Huge Pool of Ice-Free Water Discovered Under Greenland Ice 135
The BBC reports that researchers have discovered a huge pool of meltwater beneath Greenland's ice sheet, trapped "in the air space between particles of ice, similar to the way that fruit juice stays liquid in a slush drink."
From the article, based on research published in Nature Geoscience (abstract): "The scientists say the water is prevented from freezing by the large amounts of snow that fall on the surface of the ice sheet late in the summer. This insulates the water from the air temperatures which are below freezing, allowing the water to persist as liquid all year long. Other researchers believe this discovery may help explain disparities between projections of mass loss by climate models and observations from satellites."
And It's Our Fault (Score:1)
Hrrrmph.
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There is only one thing to do.
Pump it out, bottle it, and sell it.
Then use the resulting cavern to hold raw sewage. Maybe with a little radioactive waste thrown in for good measure.
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Nooo! Radioactive waste is warm, it would melt the ice ;)
You could pump the water out and allow it to freeze on the surface. Cover the damn thing with solar panels - less sun to reach the surface and melt the ice.
Water usually falls through cracks and lubricates the ground beneath the glaciers.
If we can remove the water maybe they won't slide into the ocean, and won't raise sea levels?
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They're melting at a ridiculous rate, all that water *will* end up in the ocean unless we somehow halt global warming in it's tracks. Given that, it seems like a waste of resources trying to just buy a few more years.
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No it is just an obvious ploy from those LiBeRaL scientists to back track on their global warming "Science" so they can continue to leach off of hard working Americans money, so they work rich and without impunity in the Education Commune.
Hey that sounds pretty good, I could be a conservative radio host. I don't need to agree with, or have any fact to back up the stuff I spew, just a sweet gig.
Technolog (Score:5, Insightful)
Given our current level of technology, I'm always amazed when we discover large scale things like this. We have out cities mapped and photographed down to the meter, but we keep finding things like this.
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Well, the UEO won't be formed for another 4 years. SeaQuest is even further off. We've barely scratched the surface of our marble's trademark blue.
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Who wants to look down through the layer of crap we have put on top of the ocean's?
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On top of the ocean's what...?
There's a word missing from your sentence.
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Surface???
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Just another example of Man thinking he has everything figured out only to be made a fool of by nature.
Re:Technolog (Score:4, Funny)
We generally don't even need nature. We seem to do a fine job on our own.
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Well, I must admit that insulting mankind in general *is* probably a good start to getting modded "Troll".
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You should pop on over to a 'Clarity Clarence' meme generator with that one.
Re:Technolog (Score:5, Informative)
Funny thing is, we have Ice Core Samples [noaa.gov] from all over Greenland, in Multiple Different Databases [noaa.gov] and they have all missed (or misinterpreted) this data for decades. Some of these were 2000 meters deep. In addition there were dye experiments in some areas.
So it is sort of a surprise that we had no hint of this.
Re:Technolog (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah...Good thing they weren't using them to publish information that's at the core of some public policy or something.
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Water has a lower melting temperature at high pressure. If anything this suggests that the consequences of glacial melting have been underestimated. You don't deserve mod points for implying or making bogus generalizations.
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it's just the size of ireland. entirely possible to miss it on random sampling.
besides, if you're looking for ice cores you want places where there isn't a reservoir at any point in the yearly cycle down there....
somehow finding water under ice in my book doesn't qualify as the nature making a fool out of the man. and that temperatures in and under the ice and/or snow are higher than the air temp in the arctic in the winter? holy shit call the inuit press quick!
like the juice in a snow cone? like slush in a
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From TFA
The scientists have also come up with a rough estimate for the amount of water that is contained in the aquifer which itself covers an area of 70,000 sq km.
Greenland ice melt The researchers drilled in areas with large accumulations of snow on the surface
They believe that it holds roughly 140 billion tonnes of water, which is the equivalent to 0.4mm of sea level rise per year - about half of what Greenland contributes to the sea every year.
Re:Technolog (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not surprised. It's science, you keep looking and you keep finding new and interesting things. It's not possible to know everything instantly and Greenland is a remote and expensive place to study.
This water is in the firn [wikipedia.org] which occurs down to a depth of around 50 meters [nationalgeographic.com] before the weight of snow above compresses it to glacial ice which can't hold water like firn. The top of the water table is generally less than 25 meters under the surface (see Figure 2 [nature.com]) and can't be deeper than about 50. These aquifers were found in the far south of Greenland near the coast, one of the warmer areas of Greenland. It's unknown as yet if they exist elsewhere but now they know to look for them. I imagine the further north you get the more difficult it would be for them to form.
So you wouldn't likely see this except possibly at the very top of a 2,000 meter+ ice core. Most of those ice cores are drilled from far higher elevations and further north where it doesn't melt much even in summer so there is little water to begin with and in any case the colder temperatures probably cause water that forms to refreeze near the surface. In order for this water/firn mixture to coexist the temperature has to be just right and it wouldn't take much to tip the balance one way or another. If it tipped to warmer I imagine it could lead to rapid collapse of the snow field but we'll just have to wait and see what happens.
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In this case it's probably just you. Rather than attack my sources why don't you attack my information?
For simple noncontroversial things like the definition of the term "firn" Wikipedia is about as good as anything. I felt the need to provide the reference since firn is not a common word in everyday conversation.
After spending a half hour searching for information about how deep the snow had to get before it became glacial ice I found lots of papers and such that said, "When the snow gets deep enough it
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Ice (and s
Re:Technolog (Score:5, Insightful)
Just another example of Man thinking he has everything figured out only to be made a fool of by nature.
Who claims to know everything? Certainly no scientist does. If they knew everything they wouldn't have anything to figure out and figuring out "how life, the universe and everything" work is the what science is about.
Re:Technolog (Score:4, Insightful)
Who claims to know everything? Certainly no scientist does.
Don't worry. Just another example of One Man making a sweeping claim, only to be made a fool of by the Wisdom of Slashdot.
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Note carefully the difference between knowing *something* and knowing *everything*. Consider the implications of each claim and prepare an essay comparing and contrasting them. This will be 5% of your overall grade, and it WILL be on the test.
Re:Technolog (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they believe they know *something*: That the planet *is* warming at an alarming rate, and that human produced CO2 is the forcing factor. Basically all the data collected to date corroborates this, and so that much is considered settled. The exact *implications* of those facts is still very much up in the air. We know the ice caps will melt, that's firmly within the error bars on the model. The exact speed at which it happens, the implications thereof, and the various confounding factors that may arise along the way, *that* is all still very much under examination.
Consider an example - we have a pretty good model of gravity - so if I throw a baseball with a given speed and direction we can model the exact parabolic path it would follow in a vacuum, and that will give us a pretty good idea of where it will land. For a better model we'll have to factor in air resistance and wind velocity, which will give us a much more accurate guess, but still not be perfectly accurate. Then we'd need to factor in any spin on the ball. We could find the exact local gravity (which fluctuates by almost 1% over the Earth's surface) and get even more accurate. If we had a sufficiently detailed weather model (or a large sealed room) we could factor in the fluctuations in air velocity over the course of the balls path. We could even model the exact surface features of the ball and how they influence it's movement as the air drags across it. It *still* wouldn't be completely accurate, but would probably be accurate to within some fraction of an inch. Provided I don't hit a passing bird and totally disrupt the prediction (a totally unexpected major confounding factor) For most purposes though that initial "ball in a vacuum" estimate, with sufficient error bars, is perfectly servicable.
With climate science we're still kind at the level of trying to take the ball's spin into account. There are lots of variables still not understood, and there may even be some giant major confounding factors that end up giving us a "get out of jail free" card. (Aliens swoop in to save us? Rush Limbaugh's head implodes and sucks all the excess hot air out of the world?) The core of the matter though is that, to the limits of our current understanding we are actively creating a situation that is going to have a really drastic impact on our planet's ability to continue supporting us, and the sooner we start facing the problem the cheaper and less severe it will be to make sure we can still support at least a couple billion people by the end of the century. We could have started changing our behaviors 50 years ago to almost completely avoid it, but back then all we had was a crude theory easily dismissed by vested interests. Now we're starting to see the first obvious (to the layman) undeniable signs that the theory was correct, and have fleshed it out to be ever more accurate. Yet people still want to deny that our actions are causing a problem.
Look at it this way - if I were to propose that we restructure our society because in the next fifty years some major confounding factor will be discovered in our theory of gravity that will allow for cheap and simple levitation, you would think I was nuts. Yet when people say we should continue on with business as usual because surely some unexpected confounding factor in climate science will make everything okay, somehow that's okay?
Re:Technolog (Score:4, Interesting)
Just another example of Man thinking he has everything figured out only to be made a fool of by nature.
Except Man doesn't think that he has everything figured out. This is even mentioned in the summary:
Other researchers believe this discovery may help explain disparities between projections of mass loss by climate models and observations from satellites.
Researchers knew that the models did not match what was happening and didn't know why. In fact, you can tell that they don't think that they know it all by seeing how they state their margins of error (which takes into account that there might be things that they don't know). Hell, even when they try to sound certain they can't quite bring themselves to stating things in terms of absolutes (hence the IPCC report saying that it was 95% certain that climate change was man made).
And think about it, if scientists came out and said that they had discovered everything that there was to know then they would be putting themselves out of a job.
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And think about it, if scientists came out and said that they had discovered everything that there was to know then they would be putting themselves out of a job.
"Climate change is the biggest issue for us to face this century. It's man made. The science is done. It's complete. It's a matter of political understanding." - Sir David King, UK Government's Chief Scientist, giving evidence to House of Lords select committee (March 2004)
I'm not arguing with you, I'm on your side. Just pointing out that not all scientists have the intellectual honesty we expect.
Trend versus details (Score:1)
Is that a clear and polite enough response to your "intellectual honesty" accusation of lying? Do you even understand that it is an accusation of lying or are you just a parrot repeating propaganda that you have heard?
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Obviously intended to mean the exact same thing but with an option to weasel out by pretending to be too stupid to notice. There's no point pretending such a direct attack is not.
Instead of arguing about the analogy (Score:2)
It is not overstating the case because the trend is even more obvious now than when a conclusive report about it was placed on President Johnson's desk. The exact details of how and why are less obvious.
It's as if you are arguing against the effect of gravity just because we don't know the details about how it happen
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Just another example of Man thinking he has everything figured out only to be made a fool of by nature.
History shows again and again how nature points up the folly of man.
Re:Technolog (Score:5, Interesting)
We're not very good at looking through solid substances yet. Not only don't we know what's under the Greenland ice, we don't even know what's under many of our cities. For example, construction of the Thessaloniki metro recently discovered an entire Roman city center [bbc.co.uk] buried beneath the modern-day city center. In limited cases you can find some of this kind of stuff with ground-penetrating radar [wikipedia.org], but in general mapping out stuff that's covered by solid dirt/ice/etc. is not easy, even in the 21st century.
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Re:Technolog (Score:5, Funny)
Google Subterrain was voted out by focus groups. The troglodyte minority was trounced by those smug hipsters with their Earth and Streetview apps.
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And let scientists and astronomers think they can determine the chemical composition of a planet 10K light years away, how many moons it has surrounding it, and how old it is or readily explain in detail some cluster of mass or light from 3 billions years ago. Yeah. You have to justify that equipment and education and job you have I assume. Meanwhile on earth there is a huge moving target of when different versions of people first appeared, why dinosaurs went extinct and no one knows with any accuracy w
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And let scientists and astronomers think they can determine the chemical composition of a planet 10K light years away, how many moons it has surrounding it, and how old it is or readily explain in detail some cluster of mass or light from 3 billions years ago.
These are easier targets because we are directly observing them. Predicting weather in 5 days is about that level of difficulty too. We probably have figured out why bees are dying, we just don't know it yet.
And while we don't know why whales beach themselves, we do know why most human boats do - because they weren't where they thought they were, because they weren't aware of local conditions, or because they didn't have the ability to avoid grounding themselves. That's probably why whales beach themselv
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As far as the bees are concerned we seem to have figured out at least one of the major causes: Roundup. Nicitinoid based insecticides are known particularly lethal to bees, and supposedly colony collapse has now been fairly well correlated with Roundup usage in the bees foraging areas. Granted that's no guarantee of causation, but when the bees return after eliminating the Roundup it certainly is a strong indicator. I heard just the other day that Monsanto has for the first time actually been found liable
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Suggesting they didn't notice the water depth would seem to be suggesting that something has severely impaired their sonar.
And there we go. I suspect it wouldn't be that hard to come up with ways, both natural and man-made which could impair whales' sonar.
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Actually we do know why the bees are dying, just stop looking to media types who are just looking for an alarmist story, large ag buisnesses looking for subsidies, or acedemics looking for grants to get answers (we don't know yet but if you give us more money I'm sure we can find out).
Go talk to a freaking beekeeper already if you really want to know what is going on. There is no on
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Why are you amazed? Our science can barely explain what's going on in your own body, much less entire biospheres. I've no doubt that we eventually will have the science down, but the difference between what we do know and what we don't know should never be a surprise.
Water to be the new Oil? (Score:1)
So when the worldwide population multiplies, will water be the new oil?
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The only difference between salty wateer and fresh water is energy - we just need to harness fusion power.
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While noble in intent, there is a major problem with most charities as well, especially those that target the immediate, obvious needs like food: by artificially increasing the available food supply you increase the population that can be sustained, and the population will grow until it hits the new limits. Limits which now *require* charity in order to be maintained. An influx of free resources also undermines local markets, thus reducing the sustainable carrying capacity of the society even further. Ba
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You mean, a thing that there is plenty of that we're constantly being told is just years away from being completely gone?
Re:Water to be the new Oil? (Score:5, Informative)
There's lots of fresh water on the planet (including all the fresh water stored as ice). The problem is getting to a place where it's useful. Most places have to make do with the fresh water that's available locally. A notable exception being Southern California which imports water from the north and from the Colorado River. I doubt you'll find knowledgeable people saying fresh water would be completely gone (except perhaps for some overtaxed aquifers). Instead they are saying there will be more demand for fresh water than there is supply available to fill that demand in the future. Getting fresh water from Greenland to any place useful would be difficult and expensive.
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they keep saying that, but the one's that keep yelling it the loudest are usually running a water investment scam.
I got some fresh water to sell to you... ... ... the only catch is that the water is in Finland. just figure out how to move it to sahara cheaper than drilling the water there and you'll make a bundle! promise!
Right (Score:3)
Sorta like the bulk of the oceans remain liquid under the ice that forms in the northern oceans.
Re:Right (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't that a result of the salinity keeping it from freezing?
Anyways, we have seen supercooling effects like this in the past where the pressure involved allows water to remain below it's freezing point. It's the theory behind an ice dam in the Midwest US that caused a lot of the geographical markings when it burst. I don't really see anything extraordinary here as apposed to theories in history. It's just that is is happening right now in front of us. Water does have that quality, under pressure, it raises the boiling point and can lower the point which it will actually freeze.
Re:Right (Score:5, Informative)
it's not true that subsurface water in the Arctic ocean isn't freezing: it is, continually. What salinity does is disrupt the phase equilibrium between liquid and solid so the water phases between solid and liquid at a faster rate than the liquid phasing to solid, ergo the mass remains a liquid. That's only considering salinity. Absent pressure at depth, the entire ocean would be a block of ice right now, but see my other post in this thread (here [slashdot.org]) as to the other reason the Arctic ocean is liquid.
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Absent pressure at depth, the entire ocean would be a block of ice right now
And the heat from the Sun and Earth which is the real reason the oceans are liquid.
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Not necessarily, Europa doesn't have the internal heat of the earth (though it probably does have a significant amount) and definitely doesn't get as much energy from the sun yet there is liquid water under the ice. Pressure does change the temperature at which water will turn to ice.
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Not necessarily, Europa doesn't have the internal heat of the earth (though it probably does have a significant amount) and definitely doesn't get as much energy from the sun yet there is liquid water under the ice. Pressure does change the temperature at which water will turn to ice.
Europa experiences considerable tidal heating from Jupiter.
The thing here is that without heating, anything planet-sized will cool rapidly to near the cosmic microwave background temperature, which is just under 3K currently. There simply isn't enough pressure on Earth or Europa to make a significant difference.
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You're going to have to find a shitload more geothermal energy than is currently evident to backup your hypothesis before it can be taken seriously. Another question to answer is why would there all of a sudden be more geothermal energy flux under the arctic ocean to cause the current melting?
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Even on Greenland there isn't enough heat flux from below to cause this. The water is in the firn and generally less than 50 meters below the surface (because the firn changes to solid ice below that level from the weight of snow above it). The water is undoubtedly sitting on top of glacial ice, not bedrock (unless the depth of the snow is less than 50 m).
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whoosh (Score:5, Informative)
...said the physics teacher.
Under pressure, the freezing point of water is lowered. The more pressure, the lower the ice point. To demonstrate:
Assume that a container is indestructible (let's say, a sphere with a perfect seal). It is full of water with no gas in solution or loose in bubbles or anything like that. Just pure water. Now, stick it in a deep freeze. Wait.
Water has the odd property of expanding at around 4C at normal (sea level) pressure. By the time it freezes at 0C under those same pressure conditions, it has expanded to fill 1/8 more volume than it did as a liquid. This is why icebergs float. This is why distilled water ice cubes also float. The liquid water does its thing and... you know the rest. Titanic.
The water in the sphere is prevented from freezing for the simple reason that it has nowhere to go. It has no space to expand into. If it cannot expand, it cannot freeze. How low can you go? I have no idea, having no access to magnetocaloric equipment. But I daresay, you wouldn't meet the conditions required to get the volume of water to contract to the point where it can solidify in the available space, outside of a suitably equipped laboratory or in the shadow of an outer planet.
Further reading suggests temperatures approaching/lower than about 70K (-203C) to achieve this. Further reading [lsbu.ac.uk].
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just thought of a practical experiment (one I did at school, actually), assuming you have access to a walk-in freezer (or my living room which is perishing cold right now because my heating's been off a couple days. Failing that, a domestic freezer):
Take 1 ice cube, two one-ounce lead weights, and a length of copper wire or fishing line. Tie the weights together with the wire/line with a space of about four inches between the two weights, and put the assembly across the ice so the wire rests on the ice and
Re:whoosh (Score:4, Informative)
The melting point of water is reduced by 0.007 K per atmosphere of pressure. The effect is of only minor significance, because it is so small. People almost always overestimate it.
If you put water in a real container (as opposed to something indestructible) and put it in the freezer, it will not stay liquid. Instead, it will happily freeze. In doing so it will expand the container, possibly bursting it. To keep the water liquid at just -7 C, you need a container that can withstand 1000 atmospheres, which probably requires a steel pressure vessel. According to the site you linked, there is no pressure sufficient to keep water liquid below -22 degrees.
The pressure under the ice in Greenland is probably about 300 atm at the most (based on the weight of 3 km of ice), so the freezing point is only about 2.1 degrees lower at the bottom than at the top. If there really is pure liquid water at the bottom, that can't be explained purely by regelation. It also has to be quite warm (-2.1 C) at the bottom.
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from the same page (I guess you missed it and decided to ignore my static assumption of a vessel whose volume cannot change):
"If the increase in volume on freezing is prevented, an increased pressure of up to 25 MPa may be generated in water pipes; easily capable of bursting them in Winter. An interesting question concerns what would happen to water cooled below 0 C within a vessel that cannot change its volume (isochoric cooling). Clearly if ice forms, its increased volume causes an increase in pressure wh
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I believe these aquifers are sitting on top of glacial ice not rock since below about 50 meters the firn turns to solid ice from the weight of snow above. By definition the glacial ice would be below freezing.
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Hey, I didn't know about it until I went and read the abstract and found (from Figure 2) that the top of the water table was only about 20 meters under the surface. Then I spent 20 minutes tracking down how deep the snow has to get before the firn turns to solid glacial ice and found it's at around 50 meters. So the water had to be above that. That's what I love about science, learning new things and increasing my understanding of the world.
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This insulates the water from the air temperatures which are below freezing, allowing the water to persist as liquid all year long
So the reason it doesn't freeze is because it's not cold enough. No other explanation needed.
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Well, almost.
[pedantic mode: engaged]
It's surrounded by ice on all sides so clearly it is cold enough, but like an insulated glass of ice water everything will be at the same temperature, about 0*C, but in different phases. The "problem" is that the water can't freeze without losing a *lot* of energy (the enthalpy of fusion), which requires that there be a colder reservoir for that heat to flow to. There's no actual temperature change associated with the waterice transition, but it requires 79.8 c
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The liquid water does its thing and... you know the rest. Titanic.
Titanic was supposed to be an indestructible container for air and humans....
Water has the odd property of expanding at around 4C at normal (sea level) pressure.
Above 4 degrees; water is more dense at lower temperatures, just like other fluids. Water is most dense at 4 degrees C. If you cool OR heat water at 4 degrees C either above or below that temperature; it will have to become less dense or be under greater pressure.
Therefore; if y
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Actually, no. The water is still most dense at 4C, you just *also* have salt interfering with the freezing process, lowering the required temperature a bit. The 4C thing though is still a major factor in any body of cold water not freezing solid when cooled from above. As most liquid cools it becomes denser and denser, with the coldest liquid sinking to the bottom of the container and eventually solidifying into an even denser state, while the warmest liquid stays on top where it can shed its heat into t
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For anyone interested in more than a snide comment - the answer is that pure water can't exist as a liquid below about 0C until pressures climb to about 100atmospheres. The lowest temperature is at about -22C and 2073 atm. At higher pressures things get complicated as there are several other solid arrangements of water molecules which have different properties and can actually coexist with liquid water.
phase diagram [wikipedia.org]
Has it always been there? (Score:3)
Other researchers believe this discovery may help explain disparities between projections of mass loss by climate models and observations from satellites
Or maybe not. For all we know that slush has been there since the last ice age.
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Coming This Winter: A warming tale of overcoming adversity from beneath Greenland's Ice. In the face of immense pressure a soggy hero goes against the grain, and learns its okay not to be as cool as everyone else.
Slushy the Snowman
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Are there really people denying "climate change"? It's a pretty accepted thing. Maybe not that it is due to man, but that there is change, sure. Of course, we also can't decide if the change is global *warming* or global *cooling*. It was only a couple decades or so ago that we were told pollution was sending us over the edge of unavoidable ice-ages.
I suppose you can sort of understand their skepticism. If I was born in 1990 and all I had ever heard was "global warming global warming AND IT IS ALL OUR FAULT
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You can understand their skepticism even more when you consider that moneyed interests -- who stand to lose a lot if carbon emissions are seriously restricted -- have been pouring a ton of money into PR campaigns to discredit AGW and the scientists who promote it. Their wholly-owned media arm includes Fox News, the National Review, and propaganda outlets like the Rush Limbaugh show.
Sadly, many gullible conservatives would rather believe in a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy which promotes AGW in order to... umm..
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Exactly, it constantly amazes me that some of the posters here who rely on science in almost every aspect of their lives can be convinced by either the media or their own self interest to deny reality with the thoroughly debunked skeptics arguments. There's a sucker born every minute apparently.
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Are there really people denying "climate change"? It's a pretty accepted thing. Maybe not that it is due to man, but that there is change, sure. Of course, we also can't decide if the change is global *warming* or global *cooling*.
Lemme check... Yep. You're right, not just man made; Woman also contribute. Blood pressure indicates a trend in warming that can't be ignored. Forecasts predict no end in sight for this Eternal September.
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And if you were born before the '70's you'd remember how bad the pollution was and how some scientists wondered if global dimming might counter act the rising CO2 levels that by themselves would increase the greenhousing that keeps the Earth currently at habitable temperatures. Most people don't seem to realize the Earths average temperature would be close to minus 20 Celsius without the greenhouse gases warming the Earth.
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Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
And yet despite the fact that the global cooling story made the covers of Time and Newsweek in the mid-70's, between 1965 and 1979 there were 6 times as many papers published on global warming from CO2 increases than global cooling in the scientific literature. I was born in 1952 and I don't remember being very alarmed by global cooling in the 1970's.
Slipping and sliding (Score:2)
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The water is in the firn and generally less than 50 meters deep without any ice on top that could slide off. The glacial ice starts forming at a depth of around 50 meters.
Mine would be extremely difficult to guess (Score:2)
Let's see if you can guess mine:
Marduk T-Shirt, military boots, necklace with an inverted pentagram, leather jacket with stickers of Immortal, an inverted crucifix a Church of Satan button, heavy duty working trousers... hmm, difficult, very difficult to guess.
\m/
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Fuck, wrong thread XD
So, this is were all these esquimos where hiding (Score:2)
So, that's were they were hiding... and holding the rest of the world for a fool making us believe that they were our there in the icy wilderness freezing their balls off with nothing to eat but live baby seals while they actually were enjoying Martinis and banana splits in their underground climatized giant pool!
SIGH - messed up TFS of an unsurprising article (Score:2)
That water moves around in both solid (porosity under a couple of %) ice and less compacted snow (let's call it "firn", because Wegener was German) is well known. Sometimes it moves in large channels - look up "joukullhlaup' for some fun figures - sometimes in small or microscopic ones. But always it remains hy
Re:why haven't we heard about this before? (Score:4, Informative)
So there was a discrepancy between prediction and observation for the AGW model. Why haven't we heard about that before? Only now that the observations are consistent with theory do we find out about it. Yet more evidence that climate scientists are not real scientists.
What makes you think that scientists have hidden this discrepancy? They haven't, and every anti-AGW promoter has been shouting it from the rooftops (while they ignore or misrepresent all the evidence that supports AGW.)
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If this slushy effect is real then update the model, recalculate the figures for the previous years data and see how accurate it is.
Don't waste everyone's time making predictions using a model that doesn't work on previous years data.
That is exactly how the models work; when new facts are found they plug that into their models and calibrate it against past data. They also compare the predictions against new measurements, and if there is a discrepancy then they try to figure out why - as was the case here. This is why the models are getting more accurate as the years go by.
Re: (Score:3)
They are unable to predict the future though, and always have been.
That is a pretty unsupportable statement considering that the scientists are well aware of how much certainty their models have, and so give a large error range such that it was nearly impossible to get it wrong. Your claim that they all have been falsified by observations is a complete lie.
Re: (Score:2)
Easy - model predicts Y, actual data is in the range X to Z. That's your margin for error. As the model improves the error bars become smaller. That's the way it works for *all* of science. Even something as "simple" as Earth's gravity - the first approximation, let's call it 10m/s2 was okay, thousands of experiments later we know the average value is closer to 9.80665m/s2. Of course that's only the average, and changes based on your altitude and the density of the Earth beneath you - and those factors