Roland Piquepaille writes "Ice has covered Greenland for millions of years. So what's hidden under this ice cap? Mountains and valleys? Rivers and lakes? Of course, we might know it sooner than we would have liked if the ice covering Greenland continues to melt. But researchers from Ohio State University have decided that they wanted to know it next year and have developed a radar to reveal views of land beneath polar ice. Their first tests of this new radar, which helps them to catch 3-D images of the ground under the ice, took place in May 2006. The next images will be shot in April 2007. Here are some images of the new GISMO device and what it can do."
We should leave the aliens alone. Finding out what's in Greenland is surely far more important than pissing money into space to find out what's under Jupiter's/Mars's/etc surface.
Just a Guess.. but maybe there is.. uh... green land under Greenlands ice caps?
Heh. Actually, we've known for a few decades that most of the interior is below sea level. Greenland is a big, backwards "C", with a ring of mountains around the edges and lower land inside. But when the ice melts, the land will slowly start rising, as has happened in Scandinavia, and there might be some dry land there in a couple thousand years.
And you should look up the history of the name "Greenland". It's a good example of what can be done with a dishonest marketing campaign. The Vikings that fell for it and settled there ended up all dying some time later, leaving behind only a few interesting archaeological sites. The smarter ones settled further south, despite the name "Iceland", so their descendants are still alive today.
This study will be interesting because it will give us details of the terrain under the ice. What we have now is the general contours showing that Greenland is a large bowl.
It's a well known fact Greenland is not only harboring terrorists under the ice cap, but also developing nuclear weapons and other means of mass-destructions. They are also suspect of being major factors in the climate change.
They must be invaded so the threat can be neutralized.
People taste Greenland beer in Copenhagen. The new beer is said to taste cleaner and smoother. A brewery in Greenland is producing beer using water melted from the ice cap of the vast Arctic island.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5234194.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Now if only the ice were getting thinner in Greenland, we'd have something to worry about. Unfortunately for you global warming scaremongers, that isn't the case. It seems the ice has been getting thicker in Greenland [sciencemag.org] over the past decade or so.
Now if only the ice were getting thinner in Greenland, we'd have something to worry about. Unfortunately for you global warming scaremongers, that isn't the case. It seems the ice has been getting thicker in Greenland [sciencemag.org] over the past decade or so.
Your link mentions a thickness increase in the interior only; there's a decrease on the margins. NASA says [nasa.gov]:
Greenland's low coastal regions lost 155 gigatons (41 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2003 and 2005 from excess melting and icebergs, while the high-elev
An unpublished study according to the link you provide. Really, I'd love to see that study, but all you've provided is an article in National Geographic. Of course, we can all remember National Geographic led the global cooling craze in 1975. But now, I suppose, they are an authoritative source. Much moreso than a peer reviewed scientific journal...
You can read the paper here [utexas.edu]. It was published in Science [sciencemag.org] on August 10, 2006. Abstract:
Using time-variable gravity measurements from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission, we estimate ice mass changes over Greenland during the period April 2002 to November 2005. After correcting for effects of spatial filtering and limited resolution of GRACE data, estimated total ice melting rate over Greenland is -239 ± 23 cubic kilometers per year, mostly from East Greenland. This estimate agrees remarkably well with a recent assessment of -224 ± 41 cubic kilometers per year, based on satellite radar interferometry data. GRACE estimates in southeast Greenland suggest accelerated melting since the summer of 2004, consistent with the latest remote sensing measurements.
What happens is that warming causes ice near the edges to melt. This dumps cold freshwater into the water nearby, disrupting warmer ocean currents. It also increases humidity. Due to the disrupted ocean currents, the prevailing winds go inland, taking the humid air with it. This gets dumped as snow in the middle, causing the central ice dome to increase. A similar effect occurs in Antartica, where the central ice dome is about 4ks thick.
As shown in the link you provided, _below_ 1500m, the average change was a shrinking of 2cm (+- 0.9cm). Yes, the overall effect was to increase the thickness of the ice dome, but the dome is definitely getting more pronounced.
What the models predict next, however, is that as the slope of the dome gets more steeper, it gets unstable. You then get large stress fractures occurring, and huge slabs - say, about the size of New York State - break off and slide down to the ocean. Fun stuff.
Also, there's ice and there's ice. Old ice is very dense - it's been compressed over thousands or even millions of years, and contains more water by volume than the newer ice being laid down above. The main contributor to this is that the new ice has a lot of gas dissolved into it, or caught in bubbles. What this means is you can melt a million cubic meters of old glacial ice to get a bit less than a million cubic meters of water. However, the same volume of water (a bit less than a million cubic meters) falls as about 3 million cubic meters of snow inland, which gets packed down to about 1.5 million cubic meters of new ice. So, yes, the _volume_ of ice over Greenland is increasing, but the quantity of water in that ice is decreasing.
*sigh* Global warming is not quite that simple, and frankly you're either an idiot or a troll. What global warming means is that there is more energy in the weather systems of the world. That energy gets expressed as more _extreme_ temperature. The snow storms in Denver [nytimes.com] at the moment are just as much a symptom of global warming as the heat waves in Europe were in summer.
The weather is a vast engine that pumps heat energy around the globe. Global warming will result in this engine becoming unstable. One aspec
We all know that the previous hot periods were caused by Dinosaur farts (http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNe ws/20061030/klein_quotes_061030/20061031/).
The Greek philosopher Pythagoras advised against eating beans, so the the Medieval hot period must have been due to the Viking's inability to read Greek.
They didn't get too far from the coast, or they might have realized the error.
You know the first rule of Medieval Warm Period Club? Don't talk about the Medievel Warm Period. The Global Warming people don't have an explanation for it (reverses the direction of the Hockey Stick), nor the fact that Mars has been warming up, so they want us to just... LOOK! Britney Spears' coochie!
The medieval warming period followed the so-called "mini-Ice Age" of the 12th century. During this period, the Black Forest in Europe shrunk to smaller than its current size - all due to people cutting down wood for fires. These fires significantly increased the carbon in the atmosphere. The planet warmed up as a result, slowly but at a sustained rate for over a century. The Black Forest later grew back and the carbon was taken out of the air.
These fires significantly increased the carbon in the atmosphere. The planet warmed up as a result
I'm having a bit of trouble swallowing this causal link here... there is no WAY burning even the entire black forest could cause such a pronounced and rapid change, sorry. Vulcanism has a far greater effect than what you propose, and we're not even sure if vulcanism is directly responsible.
That doesn't really reassure me. Anyone who's lived in a particularly cold climate can tell you that precipitation increases as it gets warmer (given sufficiently cold temperatures), and tends to lessen as it gets very cold, due to the air's inability to hold as much moisture at lower temperatures; it could be that the increased depth of the ice pack in the interior is a direct result of increased snowfall due to warmer atmospheric conditions. That would be rather consistent with increased snowfall in the interior (hence deepening of the ice) and melting at the edges.
I don't know for sure if that's the case, but the fact that the ice depth is increasing in the interior doesn't necessarily refute climate change. It's certainly not an open-and-shut case.
I don't have to argue. The information is provided in the article I linked to. It's very simple. The average thickness over the entirety of Greenland has increased 54 cm (21 inches) in a recent 11 year period. Is there anything else that you cowards would like to add?
First up nobody disputes there has been increased snowfall in Greenland's interior, in fact it was predicted by climate models.
Second, there have been more comprehensive and more recent studies from the GRACE sattelites [nasa.gov], seen in the citation record at the bottom of your link. Also note in the GRACE mission statement that NASA purposfully designed the sattelites to measure the "exchanges between ice sheets or glaciers and the oceans".
Third, Johanessen et al. came to the best conclusion using the data t
Thanks! Regarding your sig, do you know what happened to the censored pages on Saudi Arabia ( cut from the CIA's annual report shortly after 9/11 )? It's been bugging me ever since I heard it.
A median ice growth average over such a large landmass is a pointless statistic.
If it rains all year in Washington yet there's a severe drought in Oklahoma, the national average could be the same as if there was normal rainfall in both locations.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics"
Maybe that is why atleast in the North-Eastern part of USA, we have had a wet Christmas instead of a white one.
Having grown up in the Northeast I'd like to know when it is that we've ever had a white Christmas. In fact, a few years ago I read something about how contrary to the expectation that we should get snow on Christmas very few parts of the country actually see snow on a consistent basis for the holiday. I don't remember the percentage exactly, but it was quite high.
I do not want to hear about global warming as the cause of all the melting ice in Greenland if we're going over there and effectively microwaving the place to get pretty pictures of what's underneath.
shouldn't any mountain ranges be pretty well worn down by now? Scandinavia doesn't have any huge mountains due to the ice ages, so I'd imagine that the same goes for Greenland.
The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws. There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped disks; and strange beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath. There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer gigantism. The general type of mirage was not unlike some of the wilder forms observed and drawn by the arctic whaler Scoresby in 1820, but at this time and place, with those dark, unknown mountain peaks soaring stupendously ahead, that anomalous elder-world discovery in our minds, and the pall of probable disaster enveloping the greater part of our expedition, we all seemed to find in it a taint of latent malignity and infinitely evil portent.
Likely? No... but if it happened it might make certian people reconsider that greenhouse gas/climate change tradeoff issue.:)
Real Estate. I thought Greenland was owned by Denmark, but apparently it's autonomous now. AFAIK, nobody has surveyed the land, and even if the ice melted today it would probably be a nasty unstable place for a while, but you know some Lex Luthor type has to be smacking his lips at the prospect of an ice sheet collapse and a temperate polar climate.
to start building condos? With Florida and most of the current coastal land under water there's going to be a big demand for new coastal land. Personally I think it's all a scam and Trump is behind the survey and they are really dividing the island into lots. Just watch, there'll be prime lots for sale on Ebay any day now. They're starting to run out of desert and swamp land to sell so Greenland would be a perfect spot for retirement property for Gen Xers.
The article makes Greenland seem like a woman and the ice seem like a bra. So far, I can most certainly tell you that whatever is under the ice are not bags of sand.
I would like to just suggest a link to Roland Piquepailles blog somewhere where those who are interested can click. And *no more articles please*
I read/. to get real news and facts, and see discussions from people with insight. Roland Piquepailles submissions has not met this criterium. Did this article tell you what lies under greenlands ice?
You should mod this up if you agree or mod away as flamebait/offtopic/troll if you dont agree, but at least mod it.
Make it so they can be disabled on the "Customize Stories on the Homepage" part of the user prefs. Seriously, how many Piquepaille blogspams are there compared to Apache stories? Personally, I'd leave them on, but the icon or whatever would be a warning - even though there's usually no substance to the "story", sometimes there are worthwhile posts within the comments. Hopefully, this would also improve said comments, since complaints about these blog posts would no longer be justified.
a lot like the terrain on Baffin Island, another arctic island which underwent intense glaciation in the last ice age - and emerged from it due to slightly milder climate. This picture [umass.edu] of Mount Asgard on Baffin Island is likely quite representative of what would be under Greenland's ice. Minus, of course, the moss/lichen/pioneer plants.
They started doing the The Ohio State University thing because of the legal battle they lost with my alma mater (Ohio University). OSU was trying to just use Ohio for a lot of their stuff, and OU had the rights to it (Ohio University was founded in 1804 and was the first college in the Northwest Territory).
The legislature ought to just merge OSU and OU and shut them both up for good, firing any administrators who don't like it. The "THE" thing is one of the dumbest things going.
Aliens! (Score:3, Funny)
Would you close the damned door so they don't get in.
Maybe.... (Score:2, Insightful)
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That should work, worked for M. Night.
Re:Just a guess.. (Score:5, Informative)
Heh. Actually, we've known for a few decades that most of the interior is below sea level. Greenland is a big, backwards "C", with a ring of mountains around the edges and lower land inside. But when the ice melts, the land will slowly start rising, as has happened in Scandinavia, and there might be some dry land there in a couple thousand years.
And you should look up the history of the name "Greenland". It's a good example of what can be done with a dishonest marketing campaign. The Vikings that fell for it and settled there ended up all dying some time later, leaving behind only a few interesting archaeological sites. The smarter ones settled further south, despite the name "Iceland", so their descendants are still alive today.
This study will be interesting because it will give us details of the terrain under the ice. What we have now is the general contours showing that Greenland is a large bowl.
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Totally required (Score:5, Funny)
I thought everyone knew.. (Score:5, Funny)
Underneath sovereign territory (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Underneath sovereign territory (Score:5, Funny)
They must be invaded so the threat can be neutralized.
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In other news: Greenland ice cap beer launched (Score:3, Interesting)
Nice. Now if only... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Your link mentions a thickness increase in the interior only; there's a decrease on the margins. NASA says [nasa.gov]:
Re:Nice. Now if only... (Score:4, Informative)
You can read the paper here [utexas.edu]. It was published in Science [sciencemag.org] on August 10, 2006. Abstract:
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Re:Nice. Now if only... (Score:5, Informative)
What happens is that warming causes ice near the edges to melt. This dumps cold freshwater into the water nearby, disrupting warmer ocean currents. It also increases humidity. Due to the disrupted ocean currents, the prevailing winds go inland, taking the humid air with it. This gets dumped as snow in the middle, causing the central ice dome to increase. A similar effect occurs in Antartica, where the central ice dome is about 4ks thick.
As shown in the link you provided, _below_ 1500m, the average change was a shrinking of 2cm (+- 0.9cm). Yes, the overall effect was to increase the thickness of the ice dome, but the dome is definitely getting more pronounced.
What the models predict next, however, is that as the slope of the dome gets more steeper, it gets unstable. You then get large stress fractures occurring, and huge slabs - say, about the size of New York State - break off and slide down to the ocean. Fun stuff.
Also, there's ice and there's ice. Old ice is very dense - it's been compressed over thousands or even millions of years, and contains more water by volume than the newer ice being laid down above. The main contributor to this is that the new ice has a lot of gas dissolved into it, or caught in bubbles. What this means is you can melt a million cubic meters of old glacial ice to get a bit less than a million cubic meters of water. However, the same volume of water (a bit less than a million cubic meters) falls as about 3 million cubic meters of snow inland, which gets packed down to about 1.5 million cubic meters of new ice. So, yes, the _volume_ of ice over Greenland is increasing, but the quantity of water in that ice is decreasing.
Here's an paper from the same March 2006 issue of Science [sciencemag.org] that describes the process.
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What global warming means is that there is more energy in the weather systems of the world. That energy gets expressed as more _extreme_ temperature. The snow storms in Denver [nytimes.com] at the moment are just as much a symptom of global warming as the heat waves in Europe were in summer.
The weather is a vast engine that pumps heat energy around the globe. Global warming will result in this engine becoming unstable. One aspec
Must have been beans... (Score:2)
That's why they called it GREENland (Score:3, Funny)
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I'm having a bit of trouble swallowing this causal link here... there is no WAY burning even the entire black forest could cause such a pronounced and rapid change, sorry. Vulcanism has a far greater effect than what you propose, and we're not even sure if vulcanism is directly responsible.
Warmer air might mean more snow. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know for sure if that's the case, but the fact that the ice depth is increasing in the interior doesn't necessarily refute climate change. It's certainly not an open-and-shut case.
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There, fixed it for you.
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Second, there have been more comprehensive and more recent studies from the GRACE sattelites [nasa.gov], seen in the citation record at the bottom of your link. Also note in the GRACE mission statement that NASA purposfully designed the sattelites to measure the "exchanges between ice sheets or glaciers and the oceans".
Third, Johanessen et al. came to the best conclusion using the data t
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Re:Even nicer... AC responses. (Score:4, Insightful)
If it rains all year in Washington yet there's a severe drought in Oklahoma, the national average could be the same as if there was normal rainfall in both locations.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics"
Parent
Re:Nice. Now if only... (Score:5, Interesting)
Having grown up in the Northeast I'd like to know when it is that we've ever had a white Christmas. In fact, a few years ago I read something about how contrary to the expectation that we should get snow on Christmas very few parts of the country actually see snow on a consistent basis for the holiday. I don't remember the percentage exactly, but it was quite high.
Parent
Just for the record... (Score:3, Funny)
Ehm (Score:2, Interesting)
What I think would be cool under Greenland (Score:5, Interesting)
Likely? No... but if it happened it might make certian people reconsider that greenhouse gas/climate change tradeoff issue.
Book? (Score:2)
http://www.amazon.com/Deception-Point-Dan-Brown/d
Oh wait, that was the North Pole. My bad!
Real Estate (Score:2)
Real Estate. I thought Greenland was owned by Denmark, but apparently it's autonomous now. AFAIK, nobody has surveyed the land, and even if the ice melted today it would probably be a nasty unstable place for a while, but you know some Lex Luthor type has to be smacking his lips at the prospect of an ice sheet collapse and a temperate polar climate.
What's hidden? (Score:3, Funny)
You all got it wrong (was:What's hidden?) (Score:2)
Queue debate over what happens when ice melts. (Score:2)
Is it too early ....... (Score:2)
Penguins! (Score:2)
A Great Mystery (Score:3, Funny)
Puhleease: Put Roland Piquepaille blog elsewhere (Score:4, Insightful)
I read
Roland Piquepailles submissions has not met this criterium. Did this article tell you what lies under greenlands ice?
You should mod this up if you agree or mod away as flamebait/offtopic/troll if you dont agree, but at least mod it.
Just give them a section or author setting (Score:3, Interesting)
Vikings (Score:2)
It's probably... (Score:3, Interesting)
Been there, done that. (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.athropolis.com/arctic-facts/fact-ice-c
This planet was once warm in the past. It is warming up again despite our human influence.
FYI, the planet is going to get cold again when it adjusts.
Enjoy,
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They've been bitchy about it ever since.
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Swi
Re:Since this is a Roland P. Slashdot story (Score:5, Funny)
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$.01 or
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