Posted on 09/04/2007 8:03:37 AM PDT by cogitator
"One such piece of evidence comes from the Defense Meteorological Satellites Program (DMSP-F13) Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I), which records microwave energy emitted from the Earth’s surface. Because wet snow and dry snow look different in the microwave frequencies, measurements from the SSM/I tell scientists where and when the ice sheet is melting. Made from SSM/I data, this image compares the number of days melting occurred on the Greenland Ice Sheet in 2005 to the annual average number of melting days since 1988. Greenland is nearly entirely ringed in red and orange, showing that the summer melt season was much longer than average in 2005. Some regions, depicted in dark red, experienced up to 20 more melt days than average. No part of the ice sheet melted less than average."
Click for full-size.
Wowser! Of course all life on Earth will be extinguished by the 2029 asteroid if it hits the Earth. Which do you think is the more pressing problem?
....duh, a CATastrophe?
:-}
I wonder when Greenland will finally resemble the “green country” the Vikings found and settled prior to the invention of the internal combustion engine, LOL!
Thanks for the ping, xcamel!
Fool. The asteroid is supposed to hit us when the Mayan calendar resets in 2012 at the second eclipse of Venus.
I thought that the possibility of impact from that one had been pretty much ruled out (though it will come close). Seems like it from this article.
Astronomers Gear Up for Historic Asteroid Pass in 2029
And I'll be dead before I'd have to worry about major changes to the Greenland ice sheet. That might not be true for my grandkids, however.
Nice image. Thank you.
What is the accepted volume of Greenland’s ice cap: I know in places it is very thick (over 5000 feet in limited regions), but in others it is only a few hundred feet thick.
Too many people look at a Mercator projection map and think the Greenland ice cap is uniformly 5000 ft thick and thousands of times larger than it really is.
When the moon is in the second house and Jupiter aligns with Mars....
Since the Mayan calender does not align with the Julian Calendar we gotta get on the same Paige!
Paige was the Pope's mistress and she added the "Leap Year" option to his calendar, (secret divulged in the Da Vinci Tales!)
Screw your grandkids. I'm cold now.
Good PR, you know. (A factoid I learned from FreeRepublic, by the way.)
History of Greenland (Wikipedia)
"There are two written sources on the origin of the name, in the The Book of Icelanders (Íslendingabók), an historical work dealing with early Icelandic history from the 12th century, and in the medieval Icelandic saga, The Saga of Eric the Red (Eiriks saga rauða), which is about the Norse settlement in Greenland and the story of Eric the Red in particular. Both sources write: "He named the land Greenland, saying that people would be eager to go there if it had a good name."
So it probably wasn't really very green, but Erik the Red wanted people to think it was. Settlements did hang on for awhile there -- the article has a good summary.
I found this source to be more well-researched and accurate than Wikipedia about the lifestyle of the Vikings there:
http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/greenland/
In short, they could not have developed such a social structure without the benefit of better environmental conditions than exist today.
To prove that it wasn’t all in a name: wasn’t it Iceland where they used to grow grapes?
From ac’s link:
“An ice core drilled from the island’s massive icecap between 1992 and 1993 shows a decided cooling off in the Western Settlement during the mid-fourteenth century.”
Greenland had warmer times recently, without AGW.
Of course, though, that doesn’t negate AGW theory.
I wasn’t trying to deny that Greenland cooled off after being a bit warmer and more hospitable; that was the Medieval Warm Period, after all. My comment was just about the indications that it was never THAT warm or THAT hospitable; calling it “Greenland” may have been one of history’s greatest bait-and-switch sell-jobs, particularly for the Vikings that followed Erik the Red there and survived what it threw at them.
This map (left) shows key areas of Antarctica, including the vast East Antarctic ice sheet. The image on the right shows which areas of the continent's ice are thickening (coloured yellow and red) and thinning (coloured blue). © (Left)British Antarctic Survey, (Right)Science
The thing is...the East Antarctic ice sheet has nearly 80% of the world's ice (and its growing). Greenland has less than 10% of the world's ice. I read one source that had the growth of the East Antarctic ice sheet at five times what Greenland was losing.
Even if Greenland wasn’t really green, that still doesn’t explain why parts of Iceland (now there’s an inviting name for you, LOL!) were warm enough to grow grapes at one time, or the historical records that the permafrost in Russia or Scandinavia was much deeper (indicating warmth) than now. We can talk about the Medieval Warm Period and the LIA, but the bottom line is that in the last 1000 years or so, things were considerably warmer than the puny .6 degree that things warmed up last century, sort of putting paid to the AGW acolytes.
The problem for the Gorons is that neither history nor archeology support their pet theories either. And nobody can show that the thick interior of Greenland is melting, when it is actually growing!
No film? !?!?!?
But, which side of the earth will get fried? See, I just move to the utter side from the fried side and everythong will turnup jest fine.
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