Giant Ice Shelf Snaps 529
Popo writes "Sattelite images have revealed that an ancient 66 square-kilometer ice shelf, the size of 11,000 football fields, has snapped off from an island in Canada's arctic. The Ayles Ice Shelf was one of 6 major shelves remaining in Canada's arctic and is estimated to be over 3000 years old. The collapse was so powerful that earthquake monitors 250 km away picked up tremors. Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor."
Drinks all around! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe it was a climate change? The climate changes all the time for various reasons, some of which we know, and most of which we don't.
I get the feeling that when you see "climate change", you assume that somebody is trying to push an ideology(specifically, Global Warming). I don't think this is the case. It's a fact that there is climate change, and it's a fact that the current climate change includes a increase in temperature, but not everybody claims that this is a result of human civilization. Temperature can only change in two directions, so there's a 50/50 shot that temperatures rise instead of fall.
Moreover, these scientists never specifically target global warming as a factor in the climate change which they merely suspect as a cause for this collapse. Read the following:
The researchers suspect climate change may have played a role in the collapse but said they cannot definitively say it is a result of global warming.
Maybe the people who wrote the article are trying to push the ideology, but the scientists aren't. They're only claiming that the increase in temperature which we have observed might be responsible for the demise of ice. Seems reasonable, no?
Re:I can't wait..... (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't want to disappoint you, so I'll just say tut tut, this is not at all clearly attributable to global warming.
If it were, then it's clearly obvious that someone would have predicted it. Since no one did, then it can hardly
be attributable to this thing that you seem so sure of.
If you insist on attributing it to the result of carbon dioxide being blasted into the atmosphere at unprecedented
rates, then I'll have no choice but to ask why you have chosen to position yourself as an enemy of freedom and progress.
That's what the ultraconservative lunatics who happen to be politically savvy would do with you on a debate floor.
Seriously though, we're way past having any more "anti global warming types". Anybody who is "anti global warming"
is an absolute crackpot and should be treated as such. Don't even begin to give them their due, or acknowledge that
they can downplay anything. As soon as you see one open their mouth, just start pointing at them and laughing.
There are now enough of us that know what's going on that we'll join in.
Re:I can't wait..... (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh wait - it wasn't the LEFT that did that, was it? It's the extremes that are the problems. True liberals and true conservatives both care deeply about personal liberty.
Re:Sea Level? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to mean that we shouldn't be concerned about this however... If this sort of thing is happening, then sooner or later ice that IS on land will start melting... And while all of the north pole could melt with no change in sea level, (since it is floating) once Antarctica starts to go, (since it has land under it) that's when it's time to start seriously considering selling any beach front property you might own...
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
365 days per year, 150 years of temperature records, and a wild-ass assumption that a 10 degree variation is "normal" for a given day of the year.
Given those numbers, how many record high temperatures would this predict for 2007?
Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sea Level? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Holocene_
or, if you prefer a larger timescale:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:65_Myr_Climate
Oh wait, that question is so so hurtful. I must be paid by the oil firms or something.
Bring on the Buzz Words (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Because we all know (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, of course I do, otherwise I would not have posted the claim. Here is an example.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2004GL02138
"Evidence for subglacial water transport in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet through three-dimensional satellite radar interferometry"
I think the appropriate question here is, given that this is a well-documented and understood phenomenon, what are your political motives for questioning it?
It seems like an unlikely scenario in any case. Water doesn't exactly make a good lubricant for sub-freezing ice, it has terrible viscosity performance below 32F!
That is not the point. It has to do is have better viscocity performance than pure ice.
Do you live in the mountains or something? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sea Level? (Score:3, Interesting)
Say goodbye to Miami, most of southern Florida, a lot of Manhattan, and whatever is left of New Orleans.
Re:Do you live in the mountains or something? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Well... (Score:2, Interesting)
And correlating CO2 and temperatures is correlation. Perhaps there's more CO2 in the air when temperatures rise, post hoc ergo propter hoc error maybe?
Its all about perspective (Score:4, Interesting)
Or 1/50th the size of Rhode Island
Which one seems bigger to you?
Sad (Score:3, Interesting)
This doesn't cause me to doubt it exists, or that we've caused it. It causes me to doubt that anything will seriously change. Business As Usual.
This shelf detaching (and then refreezing later) is a potential for Greenland. If we get a sudden few feet in ocean water (unlike an ice shelf, Greenland's ice will move from land to ocean), then an extended European winter, mass fishing industry havoc and the economic ripples everywhere - it may wake everyone up.
Or it may not. History has shown that death itself is the most effective societal teacher.
Re:How much evidence do we need? (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, you're about 50 years behind the research. Global warming has been documented for over a century, and 50 years ago there was a lot of scientific debate over the causes. But two significant things have happened over the past several decades: The warming has accelerated rapidly, and scientific evidence has accumulated to the point that there's no longer scientific debate over the basic explanation (though there are still lots of fine details that will make for many dissertations).
The warming up to 50 years ago was probably mostly due to natural cycles, though human input had a small effect. The warming of the past few decades is not due to natural cycles; it is almost entirely due to human input. (Some models say that we cause around 110% of the warming; the planet should be cooling slightly now.
When I was a kid in the Seattle area back in the 50s, something I read repeatedly was that the general area (from northern California to mid British Columbia) had been cooling slightly for some decades, and local glaciers had grown longer. This was considered interesting because it was well known that most of the world was getting warmer. Nobody knew why that small area and a few others had been cooling. But around 1970, the cooling stopped, the glaciers started retreating, and the area joined the rest of the world's warming trend.
People who think this is something new to scientists simply haven't been paying attention. We do have much better data for the past 30 or 40 years, but there's enough data from previous centuries to make the story fairly clear. A lot of scientific work has been done examining the data and building theoretical models to explain the data. It's now difficult for scientists to go along with the desires of politicians to ignore the growing problem that's mostly of our own making. The "debate" now in scientific circles is over the fine details of what's happening to the planet.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
We have difinitive answers to few, if any of these questions. Until we do, screaming that we should *DO DOMETHING* no matter how stupid, costly, hazardous, ineffectual, and potentially damaging that something may be, is just political posturing, same as denial of facts is.