Greenland’s glaciers are melting, contributing to a rise in sea levels. What’s more, they are melting faster than before, according to two studies just published. The increase is due to both a warmer atmosphere and a warmer ocean, which melts the glaciers from below. Fjords apur rising sea-levels.
Archive for the ‘Polar Regions’ Category
Fjords contribute to melting of glaciers
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010New Antarctic station is carbon-free
Monday, February 16th, 2009One argument preventing more widespread use of renewable energy sources is that they may not be reliable or available in many areas. Take for example solar energy. It won’t work well in areas that don’t receive much sun, right?
With the recent opening of Belgium’s Princess Elisabeth station in East Antarctica, scientists now feel they have proof that there might not be as much strength to that argument as previously thought. Surrounded by a vast, icy emptiness, the new station is carbon-free, releasing no greenhouse gases (which contribute to climate change) and is powered solely by the sun and wind. Within the station, water is recycled through the use of micro-organisms. Scientists believe that if renewable energy can be used in such a harsh environment, what’s to stop it from being used in more habitable parts of the globe.
Now that the station is up and running, it will serve as a research lab for global scientists studying the Antarctic ice shelf. The continent is extremely vulnerable to warming temperatures and melting of Antarctica ice shelves increases the flooding threat for many coastal populations.
Antarctica is warming
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009This New York Times article reports on research done at the University of Washington in Seattle and at the NASA Goddard Space Institute in New York that will soon be published in the journal Nature. The scientists used satellites to interpolate temperatures between sparse weather stations. They determined with a high level of confidence that warming is occurring in Antarctica just as it is in the other six continents. This finding validates the reliability of the models that scientists use to predict the earth’s response to greenhouse gases. Apparent cooling in parts of Antarctica had called these models into question, and global warming skeptics grasped at the anomaly. The new research found the average warming across Antarctica to be 0.18 degrees Fahrenheit over the period 1957 – 2006, comparable to the warming measured globally. The scientists acknowledge that more work is needed to determine how much of the warming is due to natural climate swings and how much to carbon dioxide. A third scientist, at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, called the climate dynamics in Antarctica “complex,” but noted that his own findings, using different techniques and assumptions, accorded well with the results obtained in the latest research.
Ice melting across globe at accelerating rate, NASA says
Saturday, December 20th, 2008The globe’s ice is melting faster and faster. About 2 trillion tons of ice have melted in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska since 2003. That’s enough to fill the Chesapeake Bay 21 times. Find a map of the mid-Atlantic states to see just how much ice that is. The melting ice from Greenland alone causes sea levels to rise by .5 mm each year. As gaciers melt, they reflect less sunlight and absorb more heat, melting more ice more rapidly and warming Arctic waters and the atmosphere.