, Congress and other fools – not quite up to the cheery fiddling of Grasshopper – rely on dour haters of science and other mystical props guaranteed to continue America’s steady slide into the economic ditch of irrelevance.

Only the educationally-challenged think 2,000 years is a long time in earth studies. Meanwhile, the world will be able to build alternative energy systems with products from Germany, Norway and China.

A British oil firm will announce that it has struck oil off Greenland, a find that could trigger a rush to exploit oil reserves in the pristine waters of the Arctic.

Cairn Energy, the first company to win permission to drill for oil in this sensitive environment, will break the news to the London stock market along with its half-yearly financial results…

The news will delight the oil industry, which has long believed the Arctic harbours some of the last huge reserves. It will also delight a Greenland government desperate to diversify its fragile economy away from a dependence on fishing, tourism and cash handouts from Denmark, which still formally has sovereignty over the world’s largest island…

The Arctic find will reinforce the reputation of Cairn in the oil industry. The firm has a strong track record of making discoveries in new frontiers. It made a name for itself by buying assets in Rajasthan, India, from Shell, then going on to make huge discoveries. Cairn has recently hived off this business at a big profit through a separate stock market flotation.

Asked whether he expected good news from Cairn, Mininnguaq Kleist, a senior official in Greenland’s department of foreign affairs, said only: “Yes, I hope so.” The department is choosing its words carefully because the exact scale of the oil find must still be assessed. The well has not been drilled to its true depth yet, and appraisal holes have to be made before the size of any reservoir can be assessed.

It is expensive to operate in deep waters and in such inhospitable terrain, and there would have to be a lot of oil in place to justify building platforms and pipelines. But most analysts believe the Arctic holds billions of new barrels – and the find will set their imaginations racing.

I left out the portion of this article dealing with Greenpeace. Though I’ve been an environmental activist for 40 years, they are not anyone I especially regard as either constructive or willing and able to consider the needs of working people.

After decades of being a colonial property, the last thing the people of Greenland need is a clot of middle-class twits descending upon them with religious preaching and rule-making.

A University of Delaware researcher reports that an “ice island” four times the size of Manhattan has calved from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier. The last time the Arctic lost such a large chunk of ice was in 1962.

“In the early morning hours of August 5, 2010, an ice island four times the size of Manhattan was born in northern Greenland,” said Andreas Muenchow…

Satellite imagery of this remote area at 81 degrees N latitude and 61 degrees W longitude, about 1,000 km south of the North Pole, reveals that Petermann Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 70 km-long floating ice-shelf.

Trudy Wohlleben of the Canadian Ice Service discovered the ice island within hours after NASA’s MODIS-Aqua satellite took the data on Aug. 5, at 8:40 UTC (4:40 EDT), Muenchow said. These raw data were downloaded, processed, and analyzed at the University of Delaware in near real-time as part of Muenchow’s NSF research.

Petermann Glacier, the parent of the new ice island, is one of the two largest remaining glaciers in Greenland that terminate in floating shelves. The glacier connects the great Greenland ice sheet directly with the ocean…

“In Nares Strait, the ice island will encounter real islands that are all much smaller in size,” Muenchow said. “The newly born ice-island may become land-fast, block the channel, or it may break into smaller pieces as it is propelled south by the prevailing ocean currents. From there, it will likely follow along the coasts of Baffin Island and Labrador, to reach the Atlantic within the next two years.”

Enough ice for Congressional martinis for one election cycle.

Time enough to debate, stall and otherwise ignore serious questions about energy policy – again.

Greenland is situated in the Atlantic Ocean to the northeast of Canada. It has stunning fjords on its rocky coast formed by moving glaciers, and a dense icecap up to 2 km thick that covers much of the island–pressing down the land beneath and lowering its elevation. 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.

According to the study, some coastal areas are going up by nearly one inch per year and if current trends continue, that number could accelerate to as much as two inches per year by 2025, explains Tim Dixon…principal investigator of the study.

“It’s been known for several years that climate change is contributing to the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet,” Dixon says. “What’s surprising, and a bit worrisome, is that the ice is melting so fast that we can actually see the land uplift in response,” he says. “Even more surprising, the rise seems to be accelerating, implying that melting is accelerating…”

“During ice ages and in times of ice accumulation, the ice suppresses the land,” Shimon Wdowinski says. “When the ice melts, the land rebounds upwards,” he says. “Our study is consistent with a number of global warming indicators, confirming that ice melt and sea level rise are real and becoming significant…”

One of the study investigators, Yan Jiang says, “We hope that our work reaches the general public and that this information is considered by policy makers.”

Apparently he doesn’t have much experience with American politics.