Skip down to "Polar Ice" But I gave up on separating it in '03.
Skip down to "Snowball Earth".
GLACIERS & POLAR ICE, OCEAN RISE, & CURRENTS:
. . (combined, now)
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Dec 29, 06: A giant ice shelf has snapped free from an island south of the North Pole, scientists said today, citing climate change as a "major" reason for the event. The Ayles Ice Shelf —-all 41 square miles of it-— broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 500 miles south of the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic. Scientists discovered the event by using satellite imagery.
. . Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, traveled to the newly formed ice island and couldn't believe what he saw. "This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years", Vincent said. "We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead."
. . The ice shelf was one of six major shelves remaining in Canada's Arctic. They are packed with ancient ice that is more than 3,000 years old. They float on the sea but are connected to land.
Dec 29, 06: "It is consistent with climate change", Vincent said, adding that the remaining ice shelves are 90% smaller than when they were first discovered in 1906. Copland said the speed with which climate change has effected the ice shelves has surprised scientists.
. . A spring thaw may bring another concern: that warm temperatures will release the new ice island from its Arctic grip, making it an enormous hazard for ships.
Dec 29, 06: Northern Europeans were poised to celebrate the passage to the New Year in a way that is out of the ordinary for them: with an ice-free Baltic Sea. Temperatures in Estonian coastal waters are warmer by one degree C than at the end of last year.
. . The only headache is for fishermen. "Fish are eating too much and getting fat in the current conditions", Kouts said. Fishermen prefer lean fish, which give a better quality, firmer flesh when cooked.
Dec 21, 06: A joint Indian-Chinese team plans to chart remote Himalayan glaciers that scientists fear are rapidly melting because of global warming, threatening the great rivers that give life to one of South Asia's most fertile regions.
. . The two expeditions will take scientists into some of the most remote areas of Tibet to explore the sources of two rivers that provide water for vast agriculture regions that feed nearly a sixth of the world's population. "The melting of the ice sheets and the glaciers is a crisis in the Himalayas."
. . The short-term result has been flooding, but some fear that over the long term the glaciers will melt entirely and the rivers will run dry for months at a time, fed only by annual rains like the monsoon.
Dec 20, 06: Tides affect the speed at which an Antarctic ice sheet bigger than the Netherlands is sliding toward the sea, adding a surprise piece to a puzzle about ocean levels and global warming, a study showed.
. . The Rutford Ice Stream of western Antarctica slips about a meter a day toward the sea but the rate varies 20% in tandem with two-week tidal cycles, it said. And the effect is felt even on ice more than 40 km inland.
. . Tides rise and fall about twice a day but also vary in a two-week cycle of high "spring" tides, when the sun and the moon are aligned with the Earth, and low "neap" tides, when they are at right angles to the planet.
. . "For such a large mass of ice to respond to ocean tides like this illustrates how sensitively the Antarctic Ice Sheet reacts to environmental changes." Even 40 km inland, at a height of almost 200 meters above sea level, the ice's daily speed varied between 1.07-0.95 meters. "That was the furthest inland measurement but I expect the tidal effect could be felt 75 km inland", he said.
. . Gudmundsson said it was unclear whether a projected long-term rise in world sea levels, like a rising tide in slow motion, might accelerate a run-off of ice from Antarctica. Around Antarctica, the tidal effect may be strongest around the Ronne Ice Shelf, where there is a big twice-daily rise and fall in tides. The Rutford Ice Stream is bigger than the Netherlands or U.S. states such as Maryland.
Dec 18, 06: An October journal report, by European and North American glaciologists, estimates that glacier melt contributed up to one-third of the 2.5 - 5 cm rise in global sea levels in the past decade. And that contribution is accelerating. Since 2001, they report, dying glaciers apparently have doubled their runoff into the world's rising seas.
Dec 14, 06: Veiled by kms of ice, an expanse of heavily scoured mountains and valleys in Greenland has remained out of sight until now.
. . Using a new radar technique, scientists have constructed crude but useful 3-D images of the hidden land. Images like these could lead to better predictions of how the Greenland ice sheet will change in the future, the scientists said here this week at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
. . The topography as well as deposits of water beneath the ice will impact how the ice sheet moves and changes over time. So detailed images of it all will allow scientists to predict how the ice sheet will respond to global warming.
. . As scientists try to gauge the effects of global climate change, they are beginning to look closely at conditions beneath Earth's ice sheets, which cover roughly 15% of the planet.
. . How speedy the ice motion is depends on other factors, such as whether the bottom of the ice, where it meets the ground, is well lubricated by water. The under-ice rivers could speed the ice flow above. Plus, steep terrain down which water can slide also could accelerate ice speed.
. . Scientists have known that warming temperatures have caused the ice surface to melt, sending the melt-water percolating down through cracks in the ice. But what happens where the ice meets the hidden land beneath has remained a mystery.
. . "It's also the same technology that we would use to map the bottom of the ice sheet on Mars", Freeman said. And in future missions to Jupiter's moon Europa, the instrument could map an ocean thought to reside beneath the moon's icy surface.
Dec 11, 06: The Arctic may be close to a tipping point that sees all-year-round ice disappear very rapidly in the next few decades, US scientists have warned.
. . The latest data presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting suggests the ice is no longer showing a robust recovery from the summer melt. Last month, the sea that was frozen covered an area that was two million sq km less than the historical average. "That's an area the size of Alaska." The sea ice reached its minimum extent this year on 14 September, making 2006 the fourth lowest on record in 29 years of satellite record-keeping and just shy of the all time minimum of 2005.
. . The new study found that the ice system could be being weakened to such a degree by global warming that it soon accelerates its own decline. "This is a positive feedback loop with dramatic implications for the entire Arctic region." Eventually, she said, the system would be "kicked over the edge", probably not even by a dramatic event but by one year slightly warmer than normal. Very rapid retreat would then follow.
. . Locally, this would have major consequences for wildlife in the region, not least polar bears which traverse ice-floes in search of food. On a global scale, the Earth would lose a major reflective surface and so absorb more solar energy, potentially accelerating climatic change across the world.
Nov 9, 06: Climate change is melting a legendary ice field in equatorial Africa and may soon thaw it out completely, threatening fresh water supplies to hundreds of thousands of people, a climate expert said. The fabled, snow-capped Rwenzori mountains --dubbed the "Mountains of the Moon" in travel brochures-- form part of the Uganda/Democratic Republic of the Congo border and are one of Uganda's top tourist destinations.
. . But warmer temperatures are melting the glaciers sitting on their peaks, with some scientists predicting the ice could be gone within two to three decades. "They have already decreased by 60 percent since 1910. If temperatures keep going up as they have, there's a high chance of them disappearing."
. . Scientists say tropical glaciers like the snowy peaks of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa's highest mountain, are especially sensitive to climate change. "The same thing is happening to Kilimanjaro...It's gone from white to brown", Magezi-Akiiki said. A study in 2002 showed Kilimanjaro to have lost more than 80 percent of its ice cap in the past 100 years, reducing water supplies to people living around it.
. . "And during the dry season, they are the only source of water." He said measures needed to be taken to prepare people in western Uganda for future water shortages, including drilling bore holes to access water under the ground and building irrigation systems to conserve the region's rain.
Oct 20, 06: The vast sheet of ice that covers Greenland is shrinking fast, but still not as fast as previous research indicated, NASA scientists said.
. . Greenland's low coastal regions lost 155 gigatons (41 cubic miles) of ice each year between 2003 and 2005 from excess melting and icebergs, the scientists said. The high-elevation interior gained 54 gigatons (14 cubic miles) annually from excess snowfall, they said.
. . This is a change from the 1990s, when ice gains approximately equaled losses. It still shows that Greenland is losing 20% more mass than it gets in new snowfall each year. The Greenland ice sheet is considered an early indicator of the consequences of global warming, so even a slower ice melt there raises concerns.
. . It's currently losing about 100 billion tons of ice a year. US space agency (Nasa) scientists have undertaken a new assessment of the rate of melting occurring on the great ice sheet that covers the region. Their data comes from satellites that detect changes in mass by monitoring tiny fluctuations in the pull of gravity as they fly over the Earth.
. . The Science authors also found, as others have, that the ice sheet is thinning at the margins while growing a little in the interior. This fits with climate models of a warmer world which expect increased melting at the edges of Greenland and increased snowfall on more central, higher locations.
. . The contribution to global sea-level rise of the ice loss observed in this study is about 0.3mm per year.
Oct 12, 06: Africa's two highest mountains —-Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya-— will lose their ice cover within 25 to 50 years if deforestation and industrial pollution are not stopped, environmentalists warned.
. . Kilimanjaro has already lost 82% of its ice cover over 80 years. Mount Kenya, one of the few places near the equator with permanent glaciers, has lost 92% over the past 100 years. "This is a major issue because declining ice caps mean the water tap is effectively going to be turned off and that is a major concern," said Nick Nuttall from the U.N.'s Environment Program.
. . Industrial nations also need to step up support to help poor nations adapt to global warming with drought and heat resistant crops and alternative energy sources so people do not cut down trees for fuel, Nuttall said. African forests, he added, are soaking up pollution from industrialized nations for free and should reap some kind of reward or benefit for that.
. . These rivers are major sources of water and power generated by dams. "Millions who depend on the seven rivers that depend on Mount Kenya will be affected because some of the rivers are seasonal and may dry up."
Oct 9, 06: Millions of people could become homeless in the Asia-Pacific region by 2070 due to rising sea levels, with Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, China and Pacific islands most at risk, says Australia's top scientific body.
. . A climate change report by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) found global warming in the Asia Pacific region could cause sea levels to rise by up to 16 cm by 2030 and up to 50 cm by 2070.
. . Rising temperatures will also result in increased rainfall during the summer monsoon season in Asia and could cause more intense tropical storms, inundating low-lying coastal villages. "Vast areas of the Asia-Pacific are low lying, particularly the small-island states, as well as the large river deltas found in India and Bangladesh, Southeast Asia and China." Sea level rise between 30 to 50 cm would affect more than 100,000 km of coast, particularly China's Pearl Delta and Bangladesh's delta.
. . "As sea level rise exceeds half a meter, the area affected in the Asia-Pacific region rises to over half a million square kilometers, affecting hundreds of millions of people." "Large areas of Bangladesh, India, Vietnam are inundated and Kiribati, Fiji and the Maldives are reduced to just a small fraction of their current land area."
. . The report also said rising sea levels and increased rainfall would spread infectious diseases in the region, leaving millions more at risk of dengue fever and malaria. It said local and regional economies would be hard hit by chronic food and water insecurity, warning Sri Lanka's GDP could fall by 2.4% with less than a two degree Celsius warming.
. . The report also warned of environmental refugees fleeing their flooded homelands, citing growing migration from some South Pacific island states already suffering rising sea levels. Some 17,000 islanders applied for New Zealand residence in the last two years, compared with 4,000 in 2003, it said.
Oct 5, 06: A pair of studies out this week along with other recent evidence suggests an observed meltdown of Arctic ice is snowballing into a situation that could leave the North Pole ice-free during summer in just a few decades.
. . In one study, scientists reported today that the continued warming of the Arctic Ocean is creating new pathways for zooplankton to move up to northern latitudes. Zooplankton are small floating organisms that drift with water currents and make up part of the food supply that most ocean life depend on.
. . The water that flows from the Norwegian Sea [northward] to the Arctic has been an average 0.8 degrees C warmer this summer", said expedition leader Ursula Schauer of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research. "This is in addition to the last two years already having been warmer than the previous 20 from which we have regular measurements."
. . Zooplankton originally from the Norwegian Sea were previously unrecorded in the northern latitudes where they were spotted this summer. Warmer water allowed them to move north.
. . The ice has been declining at about 8.6% per decade, or at about 23 million square miles per year. The record low that occurred in 2005 was 20% lower than the average ice extent from 1978 to 2001. In 2005 the ice decreased about 500,000 square miles in area, almost twice the size of Texas. The 2006 low is about 400,000 square miles less than the average. "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean will have no ice in September by the year 2060. It seems that this feedback, which is a major reason for the pronounced effects of greenhouse warming in the Arctic, is really starting to kick in."
Oct 2, 06: On a calm, clear day in October 2005, a huge Antarctic iceberg broke into half a dozen pieces. Today, scientists said the event was triggered by ocean swells kicked up during an Alaskan storm—half a world away.
. . At 95 kg long and 30kg wide, the iceberg called B15A was half of a larger iceberg called B15, which was for a time the world's largest iceberg after breaking away from the Antarctic's in Ross Ice Shelf in 2000. Over the years, scientists put seismic monitors on B15A to better understand strange sounds called "iceberg songs."
. . "We deployed these instruments to look at a kind of harmonic tremor that the icebergs are making in a way that we still don't understand terribly well", said Emile Okal at Northwestern University. "We are trying to figure out how the icebergs are sort of making music when various phenomena that we think are linked to the cracking of iceberg masses takes place."
. . After the B15A broke into pieces, Okal's team retrieved the seismometers. Their recorded data showd that movement on the iceberg started 12 hours before the breakup and continued for three days after. Local conditions were otherwise mild, the researchers say, but the vast chunk of ice moved up and down a half-inch and four inches side to side.
. . By comparing arrival times of waves, the researches calculated it had been generated 8,300 miles away. "Our jaws dropped", said Douglas MacAyeal of the University of Chicago. "We looked in the Pacific Ocean and there, 13,500 kilometers away, six days earlier, was the winter season's first really big, nasty storm that developed and lasted for about a day and a half in the Gulf of Alaska."
Sept 16, 06: Polar bears are drowning and receding Arctic glaciers have uncovered previously unknown islands in a drastic 2006 summer thaw widely blamed on global warming. "We saw a couple of polar bears in the sea east of Svalbard --one of them looked to be dead and the other one looked to be exhausted", said Julian Dowdeswell, head of the Scott Polar Research Institute in England. He said that the bears had apparently been stranded at sea by melting ice. The bears generally live around the fringes of the ice where they find it easiest to hunt seals.
. . NASA projected this week that Arctic sea ice is likely to recede in 2006 close to a low recorded in 2005 as part of a melting trend in recent decades. A stormy August in 2006 had slightly slowed the 2006 melt. An international study in 2004 projected that summer ice could disappear completely by 2100, undermining the livelihoods of indigenous peoples and driving creatures such as polar bears toward extinction.
. . "In 1980, the average weight of adult females in western Hudson Bay was 300 kg. Their average weight in 2004 was just 230." Numbers in the Hudson Bay region dropped to 950 in 2004 from 1,200 in 1989.
Sept 15, 06: Tourists are flocking to Switzerland's highest peaks to see formidable Alpine glaciers melt away. A 100-meter-deep tunnel was dug into the Rhone Glacier, the source of the Rhone River that flows to Geneva and through France. As one of the only glaciers in Europe accessible by car, and with its man-made grotto that lets visitors walk underneath the ice mass, the Rhone Glacier has drawn many visitors looking to see for themselves how global warming is felt in the mountains. The blue-tinged ice once stretched a further 1.5 km into the valley below.
. . Hundreds of thousands of people traveled on trains leading to Swiss glacier sites last year, she said, including 23,000 to the Rhone glacier and 562,000 on the Jungfrau railway line leading to the Aletsch glacier, the largest in the Alps.
. . "The worrying part of it is not just that the glacier disappears. It is a chain reaction, and we still lack the capacity to understand the full consequence of these changes."
Sept 13, 06: Arctic perennial sea ice --the kind that stays frozen year-round-- declined by 14% between 2004 and 2005, climate scientists said on Wednesday, in what one expert saw as a clear sign of greenhouse warming.
. . Researchers have been monitoring the shrinking polar ice cap with satellites since the 1970s. What is new, and remarkable to scientists, is that the decline has been observed in winter as well as summer.
. . One image showed a strange big hole in the summer ice north of Alaska. The hole, called a polynya, is probably about the size of the state of Maryland. Such a feature has never been seen in this area before.
. . The polar bear population in Canada's Hudson Bay has dropped from 1,200 in 1989 to about 950 in 2004, a decline of 22%. The amount of ice covering the Arctic has declined by 6% over each of the last two winters, compared to a loss of merely 1.5% per decade since 1979.
. . The thick ice, which has increased in thickness as layer upon layer of snow melts and freezes on top of it, contains loads of air bubbles. “These bubbles scatter the sunlight out of the ice so less solar energy can be absorbed”, Nghiem said. The seasonal ice doesn’t contain these sun-scattering bubbles, and thus absorbs more sunlight.
. . If the perennial sea ice cover continues to decline and be replaced by thinner ice, the surrounding ocean could get warmer, further accelerating summer ice melts and impeding fall freeze-ups.
. . "It is not too late to save the Arctic, but it requires that we begin to slow carbon dioxide emissions this decade", James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, said.
. . Global warming skeptics have pointed to the lack of ice melt as a flaw in global warming theory.
July 10, 06: From 1850 to the 1970s, glaciers in the European Alps lost about 35 percent of their area. The melting then sped up, and now the 5,150 glaciers cover about 50 percent of the area they did in 1850.
. . Using historical climate data and a model that forecasts human-driven climate change, researchers looked at growing scenarios throughout the country. The scientists found that when the simulation included the effects of extreme weather, especially the hotter temperatures expected, about 81 percent of all U.S. grape wine growing areas and almost 50 percent of the areas that produce the highest quality of the grapes are lost.
May 6, 06: Already experiencing melting glaciers and a receding snowline, the Everest region of Nepal has seen some unusual weather patterns these past few months.
. . A snow-free winter, followed by unexpected snow storms in the second week of March --when spring had already begun-- has left Sherpas baffled. Another unexpected storm in April, which lasted three days, surprised the locals further still. The following morning, on 21 April, debris from a major ice collapse killed three Sherpa climbers and injured more than a dozen others in the Khumbu Ice Fall area. "This accident had much to do with the sudden change in the weather patterns in the Everest region. Perhaps this is what global warming is all about."
May 2, 06: Glaciers covering China's Qinghai-Tibet plateau are shrinking by 7% a year due to global warming and the environmental consequences may be dire, Xinhua news agency reported.
. . Rising temperatures that have accelerated the melting of glaciers across the "roof of the world" will eventually turn tundra that spans Tibet and surrounding high country into desert, the agency quoted Professor Dong Guangrong with the Chinese Academy of Sciences as saying.
. . Dong warned the deterioration of the plateau may trigger more droughts and increase sandstorms that lash western and northern China. He reached his conclusions after analyzing four decades of data from China's 681 weather stations.
. . The Qinghai-Tibet plateau covers 2.5 million square km (0.96 million square miles) --about a quarter of China's land surface-- at an average altitude of 4,000 meters (13,000 ft) above sea level.
. . Dust and sandstorms are a growing problem, particularly in North China, due to deforestation, drought and the environmental depredations of China's breakneck economic growth.
Apr 23, 06: Unlike the Antarctic continent spread around the south pole, the Arctic has no formal international treaty to regulate activities. And while howling winds, drifting icebergs and months of freezing darkness kept prospecters at bay, there was little activity to regulate. But as global warming thaws the ocean's icy layer, oil giants, shipping companies and even the odd enterprising tourist operator are casting their eyes towards the high north.
. . Last August, a Russian vessel, the Akademik Fyodorov, became the first to reach the north pole without an icebreaker --one of seven ships to make it to the top of the world last year. If the ice continues to thin and shrink as expected, then within a few decades, cruise liners, container ships and tankers could all head over the pole, shaving thousands of miles off their voyages across the globe.
. . The biggest boom could be oil and gas. The US Geological Survey surprised some experts when it declared that a quarter of the world's undiscovered reserves lay under the Arctic Ocean. As the ice retreats, oil companies are scrambling to open a new frontier.
. . The jewel in the Arctic energy crown is the Shtokman field, also in the Barents Sea. Some 300 miles off the Russian Arctic coast and 10 times the size of Snow White, it is the largest offshore gas reservoir in the world. The Russian energy giant Gazprom is poised to announce partnerships with other companies to drill up to 120 wells.
. . That interest is already turning up the diplomatic heat, and there are a growing number of territorial disputes between the eight countries with a claim to the Arctic: Russia, the US, Canada, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Iceland. A dispute between the US and Canada over rights to shipping lanes through the North-West Passage flared up again this year, with Canada promising to step up its military presence to protect what it regards as its territory and the US sees as international waters.
. . 1,000 sq miles of Arctic tundra on Alaska's North Slope is home to one of the world's largest industrial complexes, with 28 oil production plants, 4,800 exploration and production wells, 1,800 miles of pipes and 500 miles of roads.
. . The Arctic is home to hundreds of species of mammals, birds and fish found in few, if any, other places on Earth. Polar bears, musk oxen and caribou are joined each summer by snowy owls, ducks and swans that migrate there to nest. Some of the hardiest organisms discovered live within the ice, helping to make the region a unique ecosystem.
. . Global warming has lead to an increase in melting of Arctic sea ice and in one study last year, scientists predicted that 4m sq miles of permafrost could shrink to 400,000 sq miles by 2100, disrupting ocean currents, releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and causing havoc to roads and buildings across Canada, Alaska and Russia.
. . "It's an unfortunate fact of life that the climactically benign and politically stable areas are running out of oil and gas", Mr Evers said. "So in politically stable areas like the Arctic, there's going to be a substantial amount of interest."
. . Environmental campaigners are viewing the creeping development of the Arctic with mounting concern. Norway announced last month that it will limit drilling in some areas to protect fragile ecosystems. The 31-mile exclusion zone in the Barents Sea has large supplies of fish. But the embargo expires in 2010 and drilling elsewhere is being stepped up, with the granting of 13 oil and gas licences to 17 companies.
. . Stephanie Tumore, a climate campaigner with Greenpeace, said: "Haven't we learnt anything? Why are we going looking for more fossil fuels when what's happening in polar regions just proves that it is devastating and we cannot continue to do that?"
. . Global warming has lead to an increase in melting of Arctic sea ice, and in one study last year, scientists predicted that 4 million sq miles of permafrost could shrink to 400,000 sq miles by 2100, disrupting ocean currents, releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and causing havoc to roads and buildings across Canada, Alaska and Russia.
. . The melting of Arctic sea ice has made the region more accessible to shipping, and oil and gas companies keen to prospect for natural resources. Some estimates suggest that one quarter of the planet's untapped fossil fuels, including 375bn barrels of oil, lie beneath the Arctic, and industry experts talk of a "black gold rush" as companies clamour to exploit the reserves. Off Norway's north coast, the state oil company, Statoil, is engaged in project Snow White, which workers believe will generate £34bn in liquefied natural gas over the next 30 years.
. . Spillages and leaks add to the environmental damage caused by oil extraction and, according to the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), between 1996 and 2004, there were 4,530 spills of more than 1.9m gallons of diesel, oil, acid and other chemicals along the Alaskan border alone. Last month, hundreds of thousands of litres of crude oil gushed into the Arctic Ocean from a corroded 30-year old BP pipeline. The NRDC says there is at least one leak from an oilfield or pipeline every day.
Apr 19, 06: Rivers as big as the Thames in England that may connect sub-glacial lakes have been found deep under the Antarctic ice, scientists said. British researchers who discovered the plumbing system that moves water hundreds of km said it challenges the notion that the lakes under the Antarctic ice evolved independently and could support ancient life. "But this new data shows that, every so often, the lakes beneath the ice pop off like champagne corks, releasing floods that travel very long distances."
. . Scientists had plans to drill through the ice to take samples from the lakes but were worried about contaminating them with new microbes. Any attempts to drill into one body of water risks contaminating others. The US space agency (Nasa) and the Russian academy of sciences are planning to break through the ice to sample the water for life. "We had thought of these lakes as isolated biological laboratories. Now we are going to have to think again", Wingham added.
. . About 150 sub-glacial lakes have been discovered in Antarctica but researchers believe there could be thousands. Lake Vostok, at 15-20 million years old, is thought to be the biggest & most ancient --250km long, 40km wide and 400m deep.
. . "The lakes are like a set of beads on a string, where the lakes are the beads connected by a string or river of water." The scientists believe when the pressure in one of the lakes increases, a flood fills the next bead down the string. But they do not know whether the flow of water which melts ice causes a chain reaction down the string.
. . The scientists believe that every so often there are large flows of water from one lake to another. Most of the time there is very little discharge, but if a lake over pressurizes, a flood occurs that forces the water along the river to the next lake. "You could think of these things as flushing like lavatories every now and again. Currently, we don't know how full Lake Vostok is or the length of time it will take to fill", said Professor Siegert. "It might be thousands or even tens of thousands of years. Whether such a discharge could affect the ocean circulation around Antarctica is an open question at this stage." He said any discharge would probably take place over a period of months and would change sea level by less than a centimeter. [for one area, that's a huge amount!]
. . Researchers discovered small changes in the heights of surface ice overlying subglacial lakes. As one region lowered by about 3 meters, two others, located some 300km away, rose by almost a meter.
. . The researchers believe this teeter-totter effect can be explained by the transfer of nearly half a cubic mile of water from one lake to two subglacial lakes over a 16-month period. Once this process is set in motion, it triggers a positive feedback loop where flowing water melts the ice and carves out larger channels, allowing more water to flow.
. . Some of these discharges might even carry lake water all the way to the coast of Antarctica, where it gets dumped into the ocean, the researchers speculate. Such discharges could explain strange landscape features in East and West Antarctica that appear to have been sculpted by flowing water.
Apr 19, 06: Even in one of the remotest, coldest and most inhospitable parts of Canada's High Arctic, you cannot escape the signs of global warming. Polar bears hang around on land longer than they used to, waiting for ice to freeze. The eternal night which blankets the region for three months is less dark, thanks to warmer air reflecting more sunlight from the south. Animal species that the local Inuit aboriginal population had never heard of are now appearing.
. . The entire life of the Inuit --formerly called Eskimos-- is based on the cold. A rapid increase in temperatures could be cataclysmic as prey disappears and ice becomes treacherous. Buildings in the port town of Tuktoyaktuk [I love to say that! Try it.] --on the Arctic Ocean, close to Canada's northern border with Alaska-- are crumbling into the sea as the permafrost dissolves. Remote aboriginal communities are in distress because winter ice roads, needed to truck in supplies, are turning to water.
. . All months are warmer by between 3 and 6 degrees C. The warmer temperatures mean there is increased moisture in the air, which results in more frequent storms. "We're seeing more snowfall, not just blowing snow. In the olden days it might rain just once during the summer. Now it happens all the time. It's awful", said Mullin.
. . In December, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC), which represents all northern aboriginals, launched a legal petition against the United States, claiming that its greenhouse gas emissions harmed Inuit human rights.
. . "When I hear people say there is no such thing as global warming, I find them totally appalling."
Apr, 06: Rignot partnered with Pannir Kanagaratnam of the U of Kansas to look at satellite data on Greenland's glaciers. New satellites and new techniques allowed the two to figure out how fast the glaciers were moving, thinning and even what the bedrock beneath them looked like. Based on this data, the researchers found that the glaciers were traveling faster than anyone had predicted. They also determined that even more northerly glaciers were on the move and that in just 10 years the amount of fresh water lost by all the glaciers had more than doubled from 90 cubic kilometers of ice loss a year to 224 cubic kilometers. "The amount of water Los Angeles uses over one year is about one cubic kilometer", Rignot points out. "Two hundred cubic kilometers is a lot of fresh water."
. . Current climate models do not take into account glacial flow and therefore underestimate the impact of glacial melt and the calving of ice flows. With the higher glacier speeds in mind, they calculate that Greenland currently contributes 0.57 millimeter of ocean level rise every year out of a total of three mm.
. . But Greenland contains an ice sheet that covers 1.7 million square kms --an area nearly the size of Mexico-- and is as much as three km thick in places. If it all melted, it would raise the world's oceans by seven meters, though that is not likely to happen anytime soon. "The southern half of Greenland is reacting to what we think is climate warming", Rignot adds. "The northern half is waiting, but I don't think it's going to take long."
Apr 18, 06: A million-year-old ice sample drilled from 3 km under the Antarctic and unveiled in Tokyo today could yield vital clues on climate change, Japanese scientists said.
. . Researchers, showing off the cylindrical samples of what they said was the oldest ice ever to be retrieved, said studying air trapped inside "core" samples taken from various depths under ground could also help predict how the Earth's weather patterns will change in the future.
. . The Japanese team will look farther into the past and are also hoping the ice samples will yield opportunities to study the evolution of tiny organisms trapped in the ice. "The environment there is very harsh, with temperatures about minus 45 degrees, so we don't know if life can be sustained", Motoyama said. "But we believe we will find organisms."
Apr 3, 06: Europe's Alps could lose three-quarters of their glaciers to climate change during the coming century. That is the conclusion of new research from the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) in Zurich. Scientists base their conclusion on forecasts of temperature and precipitation changes in a new computer model of Alpine glaciation. Glaciers are crucial in providing fresh drinking water, and are also key for tourism, irrigation and hydro-power.
. . There is already strong evidence of a major ongoing melt. In the 1850s, according to WGMS data presented at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) annual meeting in Vienna, nearly 4,474 sq km of the Alps were glaciated. By the 1970s, the area covered had fallen to just under 2,903 sq km, and in 2000, it was down to 2,272 sq km.
. . "The summer temperature increase is 3C, which is very bad for glaciers, and the annual precipitation increases, which creates a bit better conditions for glaciers. You get a rise of 340m in the level that enables glaciation." Across the Alps, this would mean a loss of 75% in the glaciated area.
Apr 3, 06: Penguins and other Antarctic seabirds are nesting and laying their eggs later than they did 50 years ago, a response, scientists say, to global climate change. While the effects of climate change on animal behavior have been well documented in the Northern Hemisphere, the effects are less well known south of the equator. In North America and Europe, cold-weather animals are generally shifting northward as the Arctic warms and the ice cap shrinks.
. . They compiled data for Antarctic seabird nesting from 1950 to 2004. It reveals that nine species of birds are, on average, arriving nine days later to nest. The birds are also laying their eggs two days later.
. . This runs opposite to shifts in avian habits in the Northern Hemisphere, where earlier springs and increased food availability has led to birds migrating and laying eggs earlier in the season.
. . In Antarctica, the delay appears to be tied to sea ice. These changes have been associated with a decline in abundances of krill and other marine organisms that are food resources for most Antarctic seabirds. This may partly explain the delay in seabirds' arrival and laying dates, the researchers say, since seabirds need more time to build up the reserves necessary for breeding.
Mar 31, 06: In the winter sky over Antarctica, scientists have detected a vast cap of steadily warming air, in the first sign that record levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may be trapping heat above the ice sheets of the South Pole.
. . The temperature of the winter air over Antarctica has been rising at a rate three times faster than the world as a whole, the researchers reported. It was the first time anyone had been able to collate all the high-altitude atmosphere readings.
. . As levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere worldwide rise to levels not seen for a million years, the ice sheets of Antarctica —-the world's largest reservoir of fresh water-— are shrinking faster than new snow can fall.
. . When the researchers examined the data, they not only saw evidence of a winter season warming throughout the troposphere, but a cooling in the stratosphere above —-a layering effect that researchers had predicted as a consequence of greenhouse warming.
. . The new finding about Antarctic warming is particularly important, several experts said, because until now researchers had only partial —-and often conflicting-— temperature readings from a few surface stations.
. . Climate experts were especially surprised that the consistent warming trend detected in the atmosphere had no apparent effect on surface temperatures. Some wondered whether powerful polar winds, which have progressively strengthened during the last 40 years, might be partly responsible.
Mar 9, 06: There is a net loss of ice to the ocean from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, a study has found. The interior is gaining mass due to increased snowfall, but the edges are getting thinner.
. . "The study indicates that the contribution of the ice sheets to sea-level rise during the decade studied was much smaller than expected, just two percent of the recent increase of nearly three millimeters a year." ... "Current estimates of the other major sources of sea-level rise --expansion of the ocean by warming temperatures and runoff from low-latitude glaciers-- do not make up the difference, so we have a mystery on our hands as to where the water is coming from."
. . "Maybe the story there is that the moisture is never being carried on to the continent. You have got to get that packet of warmer air to the ice sheet in the first place."
Mar 9, 06: Ice on dozens of lakes in Maine and four other states is melting earlier in the year than in decades past, according to a new analysis. The study, "On Thin Ice: The Melting of an American Pastime", examined the records of ice cover on more than 50 lakes in Maine, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York and Alaska. In Maine, the study found that Moosehead Lake, the state's largest body of water, is now thawing eight days earlier than its historic average based on 149 years of records. Damariscotta Lake is clearing 12 days earlier than in the past, and Rangeley Lake is thawing five days earlier.
Mar 2, 06: Joining the growing list of places on this planet that are melting, Antarctica is losing some 36 cubic miles of ice every year, scientists said today. For comparison, Los Angeles consumes roughly 1 cubic mile of fresh water a year. Antarctica is twice as large as Australia. The ice sheet, which covers about 98% of the continent, has an average thickness of about 1.1 km.
. . The south polar region holds 90% of Earth’s ice and 70% of the total fresh water on the planet, so any significant pace of melting there is important and could contribute to an already rising sea. Other studies have documented rapid melting, unprecedented in modern times, in Greenland and around the North Pole. And rapid melting of individual glaciers has been noted in Antarctica.
. . For now, the newly measured melting might seem like a small quantity. The loss of ice in Antarctica amounts to about 0.4 millimeters of global sea rise annually, with a margin of error of 0.2 millimeters, the study concludes.
. . Computer models run in 2001 predicted Antarctica would gain ice during the 21st century due to increased precipitation in a warming climate. But the new study, based on satellite measurements between 2002 and 2005, shows the opposite.
Feb 16, 06: US conservation groups have begun a new legal case aimed at forcing government action on climate change. They have filed a petition with the UN arguing that Waterton-Glacier Peace Park, a protected area, is being damaged by rising temperatures. Similar actions have been lodged over sites in the Himalayas and Andes.
. . The case, filed on the first anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol's entry into force, could compel the US to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Petitioners argue that the US, as a signatory to the UN World Heritage Convention, has a legal duty to protect areas with World Heritage status, including Waterton-Glacier. Straddling the US-Canada border where the province of Alberta meets the state of Montana, Waterton-Glacier was the first region in the world to be declared an International Peace Park.
. . Conservation groups argue that climate change threatens to have four major impacts on the park:
. . * average summer temperatures have increased 1.66C between 1910 and 1980, and precipitation levels have decreased by as much as 20%
. . * the loss of more than 80% of the park's glaciers is the result of climate change
. . * since 1850, the area covered by glaciers in the park has decreased by 73% and continues to decrease
. . * loss of the glaciers will reduce stream flow
. . * climate change threatens mountain and prairie species which live in the region, through a reduction in water and other mechanisms
Feb 16, 06: Greenland's glaciers are sliding towards the sea much faster than previously believed, scientists have told a conference in St Louis, US. It was thought the entire Greenland ice sheet could melt in about 1,000 years, but the latest evidence suggests that could happen much sooner. It implies that sea levels will rise much faster as well. The comprehensive analysis found that the amount of ice dumped into the Atlantic Ocean has doubled in the last five years. If the Greenland ice sheet melted completely, it would raise global sea levels by about 7m.
Feb 16, 06: Greenland's glaciers are dumping twice as much ice into the Atlantic Ocean now as five years ago because glaciers are moving and melting more quickly, researchers said. This could mean oceans will rise even faster than forecast, and rising surface air temperatures appear to be to blame, they report.
. . "This change, combined with increased melting, suggests that existing estimates of future sea level rise are too low." "At 1.7 million square km (656,000 square miles), up to 3 km (nearly two miles) thick and a little smaller than Mexico, the Greenland Ice Sheet would raise global sea level by about 7 meters (22 feet) if it melted completely."
. . Since 1996, southeast Greenland's outlet glaciers have been flowing more quickly and since 2000 glaciers farther north have also sped up. Rignot and Kanagaratnam found that ice loss due to glacier flow has increased from 12 cubic miles of ice loss per year in 1996 to 36 cubic miles of ice loss per year in 2005.
Feb 8, 06: Rising temperatures and a decline in the amount of snow in the Rocky Mountains have slowed the release of carbon dioxide, the main gas blamed for global warming, from forest soil, researchers said. They described it as a "serendipitous effect".
. . Trees soak up CO2 as they grow but release it when they die and rot. Monson and his team showed that declining snow linked to warming temperatures slows the release of CO2 from microbes in the soil which are very sensitive to temperature change during the winter.
. . They took millions of CO2 readings between 1998 to 2004 and noticed that the deeper the snowpack was the more CO2 they noticed leaving the forest. "But with a shallow snow pack, the soil is colder and they don't emit as much."
. . Less snow is not generally considered good news for forests because it makes trees more susceptible to fire and disease and limits how much CO2 they take up in the summer. "While winter CO2 emissions from forest soils have slowed, the lack of winter moisture is stressing the trees during the spring and summer and inhibiting the much larger amount of CO2 they absorb during their growing season." But he added that if the thinner snowpack is coupled with summer rains more CO2 could potentially be soaked up than is released.
. . Snowpack in areas of the Rocky Mountains and other ranges in the western United States and Europe has dropped by 50 to 75% in recent decades.
Feb 8, 06: Glaciers in Switzerland again retreated last year, a study showed on Wednesday, in a sign global warming is taking its toll on one of the country's scenic features. The Trift glacier in the canton of Berne had receded 216 meters in one year alone, being hardest hit by rising temperatures. Out of 91 glaciers being observed, 84 had retreated. Only seven had remained unchanged.
. . Not only did glaciers lose length, their volume also diminished. The height of three glaciers closely studied in the survey had shrunk by between 70 cm and 1.7 meters.
Feb 8, 06: Sea levels would have risen higher and ocean temperatures would have been warmer in the 20th century if the Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia had not erupted in 1883, scientists said. The impact of the eruption that spewed molten rock and sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere was felt for decades --much longer than previously thought.
. . Volcanoes release aerosols and dust that block sunlight and cause the ocean surface to cool which can offset, at least temporarily, sea level rises caused by increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
. . The study also included more recent eruptions including Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, which was on a similar scale to Krakatoa. But the effect of Pinatubo on ocean temperatures was much smaller because of the impact of greenhouse gases which were much higher in 1991 than in 1883.
Feb 6, 06: Scientists painted a gloomy picture of the effects of global warming on the Arctic, warning of melting ocean ice, rising oceans, thawed permafrost and forests susceptible to bugs and fire. "A lot of the stories you read make it sound like there's uncertainty", said Jonathan Overpeck, a professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona. "There's not uncertainty." Deborah Williams, a conference organizer and former director of the Alaska Conservation Foundation, said "We are the Paul Revere of global warming." . "What we didn't predict is that it would be so dramatic", Overpeck said.
. . Scientists predict the summertime Arctic could be ice free before the end of the century, opening up northern sea routes but threatening the existence of polar bears, a marine mammal that depends on sea ice to live. Other scientists ticked off the effects of warming on fish, forests and tundra. The warming lowers the water available to white spruce, black spruce and birch. "The warmer it is, the less the trees grow", Juday said. Warming also makes them more susceptible to fire and insects. Shrubs have thrived in the greater warmth and in turn accelerate warming. Like open water in the ocean, shrubs darken what otherwise would be a mostly white, reflective snow-covered environment, Sturm said.
. . If warming trends continue, Overpeck said, the globe eventually will get a nasty message from the Arctic: a rise in sea levels. Higher oceans will flow into low-lying parts of the world such as New Orleans, making recovery in that hurricane-ravaged city moot. "It's hard to imagine why [ they want] to rebuild if we're going to allow global warming", Overpeck said.
Feb 3, 06: Two major glaciers in Greenland have recently begun to flow and break up more quickly under the onslaught of global warming, a new study said, raising the specter of millions drowning from rising sea levels. The report said the 2 glaciers had doubled their rate of flow to the ocean over the past two years after steady movement during the 1990s.
. . This spurt meant that current environmental models of the rate of retreat had underestimated the problem. Greenland's giant ice sheet could add seven meters to the height of the world's oceans if it disappears. It seems likely that other Greenland outlets will undergo similar changes, the study said.
. . The report followed a warning earlier this week from Britain's Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research --a branch of the Meteorological Office-- that the Greenland ice sheet could be disappearing faster than previously thought.
. . Scientists predict that global average temperatures will rise by between one and six degrees Celsius this century unless urgent action is taken now to cap and reduce carbon emissions. The ice sheet contains one-tenth of the world's freshwater reserves. Even a rise of three degrees could result in cataclysmic species loss, melting polar icecaps raising sea levels by many meters and wholesale famine and disease. Greenland is only part of the picture, and there is also evidence of local warming and melting on the giant Western Antarctic ice sheet.
. . Scientists said the world had to halt greenhouse gas emissions and reverse them within two decades or watch the planet spiralling toward destruction.
A puzzling general pattern, seen the past three decades, persisted: The most significant warming occurred in the Arctic, where the ice cap is shrinking at an alarming pace. Since November 1978, the Arctic atmosphere has warmed seven times faster than the average warming trend over the southern two-thirds of the globe, based on data from NOAA satellites. "It just doesn't look like global warming is very global."
. . Scientists agree the planet is warming. Ground in the Northern Hemisphere that's been frozen since the last Ice Age is melting and collapsing. Over the past 27 years, since the first temperature-sensing satellite was launched, the overall global temperature has risen 0.63 degrees Fahrenheit, while the hike in the Arctic has been 2.1 degrees. "The computer models consistently predict that global warming due to increasing greenhouse gases should show up as strong warming in the tropics", Christy said. Yet the tropical atmosphere has warmed by only about 0.3 degrees F in 27 years.
Jan 26, 06: Global warming will cause sea levels to rise between 28 cm to 34 centimeters (11 inches) by the end of the century, causing increased flooding and coastal erosion, according to a new study by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, the Australian government main research body. The study said global warming was expected to further heat up the world's oceans and cause glaciers in the Himalayas and ice sheets in Greenland to melt.
. . Clive Wilkinson, coordinator of the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, a nongovernment group that follows closely developments on rising seas, said the findings were in line with what many scientists have predicted about global warming. "It fits a pattern that everyone is coming up with", Wilkinson said. "It means we are in real trouble. If you add another meter (yard) over coral reefs, it won't notice it. But the rising water would flood any low-lying areas. Coral island like Tuvalu, Maldives and Kiribati will become uninhabitable."
. . By examining tidal data, the study said sea levels rose by 19.5 cm between 1870 and 2004. The increases accelerated with time, averaging 1.7 mm a year in the 20th century and 1.8 mm in the past 50 years.
. . In Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea in the southwest Pacific, increased sea levels have forced hundreds of islanders to abandon vulnerable coastal homes for higher ground.
Jan 13, 06: A group of Canadian aboriginal leaders said today their northern communities are in a state of emergency because abnormally mild temperatures have hindered construction of vital winter roads. "We were told all along that global warming is going to affect our roads and now we see that today." Without the winter roads, all essential goods have to be flown into the region. The roads can only be built on ice that is at least 71 centimeters (28 inches) thick. It is still only 20 cm (8 inches) thick in some areas.
Dec 21, 05: Melting permafrost is damaging roads and buildings in Alaska and Russia and threatens to get much worse as the planet grows warmer, researchers said this week. Up to 90% of the permafrost at the surface of the Northern Hemisphere could melt by the end of this century, leaving gaping holes in the ground and collapsed structures, roads and railways in northern regions.
. . In what scientists predict to be a vicious cycle, the thaw will release more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, further exacerbating global warming. The meltdown of northern soil is already underway. Other teams have noted sunken railways, damaged structures and increased numbers of rock-falls at high elevations.
. . Permafrost is soil that remains frozen through summer. Even in regions where a surface "active layer" thaws seasonally, a deep layer of permafrost exists below and has been frozen since the last Ice Age. Permafrost covers about a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere's land area.
. . The top 3 meters or more of this perennially frozen soil could be far reduced in the next few decades, altering ecosystems and causing damage across Canada, Alaska, and Russia, according to new computer simulations from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). By 2050, the topmost layer of permafrost could be gone across more than half this region, with 90% of it melted by 2100.
. . "Thawing permafrost could send considerable amounts of water to the oceans." Water runoff to the Arctic has increased about 7% since the 1930s, Slater said. That could jump by up to 28% by the end of the century depending on the extent of greenhouse gas emissions which, according to a report today, are on the rise in the United States, which refuses to agree to an international plan to cut the output.
. . The new work is the first to project future change in permafrost based on a global model that takes into account changes in the atmosphere, ocean, on land, and with sea ice and the overall effects on freezing and thawing in the soil.
. . The researchers also estimate that permafrost holds up to 30% of the world's carbon. As the ground melts, it could put more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere than what is produced by burning fossil fuels. "If the permafrost does thaw, as our model predicts, it could have a major influence on climate", Lawrence said.
Dec 7, 05: Two of Greenland's largest glaciers are retreating at an alarming pace, scientists said. One of the glaciers, Kangerdlugssuaq, is currently moving about 15km a year compared to 5 a year in 2001.
. . "It's quite a staggering rate of increase", Hamilton said at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting. Glaciers play a major role in discharging water into oceans. Sea levels have swelled globally an estimated 10 to 20 cm during the past century. Melting of Greenland ice and calving of icebergs from glaciers is responsible for about 7% of the annual rise.
. . Meanwhile, one of the fastest melting glaciers in North America has reached the halfway point of disintegration and will continue retreat for another two decades. Alaska's Columbia Glacier —-about the size of Los Angeles—- has shrunk 14 kms since the 1980s. It is expected to lose an additional 14 kms in the next 15 to 20 years before the bed of the glacier rises above sea level.
. . The glacier, which moves about 25 meters a day, currently releases about 2 cubic miles of ice every year into the Prince William Sound on the south coast of Alaska. The glacier, which is up to 3,000 feet thick, has thinned up to 1,300 feet in some places in the last two decades.
Dec 8, 05: The climate is already changing in the Arctic, where an international study last year found average winter temperatures have increased as much as 7 degrees over 50 years. Permafrost is thawing, and the extent of Arctic Sea ice is shrinking, imperiling polar bears and other animals.
. . The warming threatens "the destruction of the hunting and food-gathering culture of the Inuit in this century", said Paul Crowley of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, representing 155,000 Inuit of Canada, Greenland, Russia and the United States.
. . The northern natives — 63 petitioners are named from all Inuit regions — seek a declaration that their human rights are being violated, putting political pressure on the U.S. government to reduce emissions.
. . Canadian Environment Minister Stephane Dion, looking for a compromise route that would draw the United States into the emission-controls regime, this week proposed a plan for "discussions to explore and analyze approaches for long-term cooperative action to address climate change", with a deadline for agreement by 2008.
. . But the Bush administration rejected the Canadian bid.
. . In October, NASA climatologists projected from thousands of temperature readings that 2005 would end as the warmest year globally since records were first kept in the mid-19th century.
Nov 20, 05: The Arctic Circle: In recent years, snows have failed to fall as normal. Evidence that humans are pushing up global temperatures is growing ever stronger, ranging from a shrinking of ice in the Arctic to a warming of the Indian Ocean.
. . The scientific panel that advises the United Nations looks likely to issue sterner warnings in its next report in 2007 that emissions of heat-trapping gases from power plants, factories and cars are disrupting the climate.
. . Mounting conviction among experts may add pressure on governments, who next meet for climate talks in Montreal, Canada, from November 28 to December 9, to do more about a problem that could cost trillions of dollars to fix in coming decades. The 10,000 delegates to the Montreal talks will discuss how to fight climate change, especially after 2012 when the UN Kyoto Protocol on curbing greenhouse gas emissions runs out.
. . Reindeer, traditionally herded by Sami people -- who live in Russia, Finland, Sweden and Norway -- were vulnerable when winter snows did not fall. Lack of snow also makes it hard for reindeer to feed on lichen because the plants can get covered by sharp ice, which cuts their soft muzzles. Around Harstad, less bone-chilling winters have helped some pests to thrive, like beetles and worms that destroy Arctic forests. In northern Russia, frogs have been spotted more often on the tundra and some birds are not even bothering to migrate.
. . In September, polar ice contracted to its smallest size in at least a century, according to measurements by space agency
NASA and the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center. IPCC reports say climate change might bring more powerful hurricanes, heatwaves, droughts and raise sea levels by almost a meter (3 ft) by 2100.
. . Environmentalists say that any suggestion that humans are causing warming "beyond a reasonable doubt" might spur lawsuits against nations accused of doing too little. Environmentalists often single out the United States and Australia as laggards. Those two countries are the main rich nations outside Kyoto, which demands cuts in emissions of 5% below 1990 levels by 2008 to 2012. Nations will have to curb fossil fuel use and shift to clean energy like wind or solar power.
. . There is growing evidence that time is of the essence.
Nov 17, 05: A new study reveals one of the largest glaciers in Greenland is shrinking and speeding to the sea faster than scientists expected. If it continues, Greenland itself could become much smaller during this century and global seas could rise as much as a meter. Greenland could shrink by several tens of percent this century.
. . Greenland is the world's largest island, covering an area more than three times the size of Texas. Some 81% of it is permanently capped by ice. It is extremely unlikely that all of the ice sheet will disappear.
. . Since the 1970s, the front of Helheim glacier stayed in the same place. Then it began retreating rapidly, moving back 4.5 miles from 2001 through this past summer. It has also grown thinner, from top to bottom, by more than 130 feet since 2001. And over these past four years, its trek to the sea has sped up from about 70 feet per day to nearly 110.
. . As the glacier's front retreats, its like a dam has been removed, and the inland portion can move more swiftly.
. . If the Helheim glacier thins beyond a critical point, it would simply float and rapidly disintegrate. In fact, the changes seen since 2001 were probably underway long before then but just not noticed. "Glaciers may have been thinning for over a decade", Howat said. "But it's only in the last few years that thinning reached a critical point and began drastically changing the glacier's dynamics."
. . The melting is driven by a warmer climate. Temperatures in Greenland have risen more than three degrees C in the last decade. Helheim's speedup has been noted 12.5 miles up the glacier. The center of the Greenland ice sheet is 150 miles inland. The ultimate outcome depends on how far inland the speed-up occurs.
. . Relatively conservative estimates from climate models suggest Greenland alone could contribute about 4 inches of sea-level rise in 21st Century.
Nov 8, 05: Scientists have a released new numbers that illustrate the change in New England winters. The total number of days of ice on the region's rivers has declined significantly in recent decades and particularly in the spring. The study examined the number of days in which there is enough ice on a river to affect the flow. They looked at rivers in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.
. . The total winter days of ice-affected flow decreased by 20 days from 1936 to 2000 for the average of the nine rivers with records that long, with most of the decrease occurring since the 1960's. On average, the ice-out dates became earlier by 11 days from 1936 to 2000, again with most of the change occurring since the 1960's.
Nov 7, 05: Capping a 5-year-long saga of destruction, an iceberg about the size of the Hawaiian island of Maui has split into three pieces in the frigid Antarctic, scientists said. The larger iceberg, named B-15A, calved into three smaller icebergs — B-15M, B-15N and B-15P. The last split makes the 15th time that a portion of B-15 has broken off, or calved, since the first calving event on May 30, 2000.
Oct 24, 05: Biological activity in some Arctic lakes has ratcheted up dramatically over the past 150 years as a result of global warming, according to a new study.In six lakes, researchers dug deep into the sediment to measure the amount "chlorophyll-a", the main pigment involved in photosynthesis. When plants convert sunlight to energy, they make chlorophyll-a.
. . The amount of chlorophyll-a is two to five times higher in recent times compared to ancient sediment, said Neal Michelutti of the University of Alberta. "These recent increases really stand out because the chlorophyll-a concentrations have showed very little variability over the past several thousand years." But these increases have occurred within the last 150 years.
. . The new study, announced last week, is one of the first to show effects of the melting on plant production. "Lakes in the Arctic have extremely short growing seasons –-typically they remain ice-covered for up to 10 months of the year", Michelutti explained. "A difference of only a few weeks [in the growing season] can have a huge impact biologically." Longer growing seasons create more plant food for Arctic animals.
. . "The timing of these changes corresponds to the start of the Industrial Revolution and when humans first started having a major impact on global atmospheric chemistry." The result is a dramatic change in the way that entire ecosystems function."
Oct 22, 05: An alarming rise in temperature in the Southern Ocean threatens seals, whales and penguins as well as krill, which play a crucial role in the food chain.
. . The ocean west of the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by more than a degree since the 1960s --contradicting the results of computer models. Sea animals in the region are highly sensitive to changes in temperature. UK scientists predict whole populations and species could disappear from the region as a result of further warming. At about 2C, Antarctic scallops lose the ability to swim and at around 4-5C, clams lose the ability to burrow into the seabed.
. . Krill is considered a keystone species, an organism upon which many others in the region depend; but it is already under pressure.
. . A study published last year showed krill numbers had fallen by 80% since the 1970s and experts linked the collapse to shrinking sea ice (the crustacean feeds on algae under the ice).
. . "Air temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula have gone up by three degrees in the last 50 years or so and none of the computer models show that either", Professor Peck said. The amount of salt in the top layer of water has also increased. This is important as dissolved salt lowers the freezing point of ice. This makes it more difficult for sea ice to form in winter.
. . Ice is a powerful reflector of sunlight, so reducing its area at the poles could increase the warming effect both on polar regions and globally.
. . The amount of salt in the top layer of water has also increased. This is important as dissolved salt lowers the freezing point of ice. This makes it more difficult for sea ice to form in winter.
Oct 21, 05: Greenland's ice-cap has thickened slightly in recent years despite wide predictions of a thaw triggered by global warming, a team of scientists said.
. . The 3,000-meter (9,842-feet) thick ice-cap is a key concern in debates about climate change because a total melt would raise world sea levels by about 7 meters. And a runaway thaw might slow the Gulf Stream that keeps the North Atlantic region warm.
. . But satellite measurements showed that more snowfall was falling and thickening the ice-cap, especially at high altitudes.
. . Glaciers at sea level have been retreating fast because of a warming climate, making many other scientists believe the entire ice-cap was thinning. "The overall ice thickness changes are ... approximately plus 5 cms (1.9 inches) a year or 54 cms (21.26 inches) over 11 years."
. . The scientists said that the thickening of the ice-cap might be offset by a melting of glaciers around the fringes of Greenland. Satellite data was not good enough to measure the melt nearer sea level.
Oct 19, 05: World scientists are aiming to spell out in graphic detail the threat of flooding faced by millions of people from America to Asia as global warming melts the polar ice caps. A major coordinated study of the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets intends not only to lay the bald facts before world leaders but offer courses of action. The two year study, announced today by the International Council for Science (ICSU), will be the first coordinated probe in 50 years of the ice-bound ends of the earth under the onslaught of climate change. ICSU is a non-governmental organization whose members include the national science academies of 103 countries.
. . "Part of the reason scientists stay in the comfort zone is that they can always say: 'well we don't know enough. We are going to take away the uncertainty. If we come out of this and say 'we still don't know enough' then we will not have done our job."
. . A new United Nations' report states that up to 50 million people could become environmental refugees from floods and famines due to climate change within five years. The melting of the Arctic ice caps will dilute the salinity of the North Atlantic and slow down the life-giving Gulf Stream current that warms northern Europe.
Sept 29, 05: World sea levels could rise 30 centimeters (12 inches) by the end of the century and freak weather will become more common due to rapid global warming, according to a new study by a leading German research institute.
. . The Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg said computer models it had created showed the average global temperature could rise by as much as 4.1 Celsius by 2100, melting sea-ice in the Arctic. "Our climate models predict warmer and drier summers for Europe, with warmer and wetter winters."
. . The German researchers said that polar bears may no longer be able to wander from one ice floe to the other in the Arctic, while ships may increasingly choose to navigate through northern passages around Siberia and Canada.
. . The German study's release comes just days after U.S. scientists said the Arctic ice shelf had melted for the fourth straight year to its smallest area in a century, driven by rising temperatures.
Sept 20, 05: The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk for a fourth consecutive year, according to new data released by US scientists. They say that this month sees the lowest extent of ice cover for more than a century.
. . The Arctic climate varies naturally, but the researchers conclude that human-induced global warming is at least partially responsible. They warn the shrinkage could lead to even faster melting in coming years.
. . The new data show that on 19 September, the area covered by ice fell to 5.35 million sq km, the lowest recorded since 1978, when satellite records became available; it is now 20% less than the 1978-2000 average.
. . The current rate of shrinkage they calculate at 8% per decade; at this rate there may be no ice at all during the summer of 2060.
. . One of the limitations of these records is that they measure only the area of ice, rather than the volume. Professor Morris is involved in a new European satellite, Cryosat, which should be able to give definitive measurements of ice thickness as well as extent; its launch is scheduled for 8 October. But she also believes that the NSIDC data suggests an impact from the human-enhanced greenhouse effect. "These dark areas absorb a lot of the Sun's energy, much more than the ice; and what happens then is that the oceans start to warm up, and it becomes very difficult for ice to form during the following autumn and winter. "It looks like this is exactly what [we see] --a positive feedback effect, a 'tipping-point'." The idea behind tipping-points is that at some stage, the rate of global warming would accelerate, as rising temperatures break down natural restraints or trigger environmental changes which release further amounts of greenhouse gases.
. . Possible tipping-points include:
. . * the disappearance of sea ice leading to greater absorption of solar radiation.
. . * a switch from forests being net absorbers of carbon dioxide to net producers.
. . * melting permafrost, releasing trapped methane.
Aug 11, 05: The world's largest frozen peat bog is melting, which could speed the rate of global warming. The huge expanse of western Siberia is thawing for the first time since its formation, 11,000 years ago. The area, which is the size of France and Germany combined, could release billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This could potentially act as a tipping point, causing global warming to run-away, scientists fear.
. . The situation is an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming", researcher Sergei Kirpotin, of Tomsk State University, Russia. The whole western Siberian sub-Arctic region has started to thaw, he added, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years". Western Siberia has warmed faster than almost anywhere on the planet, with average temperatures increasing by about 3C in the last 40 years.
. . The 11,000-year-old bogs contain billions of tons of methane, most of which has been trapped in permafrost and deeper ice-like structures called clathrates. But if the bogs melt, there is a big risk their hefty methane load could be dumped into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming.
. . Scientists have reacted with alarm at the finding, warning that future global temperature predictions may have to be revised. "When you start messing around with these natural systems, you can end up in situations where it's unstoppable. There are no brakes you can apply. This is a big deal because you can't put the permafrost back once it's gone. The causal effect is human activity and it will ramp up temperatures even more than our emissions are doing."
. . The intergovernmental panel on climate change speculated in 2001 that global temperatures would rise between 1.4C and 5.8C between 1990 and 2100. However, these estimates only considered global warming sparked by known greenhouse gas emissions.
. . "These positive feedbacks with landmasses weren't known about then", Dr Viner said. "They had no idea how much they would add to global warming."
. . Dr Kirpotin told the magazine the situation was an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He added that the thaw had probably begun in the past three or four years.
. . Climate scientists yesterday reacted with alarm to the finding, and warned that predictions of future global temperatures would have to be revised upwards.
. . The west Siberian peat bog could hold some 70 billion tons of methane --a gas with 20 times the greenhouse effect as CO2. That's a quarter of all of the methane stored in the ground around the world.
. . The permafrost is likely to take many decades to thaw, so the methane locked within it will not be released into the atmosphere in one burst, said Stephen Sitch, a climate scientist at the Met Office's Hadley Centre in Exeter. But calculations by Dr Sitch and his colleagues show that even if methane seeped from the permafrost over the next 100 years, it would add around 700m tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere each year, roughly the same amount that is released annually from the world's wetlands and agriculture. It would effectively double atmospheric levels of the gas, leading to a 10% to 25% increase in global warming, he said.
. . Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, said the finding was a stark message to politicians to take concerted action on climate change. "If we don't take action very soon, we could unleash runaway global warming that will be beyond our control and it will lead to social, economic and environmental devastation worldwide", he said. "There's still time to take action, but not much.
Aug 3, 05: After a fresh analysis, scientists today warned again that global warming is threatening the stability of fragile glacier systems in the Antarctic and could lead to sea level increases worldwide. The Antarctic region where an ice shelf known as Larsen B is found is warming faster than any other place on the planet.
July 22, 05: Engineers are carrying out final checks on the ice monitoring craft CryoSat, in preparation for an autumn launch. The European Space Agency (Esa) satellite has gone through months of testing in Germany. Its main objective is to test the prediction that ice cover is diminishing due to global warming. Data gathered by submarines suggests that Arctic sea ice is thinning rapidly. The measurements carried out by the subs, in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the 1990s, by scientific vessels, suggest that Arctic sea ice has shrunk 40% in thickness.
. . CryoSat is the first of Esa's Earth Explorer missions, which focus on specific aspects of the planet's environment, in this case polar ice. Using a device known as a radar altimeter, it will measure fluctuations in land ice sheet height and sea-ice thickness to an accuracy that is only possible from space.
. . NASA's IceSat, launched in 2003, is already mapping the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which cover 10% of the Earth's land area, using a laser instrument. Data from both satellites should give scientists the clearest picture yet of what is happening to the world's total ice mass, and the consequences for climate, ocean currents and global sea levels.
June 9, 05: With sea ice shrinking, permafrost thawing and sea storms becoming more frequent, residents of a remote Eskimo village in Alaska are preparing to move their entire community to more solid ground within four years, officials said. The Inupiat village of Shishmaref has lost so much ground in recent years that it has become an internationally famous case study into the effects of global warming. It is likely to become the first U.S. community to move because of a warming climate. Residents of Newtok, a Yupik Eskimo village of 300, are also planning a similar move.
. . "The springtime is getting earlier each year. In the fall time, it's not as snowy as it used to be", said Stanley Tom, a liaison for the Newtok tribal council. Buildings are starting to slump in the thawing permafrost, and water levels are rising, Tom said.
June 4, 05: A new study finds 125 large lakes in the Arctic have vanished as temperatures rose over the past two decades. Many other lakes have shrunk. The lakes once sat atop permanently frozen soil called permafrost. Other studies have shown permafrost is melting around the world, causing low-lying ground to slump and rock to fall from mountains. "We think that climate warming is thawing the permafrost. It's like pulling the plug out of a bathtub."
. . The sudden draining could alter entire continental ecosystems, affecting birds and other wildlife that depend on the waterways, Smith and his colleagues say. Migratory birds count on the lakes during summer to feed their young. "The loss of these lakes would be an ecological disaster." As temperatures in the region continue to rise, as many experts predict, Smith expects lakes farther north to vanish, too.
. . Past research suggested that global warming would increase the amount of summer ice melt, and so there would be more lakes. Indeed, in the most northern parts of the study area, where permafrost remains, that's true, the new survey found. But overall, the surface area of lakes in the entire study area declined by 6%.
. . "We were totally surprised by our findings", Smith said. "We were expecting the lake area to have grown with climate change." Past research suggested that global warming would increase the amount of summer ice melt, and so there would be more lakes. Indeed, in the most northern parts of the study area, where permafrost remains, that's true, the new survey found. But overall, the surface area of lakes in the entire study area declined by 6%.
May 22, 05: Sea levels are currently rising at about 1.8mm per year, largely because ice sheets in polar regions are melting, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said. However, the panel also predicted that global warming would lead to an increase in snow fall over the Antarctic, because warmer air leads to more evaporation and precipitation. "The effect will only work for a finite period of time", Professor David said. "Eventually, the snow will start to melt." Also, the overall mass of Antarctica may be decreasing, because coastal melt may be happening faster than internal ice sheet gain.
May 20, 05: Part of the Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, slightly slowing rising ocean levels, according to a new report. In the past 10 years, the warmer temperatures over the eastern part of the Antarctic ice sheet have allowed that air to gather more moisture. Snow has been falling and causing part of the ice sheet to thicken —-slowing the rise of the sea level by a tiny amount.
. . "The interior of the east Antarctic ice sheet is the only large terrestrial ice body that is likely gaining mass rather than losing it", said Curt Davis, an engineering professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, who co-authored the report. "This study suggests that the interior areas of ice sheets also can play an important role. In particular, the east Antarctic ice sheet is the largest in the world and contains enough mass to change sea level by more than 50 meters."
. . The researchers used satellite images and elevation changes they saw in cored ice samples. They said their work pertains only to the interior, eastern part of the Antarctic ice sheet. Other parts of the sheet may be contributing to rises in sea level, not mitigating them.
. . May 19, 05: A Russian village was left baffled after its lake disappeared overnight. NTV television showed pictures of a giant muddy hole bathed in summer sun, while fishermen from the village of Bolotnikovo looked on disconsolately. "It is very dangerous. If a person had been in this disaster, he would have had almost no chance of survival."
A lot of carbon is sequestered in permafrost. If the planet grows warmer, this permafrost will melt and release the carbon into the atmosphere, where it will add to the heat-trapping blanket of greenhouse gases and fuel further warming.
May 17, 05: Global warming is shrinking glaciers on the Tibet side of
Mount Everest faster than ever, putting world water supplies at risk, Xinhua news agency said. Chinese scientists researching the world's tallest peak, which China refers to by its Tibetan name, "Qomolangma", had found clear evidence of increasing glacial melting.
. . Around 75% of the world's fresh water is stored in glacial ice [mostly polar], much of it in mountain areas, allowing for heavy winter rain and snowfall to be released gradually into river networks throughout the summer or dry months.
. . The Chinese scientists had found the melting point of one Everest glacier had risen around 50 meters (165 ft) in just two years, more than twice as fast as normal, while a huge, high-altitude ice cliff seen in 2002 had apparently disappeared.
. . Similar melting has been reported on Nepal's side of the mountain. The
United Nations warned in 2002 that more than 40 Himalayan glacial lakes were dangerously close to bursting, endangering thousands of people, because of global warming.
May 11, 05: A ski resort in Switzerland spread high-tech reflective foil over the tip of a glacier Tuesday to prevent it from melting this summer. As temperatures have gradually risen in recent years, the Andermatt resort has watched the annual disappearance of a strip of snow connecting a ski lift with the Gurschen glacier, 3 km above sea level.
. . A resort statement said that in the past 15 years, the Gurschen glacier has sunk about 20 meters, and without artificial help, it would be impossible to reach the runs at the beginning of the winter season.
Apr 22, 05: Most of the glaciers on the Antarctic peninsula are in headlong retreat because of climate change, a leading scientist said. An in-depth study using aerial photographs spanning the past half century of all 244 marine glaciers on the west side of the finger-like peninsular pointing up to South America found that 87% of them were in retreat --and the speed was rising.
. . "Regional warming is the strongest single factor in this retreat, and there is growing evidence that this is due to global warming", scientist David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) told a news conference. "The peninsula could end up looking like the Alps if the glaciers retreat far enough from the sea."
. . Fellow BAS researcher Alison Cook, who spent three years studying thousands of old aerial photographs, said they clearly showed a general glacial retreat which had accelerated sharply in the past five years. Widdowson Glacier, had been measured galloping backwards at an alarming 1.76 miles a year.
Apr 12, 05: Glacier National Park is expected to be devoid of its namesake ice formations by 2040, according to U.S. Geological Survey scientists. What's more, the Earth's northern hemisphere has been growing greener over the last two decades as temperatures rise, according to NASA satellite images.
. . For the region's forests, these changes could have serious consequences, said Steven Running, an ecology professor from the University of Montana. They include increased insect plagues and less snowpack, which acts as a wildfire-prevention blanket.
. . There's very little debate in Canada about warmer winters, drier summers and how they may be affecting forests, said Greg McKinnon, a Canadian Forest Service scientist who directs a national research effort on climate impacts on forests. In Edmonton, Alberta, where McKinnon works, aspen leaves are emerging three weeks earlier than a century ago, he said. In British Columbia, 17 million acres were chewed up last year by mountain pine beetles. Beetle populations are growing exponentially because they no longer are being kept in check by low temperatures, McKinnon said. The Canadian government believes the insects may establish themselves east of the Rocky Mountains, where they quickly could eat their way through the continent's vast boreal forest, McKinnon said.
. . "There's no speculation", he told loggers. "We're into uncharted territory. Not only are we not getting it under control, but the rate of increase is increasing."
Mar 28, 05: Black carbon, generated through the process of incomplete combustion, may have a significant warming impact on the Arctic", said Dorothy Koch of Columbia University and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Using computer models and information from NASA satellites, scientists located significant accumulations of black carbon soot in the Arctic region. This soot may contribute to the warming of a region that has already seen rapidly increasing temperatures in recent years.
. . Of the atmospheric soot found above the Arctic, about one-third comes from South Asia, which is estimated to have the largest industrial soot emissions in the world. Russia, Europe, and North America are also significant industrial producers of soot. About a third of all soot comes from worldwide burning of trees and other biomass.
Mar 24, 05: Swiss technicians will use a special insulating foam to wrap up a glacier that has been shrinking under the summer sun. The Gurschen glacier was to be partially covered with 3,000 square meters of PVC foam from the beginning of May. The ice-field was receding by some five meters per year. The cost of the PCV covering, which is to be left in place during the summer season when skiers do not frequent the resort, was some 30 Swiss francs (20 euros, 26 dollars) per square meter.
Mar 15, 05: A snow festival in Arctic Greenland has been postponed indefinitely because of a "heat wave". Greenland's climate is usually harsh and about 80% of the semi-autonomous Danish province is covered by ice, but February brought record-high temperatures.
Mar 14, 05: The shrinking of Himalayan glaciers could fuel an upswing in flooding in China, India and Nepal, before creating water shortages for hundreds of millions of people across the region, a leading environmental group warned. The Switzerland-based World Wide Fund for Nature said the rate of retreat of the Asian mountain range's glaciers is accelerating because of global warming, and has now reached 33-49 feet a year.
. . "The rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers will first increase the volume of water in rivers causing widespread flooding", said Jennifer Morgan, head of WWF's global climate change program. "But in a few decades this situation will change and the water level in rivers will decline, meaning massive economic and environmental problems for people in Western China, Nepal and Northern India."
. . Himalayan glaciers feed into seven of Asia's biggest rivers: the Ganges; Indus; Brahmaputra; Mekong; Thanlwin, formerly known as the Salween; Yangtze and Yellow. WWF noted that this ensures a year-round water supply to hundreds of millions of people in the Indian subcontinent and China. As glacier water flows dwindle, the energy potential of hydroelectric power will decrease, causing problems for industry, while reduced irrigation means lower crop production, it said. Nepal has an annual average temperature rise of .11 degrees F. The report said that flows have decreased in three of Nepal's snow-fed rivers.
. . In China, the report said, the Qinhai Plateau's wetlands have seen declining lake water levels, lake shrinkage, and the degradation of swampland. In India, the Gangotri glacier, which supports one of India's largest river basins, is receding at an average rate of 76 feet per year.
Mar 15, 05: A photo of Mount Kilimanjaro stripped of its snowcap for the first time in 11,000 years will be used as dramatic testimony for action against global warming as ministers from the world's biggest polluters meet today. "This is a wake-up call and an unequivocal message that a low-carbon global economy is necessary, achievable and affordable", said Steve Howard of the Climate Group charity which organized the book and an associated exhibition.
Mar 10, 05: Paw prints of a grizzly were found last year on Melville Island, about 1,000 km north of the Arctic Circle. No grizzly has ever been seen so far north. The grizzlies are visible examples of climate changes occurring in the Arctic. Grizzlies have been bred with polar bears successfully in captivity. It's not clear whether they would do so in the wild.
Feb 23, 05: The current retreat of ice shelves in the Antarctic due to global warming is nothing new —-but this time the problem is manmade and therefore potentially more serious, according to research. British scientists said a survey had shown that ice shelves had retreated thousands of years ago as a result of rising air and ocean temperatures. "What this tells us is that ice shelves don't just break up because they get too big — as the global warning skeptics argue."
. . He said previous periods of warming —-about 9,500 years ago and some 2,000 years to 4,000 years ago-— were caused by natural causes, including the ending of ice ages, rather than man's emissions and the ice shelves had been able to reform. "This time, the problem is man-made and if we don't take steps, the damage will be worse", he said. "There is no room for complacency."
Sept 22, 04: Glaciers once held up by a floating ice shelf off Antarctica are now sliding off into the sea --and they are going fast, scientists said. Two separate studies from climate researchers and the space agency NASA show the glaciers are flowing into Antarctica's Weddell Sea, freed by the 2002 breakup of the Larsen B ice shelf. The researchers said their satellite measurements suggest climate warming can lead to rapid sea level rise. They said the findings also prove that ice shelves hold back glaciers.
. . Large ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula disintegrated in 1995 and 2002 as a result of climate warming. But these floating ice shelves did not affect sea level as they melted.
. . Glaciers, however, are another story. They rest on land and when they slide off into the water they instantly affect sea level. It was not clear how the loss of the Larsen B ice shelf would affect nearby glaciers. But soon after its collapse, researchers saw nearby glaciers flowing up to eight times faster than before. "If anyone was waiting to find out whether Antarctica would respond quickly to climate warming, I think the answer is yes."
. . The affected area is at the far northern tip of the Antarctic, just south of Chile and Argentina. Temperatures there have risen by up to 4.5 degrees F (2.5 degrees C) in the past 60 years -- faster than almost any region in the world.
In the past 30 years, ice shelves in the region have lost more than 5,200 square miles of area. "At every step in the process, things have occurred more rapidly than we expected."
. . The Ross ice shelf, for example, is the main outlet for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, with several large glaciers that could, if they melted completely, raise sea levels by 16 feet.
Aug 22, 04: Around the Arctic, many glaciers in Canada and parts of Alaska are retreating faster than in the past. But some in Norway have even grown while others in Alaska are stable. One reason for glacier growth may be that rising temperatures melt sea ice that is sucked up into clouds as moisture, some of which falls as snow.
July 23, 04: The snow atop Pastoruri, one of the Andes most beautiful peaks and a big draw for mountaineers and skiers, could disappear along with many of Peru's glaciers in the next several years because of global warming, experts say. At 17,000 feet in the northern Andes, the glacier which covers famed Pastoruri has shrunk at a rate of 62 feet every year since 1980. Today it covers a surface area of 0.7 square miles, about 25% less than a quarter of a century ago.
. . Pastoruri is one of 18 glacier-capped mountains in Peru suffering the effects of climate change.The world has been heating up in the past 50 years and the Earth is at its hottest in 10,000 years, scientists say.
. . Peru is particularly vulnerable to climate change because some 70% its energy comes from hydroelectric plants, supplied mainly by meltwater from Andean glaciers. The meltwater is also used for agriculture and industry and to supply Peru's desert coast, home to more than half the country's population. But fast-melting Andean glaciers are also a hazard, causing catastrophes such as avalanches and floods.
June 28, 04: Britain's Antarctic ice station has a design problem few architects can have envisaged when it was built --within a decade, it is likely to float away. The existing base is built on an ice shelf which is likely to break off into the sea if global warming continues at its current rate. So now the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has appealed for designers to come up with a replacement.
. . Not only will the new 19 million pound ($35 million) station have to be able to operate throughout the year in one of the world's most inhospitable environments, it will have to be environmentally neutral and aesthetically inspiring.
. . So strict are the environmental rules governing Antarctica that all refuse --including human waste-- is supposed to be bagged up and shipped out so no lasting trace is left of outside occupation.
June 25, 04: A new survey of the depths of the ice-capped Arctic Ocean could reveal a lost world of living fossils and exotic new species from jellyfish to giant squid, scientists said. The census could easily double the number of species known in the Arctic.
. . The international scheme will include probing a 12,470-ft abyss off Canada described by project leaders as the "world's oldest sea water --a vast, still pool unstirred for millennia, walled by steep ridges and lidded with ice."
. . Scientists plan to use robot submarines and sonar to track down life, where they say many species may be at risk from global warming. U.N. models say that the Arctic could be largely ice-free in summer by 2100. More southerly species may invade Arctic waters if the polar icecap melts, while increased shipping could accidentally introduce new creatures to the region in ballast water and disrupt the pristine ecology, he said. "Anything that's fast enough to move out of the way may have been missed by previous surveys."
May 24, 04: Global warming is hitting the Arctic more than
twice as fast as the rest of the planet in what may be a
portent of wider, catastrophic changes, the chairman of an
eight-nation study said. Some parts of Alaska have heated
up 10 times more than the global average. The icy Hudson
Bay in Canada could be uninhabitable for polar bears within
just 20 years. The melting is also destabilizing buildings
on permafrost and threatening an oil pipeline laid across Alaska.
. . Benefits, for human commerce, might accrue from
the opening up of a now largely icebound short-cut sea
route from the Pacific to the Atlantic. "On average, our
models show that by 2050 the Northern Sea Route will be
open about 100 days a year. Now it's open about 20 days."
Russia might also win easier access to oil and gas as the
icecap shrinks and permafrost retreats.
. . It's partly because dark-colored water or earth,
once exposed, soaks up heat far faster than white ice or snow.
. . In the Nordic region, birch trees were taking
over traditional reindeer lichen pastures, Corell said. The
reindeer had to compete with elk and red deer moving north.
May 20, 04: Shifting land caused by the melting of
Canadian glaciers causes Chicago to sink at the rate of
about a millimeter a year, a Northwestern University study
has found. The shift also causes water in the Great Lakes
to move from the upper Great Lakes into their lower
reaches. Water has been tipped toward Chicago beaches, as
well as rivers and marshes all over the northern United
States. "All of Canada's going up", said Seth Stein, a
Northwestern professor of geological sciences who helped
organize the study. "The U.S. is going down."
. . The reason lies far beneath the Earth's surface,
in a mantle of semimolten rock. More than 20,000 years ago,
the weight of glacial ice sheets created depressions in the
Earth. When the ice began to melt around 12,000 years ago, the land returned to its original shape, forcing some areas to sink and others to rise, like a seesaw.
May 17, 04: Summer temperatures in the Arctic have risen
at an incredible rate over the past three years, and large
patches of what should be ice are now open water, a British
polar explorer said. Ben Saunders, forced by the warm
weather to abandon an attempt to ski solo from northern
Russia across the North Pole to Canada, said he had been
amazed at how much of the ice had melted. "I had days when
I could ski with no gloves and no hat at all, just in bare
hands, because I was too hot." Logs from an expedition in
2001 showed the average Arctic temperature at this time of
year was minus 15 to minus 20 degrees Celsius. Saunders
said the average temperature this time was just minus 5 to
minus 7 degrees C. The fresh snow he encountered was soft
and bulky, unlike the typical hard, fine-grained snow found in the Arctic.
. . Saunders said he had also been struck by the
almost complete absence of polar bears on the Russian side. "That surprised me a lot ... that's historically been a very concentrated area for bears."
Apr 16, 04: Anyone who doubts the gravity of global
warming should ask Alaska's Eskimo, Indian and Aleut elders
about the dramatic changes to their land and the animals on which they depend.
. . Native leaders say that salmon are increasingly
susceptible to warm-water parasites and suffer from lesions
and strange behavior. Salmon and moose meat have developed
odd tastes and the marrow in moose bones is weirdly runny, they say.
. . Arctic pack ice is disappearing, making food
scarce for sea animals and causing difficulties for the
Natives who hunt them. It is feared that polar bears, to
name one species, may disappear from the Northern
hemisphere by mid-century. As trees and bushes march north
over what was once tundra, so do beavers, and they are
damming new rivers and lakes to the detriment of water
quality and possibly salmon eggs.
. . Still, to the frustration of Alaska Natives, many
politicians in the lower 48 U.S. states deny that global
warming is occurring or that a warmer climate could cause
problems. "They obviously don't live in the Arctic."
. . The climate changes are disrupting traditional
food gathering and cultures. Indigenous residents of the
far north are finding it increasingly difficult to explain
the natural world to younger generations. "As species go
down, the levels of connection between older and younger go down along with that."
. . River ice, long used for travel in enterior
Alaska, is thinner and less dependable than it used to be.
"It looks like winter out there, but if you've really been
around a long time like me, it's not winter."
. . Average temperatures in Alaska are up about 5
degrees Fahrenheit from three decades ago, and about twice
that during winter. Most of Alaska's highways run over
permafrost that is now rapidly thawing, meaning maintenance
headaches for state officials. The thaw has already caused
increased maintenance costs for the trans-Alaska oil
pipeline, which uses special vertical supports for suspension over the tundra.
. . Cited: the cost --estimated at over $100 million-- of
moving Shishmaref, an Inupiat Eskimo village on Alaska's
northwestern coastline, to more stable ground. The village
of 600 is on the verge of tumbling into the Bering Sea
because of severe erosion resulting from thawed permafrost
and the absence of sea ice to protect the coastline from high storm waves.
. . There are about 20 Alaska villages that are
candidates for relocation because of severe erosion, with similar costs.
Apr 7, 04: Greenland's huge ice sheet could melt within
the next 1,000 years and swamp low-lying areas around the
globe if emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and global
warming are not reduced, scientists said. A meltdown of the
massive ice sheet, which is more than three km thick would
raise sea levels by an average seven meters, threatening
countries such as Bangladesh, island in the Pacific and parts of Florida.
. . "We found that the levels of CO2 which we could
quite likely reach during this century are sufficient to
produce that amount of warming." Some of the models forecast a temperature rise that was nearly three times more than the threshold. "How quickly it would happen would depend on how severe the warming was."
Mar 24, 04: Melting glaciers, eroding snowcaps and icefields contributed more to rising sea levels in the last century than is usually estimated, according to a new study. Ocean levels rose by between 15 and 20 cm in the 20th century, most of which can be attributed to runoff from melting ice on land, it says.
. . The research compares with estimates which put
the rate of rise lower and which blame most of that on
thermal expansion rather than ice melt. Under thermal
expansion, the sea expands as it warms, and thus rises.
. . If the icecap on the North Pole melted, that
would not cause ocean levels to rise, because this ice
floats on water, not land, and so displaces its own weight.
However, the melting could have a big impact on ocean
currents, notably braking the balmy North Atlantic Drift
and plunging northwestern Europe into an Ice Age, according to some scenarios.
. . Around 100 million people live in small island
states, low-lying or delta areas that are within one meter
of sea level, according to some estimates.
. . Over the 20th century, the increase was 0.6 C,
plus or minus 0.2 C, the IPCC said, & estimated the range
for 1990-2100 to be between 1.4 to 5.8 C.
Jan 13, 04: Switzerland's glaciers melted by a record
amount during 2003 under the onslaught of long-term climate
change, according to the Swiss Academy of Natural Sciences.
The retreat of the glaciers in the Swiss Alps reached up to
150 meters, with an overall melting exceeding that observed
in any year since measurements began in the 19th century.
And the shrinkage of the mountain ice was not the direct
result of record hot summer temperatures in Switzerland and
Europe last year, it added. Overall, glaciers in the heart
of Europe's biggest mountain range stopped advancing about 50 years ago.
Nov, 03: Almost 80% of the ice on Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya is gone.
Dec 5, 02: Accelerated melting of Earth's glaciers in recent years has meant its midsection gained girth, according to a study released today. "The enhanced glacial melting amounts to several hundred cubic kilometers of water per year." The increased diameter will very slightly increase the length of the day, as rotation slows. Think of the spinning ice-skater.
Permafrost in Switzerland? Yes, and it's an increasing problem. As Global Warming moves the thaw-line to higher altitudes, what melts up comes down! Mud slips, rocks fall, towns want to raise 10 meter high walls to protect themselves. Cable-car companies worry about their concrete anchors --some will have to be replaced.
Dec 12, 02: Peru: Run-off from glaciers in the Cordillera Real contributes to reservoirs that supply 1.5 million people in La Paz and a neighboring city. It also feeds a series of hydroelectric plants that satisfy the two cities' energy needs. Data collected from tropical ice fields near the world's highest capital, La Paz, show mass loss in the 1990s at rates 10 times greater than previous decades. If rising temperatures and low precipitation continue, many smaller glaciers will vanish in a decade. The key factor accelerating mass loss on these glaciers is increasingly frequent El Nino events in this part of the world, a climate phenomenon being pumped up by global warming.
. . There was a tripling in the world average glacial melt rate --from 100 cubic kilometres in 1989 to 320 cubic kilometers in 1998.
. . The surface-melt on Greenland was the highest in recorded history --and extended to elevations previously untouched by melt-- while the amount of Arctic sea ice also reached a record low.
. . When melted... "The sea ice goes from absorbing 20% of solar radiation to absorbing 80%", said Dr Hinzman. This creates positive feedback for further warming. "We're experiencing the most rapid increase in temperature in recorded history."
. . NASA: Greenland's ice-sheet is thinning at a rate of nearly a meter per year! That's about 51 cubic kilometers, enough, by itself, to raise sea level by a meter per century.
Oct 24, 02: Two major ice sheets, in Greenland and Antarctica, hold 77% of the world's fresh water --enough to potentially raise the sea level approximately 70 meters. If the Greenland ice sheet melted, sea level could potentially rise by 7 meters, and the Antarctic ice sheet: by 61 meters.
. . In early December, NASA plans to launch ICESat, a satellite dedicated to the study of ice and how it moves. ICESat will use lasers to measure the surface elevation of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which cover 1.7 million and 13.7 million square km, respectively. These two ice sheets alone, which average 2,500 meters thick, cover 10% of Earth's land surface.
. . Scientists have reported thinning glaciers at the edge of Greenland's ice sheet. So the question is not whether things are changing, but why and how quickly. But this doesn't necessarily mean we're all going to get wet. In a warmer climate, more snow may fall. "In that case, Greenland may actually gain ice in its high center. ... It's a race between increased melting at the edges and increased snowfall in the center."
Oct 17, 02: Kilimanjaro's already skimpy glaciers are melting so quickly that they will be gone by 2020, U.S. researchers reported. The researchers, who are racing to glean information from the unique glaciers on Africa's highest peak before they are completely gone, also said they had found evidence of three catastrophic droughts 8,300, 5,200 and 4,000 years ago. They also determined that the glaciers began to form on top of the mountain, which rises from the savannas of Tanzania, 11,700 years ago. The glaciers measured 4.8 square miles in 1912, but had shrunk to 1 square mile by 2000.
July 18, 02: An estimated 24 cubic miles of ice are disappearing annually from Alaskan glaciers, turning some imposing ice mountains into minor hills and adding to the steady rise in global sea level, a study shows. Previous studies have suggested that the global sea level has risen about 7.8 inches over the last 100 years.
. . But the bad news is that the rate of melting in the last five years is rapidly growing. "From the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s, the glaciers lost about 52 cubic kilometers a year", said Anthony A. Arendt, first author of the study appearing in the journal Science. "In the last five years, that rate has almost doubled."
. . The new measurements show that the glaciers of Alaska are contributing about half of the water worldwide flowing into the oceans from shrinking mountain glaciers, said Arendt. Although Alaska contains 13% of the world's glacier-bound ice, the melt from its glaciers is greater than all the other glacier fields put together, excluding the ice fields in Greenland and Antarctica. "Greenland is actually contributing less runoff than are these Alaskan glaciers."
Many glaciers and ice caps atop mountains in Africa and South America will probably have melted within the next 15 years because of global warming and little can be done to save them, an Ohio State University researcher explained today.
. . Lonnie Thompson, professor of geological sciences, reported that at least one-third of the massive ice field atop Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa has disappeared, or melted, in the last dozen years. About 82% of the ice field has been lost since it was first mapped in 1912.
. . And the Peru's Quelcaya ice cap in the Southern Andes Mountains has shrunk by at least 20% since 1963. More troubling however, Thompson said, is the observation that the rate of retreat for one of the main glaciers flowing out from the ice cap, Qori Kalis, has been 32 times greater in the last three years than it was in the period between 1963 and 1978.
. . "These glaciers are very much like the canaries once used in coal mines", Thompson said. "They're an indicator of massive changes taking place and a response to the changes in climate in the tropics."
. . The ice cap on Mount Kenya has shrunk by 40% since 1963. Two glaciers atop mountains in New Guinea are disappearing and should be gone in a decade. And in Venezuela in 1972, there were six such glaciers —-now there are only two left, and they will melt in the next 10 years.
Feb 2X. 02: Global sea level rise in the 21st century could be significantly higher than previously estimated, according to the most comprehensive glacier dataset ever compiled. The previously missing factor was the melting of the world's largest temperate glaciers in Alaska and Canada. The total 21st century rise could be as much as 89 cm. A 30 cm rise in sea level will typically cause a retreat of shoreline of 30 meters.
May 14, 02: A reduction caused by global warming in the massive sheets of Arctic sea ice that polar bears prowl for their prey could have devastating consequences for the world's largest land predator. The World Wildlife Fund said in a report that polar bears are facing a series of threats, including large-scale habitat fragmentation, pollution and excessive hunting, but pointed to the climate change forecast to occur over the coming decades as the gravest of them all.
. . The report said global warming, which scientists blame on greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fuels and other sources, could drastically shrink the thickness and extent of this polar ice, erasing much of the bear's habitat. Many scientists believe polar regions are particularly sensitive to global warming. The report said a warming trend has caused a 6% decline of Arctic sea ice since the 1970s. It added that computer models suggest there will be a 60% drop in summer sea ice in the next 50 years, which would increase the ice-free season from 60 to 150 days.
. . The world's polar bear population currently numbers about 22,000 -- 60% in Canada and the rest in Alaska, Russia, Norway and Greenland.
March 19, 02: A large Antarctic ice shelf in an area of the giant continent that is warming faster than the global average has collapsed with "staggering" rapidity.
. . The shelf designated as Larsen B, 650 feet thick and with a surface area of 1,250 square miles, has collapsed into small icebergs and fragments, the British Antarctic Survey said. Before breaking apart, the ice shelf was about the size of Rhode Island.
. . "The reason this is worth paying attention to is that we're seeing a very rapid and profound response by the ice sheet to a warming that's been around for just a few decades", Scambos said.
. . "We knew what was left would collapse eventually, but the speed of it is staggering. Hard to believe that 500 billion tons of ice sheet has disintegrated in less than a month."
. . The Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by 2.5 degrees Celsius over the past half century, far faster than elsewhere on the ice-bound continent or the rest of the world.
. . The break up of the ice mass would not raise sea levels because the ice was already floating. Sea levels would be affected if the land ice behind it began to flow more rapidly into the sea, as is expected.
Dec 28, 01: There is a one in 20 chance of a dramatic rise in world sea levels over the next century due to global warming, according to a new risk assessment.
. . The survey --by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and Norwegian environmental safety organization, Det Norske Veritas-- said there was a 5% chance of the giant West Antarctic Ice Sheet disintegrating due to climate change and
raising sea levels by one meter (1.1 yard) in the next 100 years.
. . "You have to balance the likelihood against the severity of the impacts, and in this case even a 5% chance of this happening is really damn serious", said scientist David Vaughan of BAS, responsible for British scientific research in
Antarctica.
. . Scientists have already predicted a rise in sea levels of 50 cm (20") over the next century, due to a combination of climate change and increased extraction of ground water --even with no contribution from melting Antarctic ice.
. . "So we might be looking at something like one and a half meters in the next century", Vaughan said. "The potential impacts of a major change in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet are severe --sea level rise will be fantastically expensive for developed nations with coastal cities and dire for poor populations in low-lying coastal areas."
. . Not only would there be flooding on a potentially vast scale, but changes in ocean currents could also have untold consequences on weather patterns, he added. Previous calculations have said low-lying countries such as Bangladesh could lose 17% of its land area and as much as half of its farmland if sea levels rose by one meter, and small island nations could be completely swamped. (including one of the Hawaiian)
5/27/01: Boerge Ousland, speaking after an 82-day trip in which he traveled 1,300 miles over the pole, Russia to Canada, said he had seen other evidence which hinted strongly at the effects of climate change.
. . The explorer, holder of four long-distance polar skiing records, measured the ice thickness as part of a study by the Norwegian Polar Institute. He also made measurements on a trek from Russia to the North Pole in 1994.
. . "The ice toward the North Pole seems to be much thinner than normal, and this made it much more broken so that the conditions were much more difficult than they had been in 1994 ... at around 87 degrees North, it was up to a meter thinner."
. . Ousland said he had been shocked by the death of Japanese Polar explorer Hyoichi Kohno, who drowned after plunging through thin ice in the Canadian Arctic earlier this month.
May 10, 01: The evidence for major polar ice-thinning is supported by submarine data. Upward-looking sonar readings, studied by both US and British scientists, have produced broadly similar results: about a 40% reduction in draught between the 1960s and 1990s. Data from radar altimetry suggest thinning over the entire Arctic, not just over the regions where the submarine data exist. It doesn't just move & pile up in "secret" areas where the subs didn't go!
March, 01: "Almost all Alaska is covered by a layer of permanently frozen ground. But this permafrost is thawing in the higher temperatures, steadily destroying millions of acres of spruce and birch trees, and with it the habitat for much of the state's wildlife.
. . "Rotting trees are producing millions of tons of carbon dioxide, and of methane, one of the most potent of the common greenhouse gases." For thousands of years, the permafrost has mopped up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stored it in its soil, mainly because the decomposition of dead vegetation is extremely slow in such low temperatures. However, with rising temperatures in the Arctic, microbes decompose dead plant matter at a higher rate, releasing carbon dioxide that then adds to the problem of global warming. U.N. scientists say the vicious cycle appears to have already begun.
March 30, 01: Rebounding from the weight of ice sheets that depressed the land during the ice age, Scandinavia has risen about a kilometer in the past 20,000 years, according to new satellite measurements.
. . In a study in the journal Science, researchers report that Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark are moving upward at almost a half an inch year as a rebound from the melting of two-mile-thick ice mountains.
. . "There is not one place in Scandinavia that was not covered with ice", said Jerry X. Mitrovica of the University of Toronto. "The land was pressed down about a kilometer.
. . The ocean could be rising at 7 millimeters a year in Scandinavia, but because the land was rising at 9 millimeters a year, it would appear that sea level was dropping. "This is one of the important confirmations of sea level rising. Sea level is going up worldwide about 2 millimeters a year."
2-7-01-- U.N. scientists said that global warming is melting the Arctic's permafrost, causing it to release greenhouse gases that could in turn raise temperatures even higher. "This is very alarming", said Svein Tveidtal, a prominent scientist with the United Nations Environment Program.
January 17, 2001: Vast sheets of ice on the warming fringes of Antarctica may be on the verge of collapse and could eventually release rivers of ice that would cause sea levels worldwide to rise more rapidly than expected, according to new study of satellite images.
. . The EPA and the United Nations have both said that in a worst-case scenario --depending on how much global air temperatures increase -- seas could jump 1 meter by 2100.
. . Each vertical inch can translate into several horizontal feet of flat lowlands. The Mississippi River Delta gave up about 41 square kilometers of land to the Gulf of Mexico every year between 1930 and 1990. But the rate has accelerated in recent years to about 65 square kilometers a year, according to a study released a year ago by University of New Orleans coastal geologist Shea Penland. "We're living on the verge of a coastal collapse", Penland warned in January, 01.
. . Some say New Orleans may be among the first major casualties. The city, which sits 2.5 meters below sea level at the mouth of the Mississippi, is protected by a system of manufactured levies and natural barrier islands. But many of the tiny islands are expected to disappear by 2050. Meanwhile, New Orleans is sinking, in a process called subsidence, at a rate of 1 meter per century.
06/21/99: The most rapidly moving glacier in the world is reportedly picking up speed and melting quickly, which could in
the near future jettison an increasing number of dangerous icebergs into shipping lanes. And, of course, raise the oceans more.
. . Global warming shoulders a portion of the blame for this
mass retreat, according to studies by CU-Boulder professor Mark Meier and other scientists.
. . The Columbia Glacier-- 34 miles long, 3 miles wide and nearly 3,000 feet thick in spots-- is what researchers call a tidewater glacier, because the frozen end, known as the terminus, rests in hundreds of feet of seawater.
Researchers say the Columbia Glacier is among the last of the 51 tidewater glaciers in Alaska to make a drastic retreat. Since 1982, it has pulled back about 10Km.
POLAR ICE.
The Larsen area: in the past 30 years, ice shelves in the region just south of Chile and Argentina have lost more than 5,200 square miles of area.
.
Feb 7, 03: At the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, a flurry of new reports examining evidence of global climate change all tell the same story. From the tropics to the poles, evidence is growing stronger than ever that Earth's climate is warming dangerously.
. . In the Arctic Ocean, floating masses of sea ice are shrinking and splitting apart, and the massive Greenland ice cap melted more this past summer than ever before. Meanwhile, warming ocean temperatures are endangering coral reefs in the tropics.
. . The Arctic's sea ice --large masses of snow-covered ice that float everywhere around the polar latitudes-- usually covers 2.4 million square miles of the ocean north of Canada, Greenland and Russia in September, the height of the ice season.
. . This past summer, however, measurements showed that the sea ice had decreased by nearly a half- million square miles. The flat ice floes left wider sections of open water between them and became extremely thin in many areas. Equally ominous was a report by Konrad Steffen, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado, on Greenland's vast ice cover, second only in size to Antarctica. It was melting faster this year across nearly 265,000 square miles than at any period in recorded history, Steffen said. The ice sheet is a mile and a half thick in some places. As meltwater from the surface seeps through crevices in the ice, it loosens the edges of the sheet and causes the ice to flow more swiftly to the sea, where it breaks off into icebergs.
the entire Greenland ice sheet sea levels would rise by a globally disastrous 23 feet.
. . "The vast corn belt of the Northern Hemisphere, for example, will become hotter and dryer, and that change can't be resolved merely by creating new corn belts further north, because the soils further north are not the same at all", Brown said. "Each global increase of 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) around the world will reduce grain yields like rice and wheat, as well as corn, by at least 10%. And because aquifers are being tapped at an increasing pace throughout the world and water tables are falling, the outcome will soon mean a devastating blow to agriculture --particularly in the developing world, he said. "This disruption by a combination of climate change and water shortages has the potential for creating political instabilities on a scale that we can't even foresee."
Jan 28, 03: The shrinking Arctic icecap may open a fabled passage for ships between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans within a decade, transforming an icy graveyard into a short-cut trade route.
. . U.N. studies project that the Arctic may be free of ice in summertime by 2080. The polar passage, clogged by ice throughout seafaring history, may come to challenge the Panama and Suez canals. "You can save at least 10-15 days on the voyage from Japan to Europe, especially in summertime."
. . U.N. studies show that the Arctic ice has shrunk by about 3% a decade since the 1970s and that air temperatures have risen by about five Celsius in the past century. About four million people live around the Arctic.
Jan 14, 03: Using lasers beamed from high above Earth, a newly launched NASA satellite aims to track ice sheets near the north and south poles and how they react to global warming.Most people would figure that as the planet gets warmer, the monster ice sheets would melt and get smaller, but this is not necessarily so. "In a warmer climate, the atmosphere can contain more water vapor, so for moderate changes of temperature, it's altogether conceivable that the ice sheets might expand."
. . The expansion could come through more snow that could build up at the center of the ice sheets, he said. For long-term warming, though, the ice sheets would most certainly melt. In the last 10 years, they said, surveys of Greenland indicate that while the ice sheet is thinning near the coast as it is lapped with warmer water, it is thickening near the center of the land mass, possibly due to greater snow accumulation.
Jan 6, 03: A natural cycle of thawing may cause an Antarctic ice sheet as big as Texas and Colorado combined to melt away in 7,000 years, possibly causing a worldwide sea level rise of about 16 feet, according to new research. The study establishes a baseline trend of natural melting against which added melting caused by human influences on the climate can be measured. He warned not interpret these data to mean we no longer need to be concerned about the global-warming issue.
Dec 7, 02: The northernmost reaches of the Earth are warming, reducing the sea ice across the Arctic Ocean, melting the ice sheet in Greenland and spreading shrubs into the Alaskan tundra, scientists said today at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Shrubs are pushing farther northward, growing in areas of tundra that were void of trees as little as 50 years ago.
. . Greenland is experiencing a warm spell unseen since the 1930s. Satellite data show the greatest area of melt across its mammoth ice sheet in 24 years of measurements occurred this year. Since 1979, the melt area has grown by 16% and is affecting higher and higher elevations.
. . Across the Arctic Ocean, the floating mantle of ice that covers it throughout much of the year shrank to record levels this summer. In September, sea ice extent was 4% lower that that seen in any previous September since monitoring began in 1978.
The Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves are cracking up and, on the face of things, it is the most serious thaw since the end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago.
. . The break-up of the ice shelves in itself is a natural process of renewal, but the size and rate of production of icebergs -- some the size of major cities -- is alarming scientists. The break-off last month of a 500 billion ton chunk of the Larsen Ice Shelf -- 650 feet thick and with a surface area of 1,250 sq. miles -- is the second big break since a giant iceberg broke away in 1995 and is well beyond normal activity.The production of vast amounts of icebergs is a threat to the world's climate and the way the ocean's function, they say. And the process, once started, cannot be reversed. The fear is that a snowball effect will lead to disintegration of the vast West Antarctic ice shelf, kilometers thick in parts. A longer-term effect would be if the disintegration led to a meltdown of the grounded West Antarctic ice sheet, which would cause the world's oceans to rise by up to five meters (17 feet).
. . "We aren't too worried about the first 100 years or so when the ice shelves go, because there's no real effect on sea level and feedback on global climate is really rather small", said Bill Budd, Professor of Meteorology at the CRC. But scientists believe that the expected loss of half the Antarctic's sea ice by the end of the century will have important consequences for Earth's entire natural system.
. . They've found that the world's deep ocean circulation system will slow as the Antarctic produces smaller amounts of dense oxygen-rich seawater, possibly within 30 years, threatening marine life. "We can't reverse it. Because the greenhouse gas levels are already up, we can't bring them down, they just get higher, and the (ocean) cutoff will be stronger at higher levels", Budd said.
. . The Antarctic is normally the source for a large part of the "bottom water" which feeds oxygen to global ocean depths. And computer modeling results indicate production of this dense, rich water has fallen by 20% from pre-industrial times. A small increase in ocean temperature from climate warming could produce a doubling of the melt, which would cause the ice shelf to shrink dramatically, recede and break off.
. . One question is whether disappearance of half the Antarctic's sea ice by the end of the century would also halve the Southern Ocean's krill, the tiny planktonic crustaceans which are most abundant animal organism on earth. Krill, the keystone of the Antarctic ecosystem and bread and butter for seals, penguins and whales, need ice for sanctuary and for food from algae.
. . Trull says CRC scientists predict a 15% drop in total global marine phyto-plankton production by the end of the century because of slowing ocean circulation. By then, melting of the grounded Antarctic ice sheet could be adding to predicted sea level rises of 30-50 centimeters (.3 to .5 M) this century. And fears remain about the long-term stability of the West Antarctic ice sheet because of rises in ocean temperature.
HUGE NEW ICEBERG. . 3-22-00 - An iceberg about twice as big in area as the state of Delaware --that's near a record size-- is breaking off from Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf and may soon be adrift, according to the University of Wisconsin Antarctic Meteorological Research Center. It was 183 miles long and 22 miles wide. Fotos from orbit show the cracks that outline it. At that length ratio, it may break in two.
. The largest iceberg ever reported was seen in 1956 and was 60 miles wide and 208 miles long, or 12,000 square miles in area, more than twice the size of the state of Connecticut.
. As the icecap shrinks, the process not only raises ocean levels but could help shift ocean circulation and weather patterns, bringing drought, severe storms and the wider spread of tropical diseases.
11-24-99: The average draft of winter Arctic Ocean ice has declined by 1.3 meters, or 40%, since the first measurements were made in 1958.
. . All of the 29 sites compared between the earlier cruises and those of the 1990s showed a decline in ice thickness.
. . Note again that melting of the northern cap would not raise ocean levels, as it is afloat. However, as the area not frozen expands, solar heat would be absorbed much more by the darker water.
Bad News: ancient viruses have been found in polar ice. With global warming, they'll be released into the environment faster than normal. Their viability hasn't been ascertained for certain, but some are sure to be live. So it's not just the estimated 5,000 "new" diseases waiting for us in the disappearing rainforests, it's "archived backup copies" of all past versions of many diseases. Perhaps even the 1918 Flu pandemic viruses.
12-9-99: A new study of Arctic sea-ice coverage revealed that the probability of a negative trend over 19.4 years as large as that seen (from satellite data) was less than 2%. (= very lil chance that it was just natural) Then they ran another computer simulation which included increases of warming greenhouse gases as well as cooling aerosols. The results that incorporated these human-induced changes matched the observed sea-ice losses much more closely.
. . But not all experts are yet prepared to blame the loss of Arctic sea ice solely on human activity. They point to the influence of a natural climate phenomenon known as the Arctic Oscillation (AO). This is an erratic see-saw that alternately raises and lowers atmospheric pressure over the North Pole while lowering and raising it in a ring around the polar region.
. . For the last 10 years, this has led to distinct wind patterns and warm-air movement that can also result in sea-ice retreat.
. . Climate change is threatening polar bears with starvation by shortening their hunting season, according to a study by scientists from the Canadian Wildlife Service.
. . The study, by Ian Stirling and colleagues is published in the journal Arctic. It finds that the bears' main food source, ringed seals, are becoming less accessible. The seals live on the ice of Hudson Bay, but this ice now breaks up earlier and earlier.
. . The sea ice season in western Hudson Bay has been reduced by about three weeks over the last 20 years. The polar bears therefore have less time to hunt and return to land in poorer condition. Weight for both male and female bears is declining and females have fewer cubs now. However, significant population decline has not yet begun.
. . Another Nasa study found a 2.9% decline in total Arctic sea ice extent over the last decade.
Scientists in Antarctica have uncovered when the continent's vast ice sheets formed and are warning that they could melt as consequence of global warming.
. . The formation of the ice sheets began between 33 and 34 million years ago. Since the time when dinosaurs roamed a tropical Antarctic continent(it moved), the world has cooled down by 6.5 degrees Celsius. Scientists say that global warming could take all that cooling back in as little as two or three centuries. But remember, only a degree or two is perilous.
ICE SHEET. . 10-9-99: The West Antarctic Ice Sheet covers and area of about 360,000 square miles, roughly the size of Texas and Colorado combined. It rests on the Antarctic land mass below sea level, which makes it particularly susceptible to rising sea level, experts say. It would tend to float & break up. Its complete collapse could raise global sea level 15 to 20 feet. This was scheduled to take 7,000 years, but researchers emphasize that G-warming could vastly speed that up, due to its sensitivity. Some bare beaches are now up to 90 feet above present sea level, due to a rise in the land since the ice-mass got off it. (The amount of ice afloat, or the % that would, if unsupported, does not count as a potential sea-level riser. ...except that--after melting--it expands as it warms.)
. . That effect also pertains to a claim that a Capt Cook mark on a beach in Tasmania "proves" that the oceans haven't risen. Real scientists are now on that case, & after a real study, will tell the results. It's likely that the land there has similarly risen. The Australian Tectonic Plate is moving (north) faster than any other plate, causing volcanoes to the north.
South POLAR ICE. . 4/09/99: Two huge ice shelves in the Antarctic have melted and crumbled, losing nearly half as much area in the past year as in the past four decades combined! The shelves are in "full retreat", scientists said this
week, blaming the phenomenon on climate warming.
12-1-98: ENN. The critical West Antarctic ice sheet is melting slower than was thought. Still, it alone will raise the sea-level by 1MM/year. (25 yrs= an old inch) A new polar-orbit satellite in 2001 will measure better. Each MM of rise covers many times that far on a beach, especially Florida--on both coasts!
HOW 'BOUT A HUGE ICE-COVER?!. . 3-1-01
If temperatures ever went low enough to allow an ice cover to creep to within 30 degrees of the Equator -- Houston, Texas, say -- "the feedback would be so strong you'd get a runaway effect. It would be unstoppable. The Earth would quickly freeze over."
. . But it was thought that the ice would cover so much that no light could get thru, and all life would go extinct... ergo: it didn't happen. But arctic researchers found that ice that froze slowly was like glass, and transmitted plenty of light.
. . It was also thought that the temperature-shift would be inescapable --permanent!
. . A snowball Earth, however, would screw up the carbon cycle something awful. The air becomes very dry. There is no source of atmospheric moisture, no way to scrub CO2. Meanwhile, "plate tectonics continues. CO2 is emitted (volcanoes), but there's no way to get rid of it. CO2 builds up and up, drives temps higher and higher --the escape mechanism is inevitable. And boy, what an escape." After about four million years, things warm to the point that dark ponds of open water appear at the equator. This sudden switch in albedo at low latitudes then kicks off wholesale melting, and from there, "Deglaciation is extremely violent. The ice will disappear in a few hundred years -- much faster than you can get rid of the excess CO2."
. . That thick blanket of CO2 means an extreme greenhouse period: "Surface temperatures at the tropics over 40 degrees C (104 degrees F), super-hurricanes, torrents of carbonic-acid rain." And --with no ice, and the maximum surface area of rock exposed-- powerful carbonate weathering. This combination eventually resets the atmospheric chemistry to pre-Snowball levels.
. . The calcium the acid rain drew out of the rocks reacted with the carbon in the acid to make calcium carbonate... chalk/limestone. That's exactly what was found just above the strata of drop-stones that the glaciers left. It was a mystery for decades --now we know how it got there.
. . A "freeze-fry" scenario, Hoffman called the whole process. And it fits nicely, he added, with the existing rock record. [So it IS a full-fledged theory]
. . It seems pretty likely, given the evidence, that a Snowball Earth did take place, somewhere between 600 and 700 million years ago.