A hole opens up under Antarctic glacier — big enough to fit two-thirds of Manhattan
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Scientists have discovered an enormous void under an Antarctic glacier, sparking concern that the ice sheet is melting faster than anyone had realized — and spotlighting the dire threat posed by rising seas to coastal cities around the world, including New York City and Miami.
The cavity under Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is about six miles long and 1,000 feet deep — representing the loss of 14 billion tons of ice.
It was discovered after an analysis of data collected by Italian and German satellites, as well as NASA’s Operation IceBridge , a program in which aircraft equipped with ice-penetrating radar fly over polar regions to study the terrain.
The discovery is described in a paper published Jan. 30 in the journal Science Advances . The researchers expected to see significant loss of ice, but the scale of the void came as a shock.
“The size of the cavity is surprising, and as it melts, it’s causing the glacier to retreat,” said Pietro Milillo, a radar scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the paper’s lead author. He said the ice shelf encompassing the Florida-sized glacier is retreating at a rate in excess of 650 feet per year, and that most of the melting that led to the void occurred during the past three years.
Sinking areas at Thwaites Glacier are shown here in red and rising areas in blue. The growing cavity (red mass, center) caused the greatest sinking. NASA/JPL-Caltech Previous research showed that meltwater from Thwaites accounts for about 4 percent of the global sea level rise, said Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, who was not involved with the new study.
If the loss of ice becomes so severe that the glacier collapses — something computer models predict could happen in 50 to 100 years — sea levels would rise by two feet. That’s enough to inundate coastal cities across the globe .
“It’s completely plausible,” Scambos said, adding that "Thwaites has a really perfect storm going for it” — a reference to the fact that parts of the glacier lie below sea level and are thus especially vulnerable to melting by seawater.
The discovery of the void comes as Scambos and other American and British scientists are gearing up for a major new research initiative. The five-year International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration will use robots and ocean weather stations, as well as more than a dozen seals fitted with sensors designed to collect data about glacial ice and the surrounding water.
“This paper really helps put a bull's-eye on some of the places we want to study,” Scambos said.
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Sometimes our biggest dangers can come and only be seen from far away.
I spent 4 years with the U.S. Navy as part of "Operation Deep Freeze" on loan to the National Science Foundation's Division of Polar Programs. Made three trips to the Ice, as we called it, for 6 months out of the year from 1987 through 1990. Saw a lot of freaky things down there meterlogically, geologically, and geographically.
playing solitaire
in confinement,
but seriously, that sounds prettyt cool, n damn frckn coold,
but i like to explore, and prefer extremes
I did play a lot of soltaire down there. In a 20 year naval career, it was without a doubt the most exciting four years I ever spent. I can honestly say I have litetally set foot where where no one else ever has. I have seen glowing clouds in broad daylight. I have stood in massive ice caves. I have watched killer whales breaching through 20 foot wide circular holes in the seasonal pack ice. I watched the very first USAF C-5 Galaxy transport to ever land on a ice runway in Antarctica on ice that was 72 inches thick. I have been to a place called the Dry Valleys where there has been no precipitation for 50,000 years and Ss aw a mummified seal carcass there that was hundreds of miles from the ocean. Those were just a few experienced I had.
So they just discovered this, and global warning scientists are predicting global disaster?
Who's to say this isn't normal? How do they KNOW it isn't?
Not trying to poke a hole or be obstinate about this, I just would like the facts, and this is a newly discovered thing and they are already using it to justify their predictions when they really don't know what it is doing, why it is there?.....
Bears watching and study..... just stop with the speculations and fact less conclusions....
Yea,
oh thank Heaven for 7-11, till people (N Scientists) start Wa Wa ing about those silly little coin cides , ses me, open up, ones brain to the Fax, that know, numerous seemingly related Facts are occuring and being recorded, that might possibly support thousands of Other seemingly related fax, and it must be a Lie, based back, the entire way to obviously see, that numerous facts pointing towards and inferrence, have Never been known to correlate with a correlation.
And Correlations,m have never been known to be possibly assocoated with in any way truths, also sometimes, on the mediumrare occasion, that, without further scientific based evidence, one might be so silly , to assume , they might possibly be true ( Obviously not form CNN or the HEADS OF ALL OF OUR INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES for De Jesus Christs'n sake.
All i know, is when a slimy LYING POS POTUS says something that negates something belse, it's usually just more of that FAKE/HOAX Old "News" Fary Tail
yet again
So, how does this have anything to do with that?
Well,
they both begin with t h, R four lettered words, and...
oh , U mean between Trumpp N Climate Change...
Well, Your little post pessimistic eternally optimistic view, of something you apparently see as optimismul Pepto Bismall based on a novel idea, by Clarke Gristwall, seems the same sorta take as that there Trumppy fellow, X cept for the Grist (WALL) construction project under weigh, paid for by Mexico with enough extra for Trump, to part his heirs, while pardoning, the exceptional expressionless expression that last left an impression, on, the impressionable, ever since gravity discovered him.
Trumpp is a Science Denier
N
Your Take ?
it is a giant conspiracy....
conspired by bout 95% of the whirled re noun ed
eating dervishes while spinning like
a Top Trumpp Administrator.
Own your boy, he could possibly need an owner, asz his dawg is gonna lose this race2
from
possibly
his bass ackward in denial thinkin ism s
Dude, you are not way out in left field here, you're in the next county over...
that's because i play 'right' field,
the next county over...
I figured you for a short stop
hey, i thought we agreed not to mention that evening...
but, i digress like a window of E
gress, cause, i now see where i'm supposed to cause the confusion.
I play short stop, on my short n stought Yellow Bus where
where i often play short stop N go on the short little bus where i always keep gatting my tongue
stuck
to the open E gress windows, i lick
before jumpin, as the condensation nworks asz a lubricant, that Ken... speaking of Kent
Clarke barred from the bar, this huge void under Deicing is asz plain as the wings withoutsauce on an arrow, pointing at Clark Kent, aka SuperMan ( In Tights) as didn't the sun of Jarell what the hell, void out an icelandic space Temple Void of the Dog, where baby super man used to hang,
to asphyxiate all that was wrong with him
Okay, I can acknowledge a good comeback when I hear it. You got me there..
If you were to read the actual abstract to the paper, it is positing that this particular glacier is melting faster than ALL other glaciers. In other words, this glacier is an anomality. Do they know what is causing this void under it? I did not see anything to point to an actual cause. For all we know that particular void is the result of an undiscovered volcanic vent.
Anything is possible, but that is my conundrum, they publish this stuff with the hyperbolic titles related to human disaster without any real information to back up such a claim....
They don't know, don't make hyperbolic claims....
They really think we are idiots....
I'm still waiting for the catastrophic sea rise they promised us back in the '90's
Why, tax-paying Americans will be expected to carry the load for the world.
Isn't that how it always works?
What underlying issue? We are not even halfway through the current interglacial. And, those that are claiming this is not acting like previous interglacials are forgetting a major fact: We don't know how those interglacials actually acted. There are no hard accounts as to what happened and when it happened.
Actually, we do know how they behaved, from the ice cores. There is far more Co2 and soot in the younger ice cores, then in the older depths.
Well, you might wax philosophical about this, but I have children, who want children, so I don't feel that way.
The same way we do everything that we care about. We make it part of trade agreements.
You are making my point for me, Perrie. We don't know the temperatures, we only know some of the life forms that were around during them. We don't know how the ice formed in the previous Ice Ages and we only know some of how it melted due to places like the Great Lakes and the Appalachian Mountains which were partially eroded by the glaciers here in North America. We can only tell if there was heavy meteor activity and volcanism from the soot and gas levels but not really how the temperatures actually behaved on a day-by-day basis.
We do not have any clear picture of how this interglacial stacks up to other interglacials as we have specific measurements for this interglacial, but only proxies for the others that cannot really give us precise temperatures.
Tom,
The ice cores are a record of how long the ice period was, what was in the air, and that the temps were below freezing which translates into a global event. So we do know a lot about the interglacial periods from them because we can tell when the next ice period was and the remains of the interglacials are in those ice cores. It's straight up math for the times.
Here is a graph of what the cores show:
And, those are not day-by-day measurements, those are estimations that cover huge periods of time. Did you even bother to read the bottom timeline? It is split into thousands of years, not days. As I keep saying we know some GENERAL behaviors, not specifics.
Tom, what we know is that over the last 50 years that we have lost most of our ice worldwide. That isn't days, that is years and pretty rapid with only temps trending upward. There are much more accurate graphs out there than the one I posted.
hemorrhage from our orifices, I'd rather we release Godzilla.
plausible that? the hole formed last week? last year? last century? or the last millennium?
lots of things are plausible, some are even likely but few things are guaranteed in this world except for climate change.
(plant eaters need plants) "obviously, that ice has not always been there.
it has been both colder and hotter than it is now, many times in history. tell me why I should panic?
Because in the past, humans weren't affected as we will be now. Our coastal cities are at huge risk in the near future. During the Great Dying, there were no humans, so we didn't care
Did you know that humans had expanded out of Africa before the last ice age, and when the ice age happened, we were almost wiped out? Then we had a second expansion after the glaciers retreated.
Another interesting factoid is that scientists now think that our genocide of the Native Americans could have led to the "little ice age" - because it led to resurgence of forests which absorbed so much cO2 that it impacted the worldwide temperatures. Human activity can absolutely make a major impact on climate.
I firmly believe that humans are partly at fault for the rapidity of the warming this time around. But I also think we're still at the end of the ice age, and while we're greatly speeding up its impact, it would eventually happen anyway. If we had longer to adjust, would that make a difference? Maybe, but I don't know. I seriously doubt we'll be ready to populate any other planets (I personally would have no desire to live on, say, Mars in a bubble even if it were possible) and we'll keep breeding, so it's not like we'd actually convince people to move out of the coastal areas even if we had another thousand years. Man cannot beat Mother Nature in the long run.
A huge volcanic explosion would reduce the temperature ... but would also have other major repercussions.
If we survive long enough, eventually the continents will merge into one supercontinent again. Wouldn't that be interesting! In a Chinese proverb type of way interesting.
Humans are pretty adaptable and are spread so wide that I don't know if we'll ever go completely extinct, but I think a huge reduction in our population is inevitable at some point. Maybe that sounds defeatist, and I am in favor of trying to reduce our carbon footprint, but I think all that will do is buy us more time. It won't change the eventual outcome.
Katrix actually yes it was interesting, so I looked it up. Apparently it'll be about another 250 million years before the next one (Pangea Proxima) forms. Very cool.
We are actually in an ice age now. But it is supposed to be an interglacial period. It's not looking like interglacial periods before.
Gotta say that you are spot on about that Katrix. We are actually in an ice age, but it's an interglacial period. It's just way warmer than all other interglacial periods.
One piece of good news is that the sun will be entering a cooling period in 2020 lasting till 2070.
Mankind is very short-sighted. We have but one planet and we are poor care keepers.
Try reading current scientific articles. I know you usually find truth to be whacky, but the reforestation actually makes a lot of sense.
Third of Himalayan glaciers can no longer be saved: study
9 hours ago · “Global warming is on track to transform the frigid, glacier -covered mountain peaks of the Hindu Kush Himalayas cutting across eight countries to bare rocks in a little less than a century,” said Philippus Wester of the center, who led the report.
I wonder who those scientists are, since many scientists believe that the Little Ice Age started almost 2 centuries before Columbus found Cuba and didn't end until 1850. The Native American die-off occurred about 1500 to 1600 from most of the sources I have seen.
Short sighted? we are but fleas on the back of the world.....
We have but one planet and we are poor care keepers.
We could be much worse than we are now. Granted, manmade climate change will be our burden to bear, but we do go to extraordinary lengths to keep our environment clean. We don’t pee and crap in the streets, we manage stormwater for quantity and quality, we don’t allow potable wells in the vicinity of septic fields, etc. As a civil engineer I could go on and on about that, but the topic of manmade climate impacts are far broader than the civil engineering profession can address.
And yes, it does make sense based on what scientists have found.
"The alleged genocide is also not supported by any evidence."
Jesus H. Christ. It's estimated that by the time my ancestors came over just after the Mayflower, 95% of the indigenous people had died out due to the diseases the Europeans introduced. That's why it was so easy for us to take over. But no wonder you refuse to accept facts about the effects of deforestation or reforestation, when you can't even accept this basic fact. And you apparently never heard how many of those people lived farther east! Or in Central and South America, where the genocide started! And the diseases went ahead of where the Europeans went.
It's an arguable point. I consider it a genocide, as do many Native Americans, and many others; we do tend to change the meaning of words over time. Lots of people now consider the Irish Potato Famine to be a genocide by the English although they weren't deliberately killing the Irish; especially if they were the ones whose ancestors died or had to emigrate. I agree with you that the spread of disease was not deliberate at the time (actually, I don't think there is any actual evidence for the smallpox blanket myth - maybe a truer one is the deliberate slaughter of the buffalo by the Army).
But the point I was making to Wally is that the sheer number of deaths, whether or not you consider it a genocide, was at the right time to have contributed to the little ice age due to the reforestation of the Americas. Which I happen to find very interesting. Of course, that raises other questions, such as did the deforestation of Europe cause any climate change? Or was it too gradual?
No, we have to keep the cows from farting! Although it's hard to believe that cows fart more (or worse) than dogs.
I read that article but didn't even think about the climate change potential. I thought it was the methane in farts that contributed to global warming, not the hydrogen sulfide (which is why women's farts smell worse).
Then we are very destructive fleas spreading a disease, as fleas will do.
Hal,
Granted we could be worse, but we are pretty bad when we have oceans full of plastic garbage and chopping down our rain forests. I would hope as semi-intelligent life, we could get some stuff straight.
Not with Ignorance Ruling the Trumpp lower class t
eam.
who still h owl about the son changing into the loon who would moon a full monty
just with his pythons.
Science deniers and logic defiers were possibly defiled
in their youth
under the wrong geriatric gender, and not till out on a full bender, did they realize the changes needed, Depends on them, so please chenge em, and keep the change, Science defilers, file it like Trumppy, under Pedo, for pseudo science is what Trumppy has his lawyers do all the time... allt the time the ain't trying to figure out how to shut him the Fck up, and defending his incessant cess pool of Swamp Thingys gone wild
Who told you that ?
your optometrist ? or vet ?
,
I don't like fleas, i prefwer to turn n FIGHT
I'm not doing your research for you. You clearly have no clue about where Europeans first landed in the Americas.
Jamestown was at least 50 years before the Mayflower. And then there is evidence suggesting that the Vikings came to Northeastern Canada long before Columbus came to the West Indies
And St Augustine was over 40 years prior to Jamestown
Do you have the slightest idea why it has been warmer and cooler in the past? Did humans even exist then? What was the time frame? Do you know what a Milankovitch cycle is? AGW is blowing right through those cycles.
Probably the clearest explanation of it I've seen.
But I disagree that GW is going to change the cycle in any way.....
The cycle is macro environmental in scale, GW is micro in comparison...
What are yours?
There's a Hole In The Bottom of The Sea
(Traditional Folk Song)
There's a hole in the bottom of the sea,
There's a hole in the bottom of the sea,
There's a hole, there's a hole,
There's a hole in the bottom of the sea.
There's a log in the hole
In the bottom of the sea,
There's a log in the hole
In the bottom of the sea,
There's a log, there's a log,
There's a log in the hole
In the bottom of the sea.
There's a branch on the log in the hole
In the bottom of the sea,
There's a branch on the log in the hole
In the bottom of the sea,
There's a branch, there's a branch,
There's a branch on the log in the hole
In the bottom of the sea.
There's a bump on the branch on the log
In the hole in the bottom of the sea,
There's a bump on the branch on the log
In the hole in the bottom of the sea,
There's a bump, there's a bump,
There's a bump on the branch on the log
In the hole in the bottom of the sea.
There's a frog on the bump on the branch
on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea,
There's a frog on the bump on the branch
on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea,
There's a frog, there's a frog,
There's a frog on the bump on the branch
on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea.
There's a tail on the frog on the bump on the branch
on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea,
There's a tail on the frog on the bump on the branch
on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea,
There's a tail, there's a tail,
There's a tail on the frog on the bump on the branch
on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea.
There's a speck on the tail on the frog
On the bump on the branch
On the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea,
There's a speck on the tail on the frog
On the bump on the branch
on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea,
There's a speck, there's a speck,
There's a speck on the tail on the frog
On the bump on the branch on the log
In the hole in the bottom of the sea.
There's a fleck on the speck on the tail
On the frog on the bump on the branch
On the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea,
There's a fleck on the speck on the tail
On the frog on the bump On the branch
On the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea,
There's a fleck, there's a fleck,
There's a fleck on the speck on the tail
On the frog on the bump on the branch
On the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea.
Damn Buzz - Mom used to sing that song to all us young'n's back in the day - luv'd it then, luv it now.
Thanks.
I've got a question !
If:
" The cavity under Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is about six miles long and 1,000 feet deep "
which supposedly " represents the loss of 14 billion tons of ice" . ..… as the article notes …..
W hy did the sea not already rise to biblical levels ?
I know if you put a separate cube of ice in a glass of water that's already at a certain level in that glass, it will rise due to the added mass …... but when it melts, your glass of water doesn't rise more than it originally did when you put that separate Cube of Ice in it.
Just wondering !
I made that point on a forum about 15 years ago..... the GW claimers liked to take my head off......
Ice floats cause it is less dense than water, when it solidifies, it expands and takes up much more space.... it creates frost heaves in the roads and sidewalks, splits mountains apart.
Freezing water is very powerful..... yet in it's liquid state takes up a lot less space.....
They still haven't explained that one yet....
Bet it's all due to …………….. "weather extremes" …………... now !
For one, warm water takes up more space than cold water. And it's the glaciers which are above ground which, when they melt, cause sea levels to rise. It's pretty easy to explain.
yeah I understand, glaciers that are not already floating in water, but still we have yet to see the predicted floods.....
Can that be explained?
There has already been some rise in sea level. Over the last century, it's been 4 - 8 inches and some island people are already having to move. We have an island off the coast of Virginia, Tangier Island, that is already being noticeably impacted. The Marshall Islands are also being impacted. The rate of sea level rise has doubled in the last 20 years. The predicted floods aren't going to happen suddenly unless a more major event, such as the collapse of an ice shelf. Otherwise they'll be more gradual, although still at an increasing rate.
Oh, and now that there is less snow during the winter at the ice caps because it's warmer, there is less leveling off to balance the loss from the summer snow melts, so that's a third factor I had forgotten to mention.
Here's an interesting article about sea level rise since the end of the last Ice Age.
I don't Noah about that.
Not trying to detract from your article but I was reading some on the forecasted mini ice age by scientist.
So If we are having a mini Ice age at the same time as Global warming I guess everything will be just perfect.....
Well, that depends on how long it lasts for and if it shows up at all. One can hope.