News from the front
Posted on the 11.07.2011 by Alain Hubert
Once in a while, I take some time to highlight for my visitors some important articles published lately on the Web about the climate change and the polar regions melting.
Posted in
" Is Antarctica Melting ? "
A first article published by the Nasa, the author shows that despite some writings showing that there is no global warming, the melting of Antarctica ice is well a dramatic reality. "...Gravity data collected from space using NASA's Grace satellite show that Antarctica has been losing more than a hundred cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice each year since 2002. The latest data reveal that Antarctica is losing ice at an accelerating rate, too. How is it possible for surface melting to decrease, but for the continent to lose mass anyway? The answer boils down to the fact that ice can flow without melting...."
In addition, he shows that there is a difference in mass losing between East Antarctica (two-thirds of Antarctica is a high, cold desert. ... this section has an average altitude of about 2 kilometer (1.2 miles), higher than the American Colorado Plateau) and West Antarctica (...West Antarctica is very different. Instead of a single continent, it is a series of islands covered by ice -think of it as a frozen Hawaii, with penguins.).
At the end, the author refers to the data collected by satellites : "...Meanwhile, measurements from the Grace satellites confirm that Antarctica is losing mass. Isabella Velicogna of JPL and the University of California, Irvine, uses Grace data to weigh the Antarctic ice sheet from space. Her work shows that the ice sheet is not only losing mass, but it is losing mass at an accelerating rate. 'The important message is that it is not a linear trend. A linear trend means you have the same mass loss every year. The fact that it’s above linear, this is the important idea, that ice loss is increasing with time,' she says. And she points out that it isn’t just the Grace data that show accelerating loss; the radar data do, too. 'It isn't just one type of measurement. It's a series of independent measurements that are giving the same results, which makes it more robust.'
" One meter of sea level rise..."
An other article I would like to highlight is the one published on 4 May 2011 by News.com, the Voice of America. This report has been released by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, the scientific arm of the 8-nation Arctic Council, just before these eight nations (the United States, Russia, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Iceland) got togheter to discuss the challenges of climate change. Globally, it finds that the past six years -between 2005 and 2010- were the warmest years recorded in the Arctic since measurements began in 1880.
Gordon Hamilton, a leading glaciologist and professor at the University of Maine Climate Change Institute : "... And so with our new understanding on how ice sheets are behaving and how they are responding to climate change we can say that the IPCC [UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] estimate for sea level rise from 18 to 59 centimeters is a very large underestimate and we are looking at something probably double the upper end of the estimate. So we are expecting one meter of sea level rise by 2100".
The report finds that the Arctic ocean could become nearly ice-free in the summers within the next thirty to forty years. Hamilton says there is still time to act to slow down these changes by drastically reducing climate-changing carbon emissions....
An iceberg melting off the coast of Ammasalik, Greenland
© Nasa
