Posted on 08/21/2008 1:55:30 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
New satellite images reveal that a massive ice chunk recently broken away from one of Greenland's glaciers, which researchers say will continue to disintegrate within the next year.
Scientists at Ohio State University monitoring daily NASA satellite images of Greenland's glaciers discovered that an 11-square-mile (29-square-kilometer) piece of the Petermann Glacier broke away between July 10 and 24. The chunk was about half the size of Manhattan.
They announced their finding today.
Glaciers are large, slow-moving rivers of ice, formed at the poles and in alpine regions by layers of compacted snow. The Petermann Glacier is one of the approximately 130 glaciers that flow out of the Greenland ice sheet and into the sea, where large chunks of ice fall off, or calve, to form icebergs.
The Petermann Glacier has a floating section of ice about 10 miles (16 km) wide and 50 miles (80 km) long -an area of about 500 square miles (1,295 square km).
The last major ice loss to the glacier occurred when 33 square miles (86 square km) of floating ice fell off between 2000 and 2001.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
GLOBAL WARMING GLOBAL WARMING GLOBAL WARMING!!!
I vaguely remember something like that from my 7th grade science class.
If I remember correctly ... it's virtually impossible to flood New York city or anything like that.
Am I right?
Excuse me, but isn’t this what glaciers do? Don’t they flow to the sea and break off because of the growth upstream? I thought receding glaciers were the evidence of global warming.
And like other rivers, they flow down to the sea. A normal river dumps water into the sea. A glacier dumps ice. For it to dump large glaciers into the ocean, there needs to be a lot of ice flowing down to the sea.
It's been close to 8 years since the last big chunks broke off, sounds like it was due to happen.
I hope this doesn’t cool down the Atlantic too much for hurricane development. Kay is a real bust and the mountainous south needs RAIN.
Your logic holds for the north polar icecap, but not for Greenland. Greenland is an island, the ice rests on land.
Pass the Scotch!
Why then is the northern ice cap 30% bigger this year than last?
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=08&fd=20&fy=2007&sm=08&sd=20&sy=2008
And why is the Southern sea ice bigger by approximately 1 million square miles of sea ice than 1980?
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.south.jpg
Am I right?
Ask Moses.
P.S. Not for ice suspended by land.
True. But note - the land that the ice is sitting on has been pushed well over a hundred meters below sea level. Perhaps 20% of the Greenland glacier lies below mean sea level.
The low elevation of the middle of Greenland makes it difficult for the inland ice to rapidly flow to the ocean.
Except, in this case, the 500 sq miles that doesn’t......
Also from Ohio State University, Dec 2007...
EARTH'S HEAT ADDS TO CLIMATE CHANGE TO MELT GREENLAND ICE
COLUMBUS , Ohio -- Scientists have discovered what they think may be another reason why Greenland 's ice is melting: a thin spot in Earth's crust is enabling underground magma to heat the ice.
They have found at least one “hotspot” in the northeast corner of Greenland -- just below a site where an ice stream was recently discovered.
The researchers don't yet know how warm the hotspot is. But if it is warm enough to melt the ice above it even a little, it could be lubricating the base of the ice sheet and enabling the ice to slide more rapidly out to sea.
As Greenland warms up, the Vikings will return there. They will raid our coastline, causing massive casualties, far beyond anything from 9/11, which was staged by our govt. anyway. All this will happen because we haven’t bought enough carbon credits and ratified the Kyoto Treaty. /s
But wait - I'm not sure I have ten houses, maybe it's eleven or twelve. I'll have to get back to you on that.
From the article, it appears the Petermann glacier is in northern Greenland, where it’s already been noted that the ice cap is melting more rapidly due to under-ice volcanic activity.
Big deal.
Recent massive volcanoes have risen from the ocean floor deep under the Arctic ice cap, spewing plumes of fragmented magma into the sea, scientists who filmed the aftermath reported Wednesday.
The eruptions -- as big as the one that buried Pompei -- took place in 1999 along the Gakkel Ridge, an underwater mountain chain snaking 1,800 kilometres (1,100 miles) from the northern tip of Greenland to Siberia.
Scientists suspected even at the time that a simultaneous series of earthquakes were linked to these volcanic spasms.
But when a team led of scientists led by Robert Sohn of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts finally got a first-ever glimpse of the ocean floor 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) beneath the Arctic pack ice, they were astonished.
What they saw was unmistakable evidence of explosive eruptions rather than the gradual secretion of lava bubbling up from Earth's mantle onto the ocean floor.
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gRI87Fyr-TpE6OBYfAcYxFKSXRJg
The hardest thing about becoming a member of the media is the pre-frontal labotomy!
Guess I shoulda refreshed the thread one more time before posting #16...
The last major ice loss to the [Petermann] glacier occurred when 33 square miles (86 square km) of floating ice fell off between 2000 and 2001.
A-Hem!
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