NSIDC Starts Graphing Greenland Ice Melt

March 29th, 2013 | Posted by Jim Cook in Environment | Science - (0 Comments)

For years, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has been sharing daily updates of the area (“extent”) of sea ice coverage in the Arctic ocean, charting current conditions in comparison to the 1979-2000 average for purposes of comparison. Current levels consistently lie two standard deviations below that long-term average, making the NSIDC Arctic sea ice chart a demonstration of significant climate change.

This month, the NSIDC has expanded its offering of visualized data with a new Greenland Today section of its website, featuring the following daily-updated chart of the extent of the 2013 Greenland ice melt, shown in comparison to the 1981-2010 average:

Greenland Ice Melt Extent 2013: Graph from the NSIDC

As you can see, the major Greenland ice melt season hasn’t really begun yet. Over the next three months, as variation in the amount of ice melt in Greenland becomes noticeable, this chart should start to tell us something really interesting.

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How To Stop An Oil Rig

August 31st, 2010 | Posted by The Green Man in Activism | Environment - (6 Comments)

Glenn Beck wants to be taken seriously as an activist, so he used his immense financial fortune to manufacture a rally in Washington D.C. at which he babbled incoherently for hours about “honor”. Whoop-tee-doo.

The photograph below shows what an activist with guts looks like. For the last 15 hours, a set of Greenpeace protesters have been hanging about 50 feet above the frigid Arctic seas underneath the Stena Don offshore drilling rig in the waters between Greenland and Canada.

I respect the courage of these protesters, but the most effective activism isn’t about showboating. It’s about making the change you really want to see in the world.

The purpose of the Stena Don protest is to prevent the rig from finding oil until the ice of the chilly waters starts to make it impossible for the rig to continue its work. But then, in order to make their way the long way up to Baffin Bay, the Greenpeace protesters burned a large amount of oil. They paid oil companies to drill that oil so that they could protest against drilling oil. The protest provides courageous images, but it doesn’t make much sense.

If you want to make a real difference, instead of just adopting a heroic pose, here’s what you can do tomorrow: Take the train to work instead of driving. Walk or bike to work, if you can. Consolidate the trips in which you need to use a car. Carpool. Stay home instead of going out to be entertained.

Sure, you can’t do it every day, but if enough Americans take these actions just a little bit more than they already do, they will shut down an offshore drilling rig. New offshore drilling operations can only continue for as long as they’re profitable, and they won’t be profitable if there’s a glut of oil.

We can stop the expansion of offshore drilling if we have the modest courage to make small sacrifices in our lives. Do you care that much?

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Four Manhattans Break Free Of Greenland

August 9th, 2010 | Posted by The Green Man in Environment | Outside the USA - (1 Comments)

Earlier today, our writer F.G. Fitzer wrote about a small group of people trying to create an independent nation of Long Island. Those residents of that low-lying island might want to rethink their effort, after hearing the news that came from Greenland today.

On the northern part of the island, in a fjord near Ellesmere Island, a huge chunk of the Petermann Glacier broke free, forming an immense iceberg. The new iceberg is four times the size of Manhattan, and would supply tap water for the entire population of the United States for 120 days.

An iceberg this size has not been seen in 48 years.

As you can see in this photograph, the break of the iceberg from the Petermann Glacier created a great surge of water moving forward down the fjord toward the strait that separates Greenland from Canada. The break also relieves pressure holding back the Petermann Glacier, and several smaller glaciers flowing from the land nearby. We can expect a great deal more thaw in northern Greenland as a result of this event.

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I See London, I See France, I See Greenland’s …

July 11th, 2010 | Posted by jclifford in Environment | Travel - (0 Comments)

A quick note on transAtlantic travel: I flew over the ocean to the UK yesterday, and looking out the window, what did I see? I saw Greenland’s mountains. I saw the actual mountains. The rocks. Without much glacial cover on them any more.

In related news, a big chunk of the Jakobshavn glacier broke off into the ocean yesterday. It was 2.7 square miles in area, and mighty thick, too. That one glacier has lost six miles in length just over the last decade.

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But What About Greenland and Antarctica?

July 8th, 2010 | Posted by Jim Cook in Environment | Science - (1 Comments)

Average Monthly Arctic Sea Ice Extent in June, 1979 to 2010I’ve been following ice trends in the Arctic Ocean for a while now, watching it get lower in volume and lower in extent, noting that both the extent and volume of ice there has been below normal for a long, long time now.

But wait, you may be saying: what about Greenland? What about the Antarctic? Well, the truth is that I’ve been looking for data to describe the entirety of the ice pattern in these latter regions across time and just hadn’t found such data.

Now, there is data for Antarctic sea ice actually showing a rise in the extent of sea ice compared to the long-term average, but the problem with this data is that it isn’t a complete measure of ice for the Antarctic. Antarctic sea ice is part of a system of ice that flows off of the Antarctic land mass; Arctic sea ice in contrast is not dependent upon land ice for its formation. An increase in Antarctic sea ice could happen for a lot of reasons, including global cooling, yes, but also including the Antarctic continent sloughing off ice at an an increasing rate or other kinds of continent-sea interactions.

So really, what this boils down to is that what I was looking for was a measure of the trend in how much overall Antarctic sea ice has been there. If I could find any kind of trend in Greenland’s ice to boot, that would also be great. But until today, I couldn’t find either. Then I happened upon a paper written by Isabella Velicogna, Assistant Professor of Earth System Science at UC-Irvine: “Increasing rates of ice mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets revealed by GRACE,” Geophysical Research Letters 36 (2009).

“Revealed by GRACE” doesn’t have anything to do with religion. GRACE is an acronym that refers to the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment, a satellite collecting data on ice masses in both Greenland and Antarctica. The abstract very nearly speaks for itself:

We use monthly measurements of time-variable gravity from the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite gravity mission to determine the ice mass-loss for the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets during the period between April 2002 and February 2009. We find that during this time period the mass loss of the ice sheets is not a constant, but accelerating with time, i.e., that the GRACE observations are better represented by a quadratic trend than by a linear one, implying that the ice sheets contribution to sea level becomes larger with time. In Greenland, the mass loss increased from 137 Gt/yr in 2002–2003 to 286 Gt/yr in 2007–2009, i.e., an acceleration of 30 ± 11 Gt/yr2 in 2002–2009. In Antarctica the mass loss increased from 104 Gt/yr in 2002–2006 to 246 Gt/yr in 2006–2009, i.e., an acceleration of 26 ± 14 Gt/yr2 in
2002–2009. The observed acceleration in ice sheet mass loss helps reconcile GRACE ice mass estimates obtained for different time periods.

A “Gt” is a gigaton, which is equal to one billion metric tons, which you would not want to find yourself stuck under. From 2007 to 2009, Greenland and Antarctica not only lost ice mass, but lost it at an accelerating rate.

Velicogna’s figures show both the raw data for the mass of ice in Greenland and Antarctica (blue) and the accelerating trend of ice loss (green):

Velicogna 2009 Figure 1: Accelerating loss of ice mass in Greenland

Velicogna 2009 Figure 2: Accelerating loss of ice mass in Antarctica

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Greenland Melting Further North, Scientists Find

March 24th, 2010 | Posted by The Green Man in Environment | Science - (0 Comments)

Today brings yet more evidence that, in spite of the fact that there was a snowstorm in the middle of the winter this year, global warming continues as a part of a larger trend in worldwide climate change. Measurements of glaciers in Greenland show that melting that has been taking on the southern part of the island is now being joined by increased melting of glaciers further to the north.

Those who suspect that climatologists have been incorrect in their predictions of global warming have been right, it turns out. The Greenland glacial melt is taking place faster than had been predicted. “These changes on the Greenland ice sheet are happening fast, and we are definitely losing more ice mass than we had anticipated,” commented Isabella Velicogna, a scientist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who participated in the study.

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Greenland Melting Getting Worse, Faster

June 12th, 2009 | Posted by The Green Man in Environment | Science - (8 Comments)

In spite of all the promises we heard last year about how the Democrats in Congress about how they would inaugurate a new generation of sustainable energy in order to fight the global climate change caused by the 20th Century’s fossil fuel economy, we’re getting new energy legislation that looks an awful lot like what Bush and Cheney were hoping for, with expanded offshore drilling and other dirty energy sources such as Canada’s tar sands.

There are real consequences to the Democrats’ assistance with the Republicans’ backwards energy policy. We’re seeing those consequences in places like Greenland. A study just published finds that the glaciers of Greenland are now melting at a rate even faster than previously believed.

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While You’re Freezing, Know the Ice Has Been Melting

December 17th, 2008 | Posted by Jim Cook in Environment | Science - (8 Comments)

Think a week’s worth of seasonal cold might undo all that pesky global warming mess? Put that wishful thinking away in the desk drawer and attend to findings from two NASA scientists. They report that more than 2 trillion tons of land-based ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003. More than half of this amount comes from melting ice on land masses in Greenland and Alaska, raising sea levels at an accelerating rate.

Don’t pack away that sweater yet; you’ll still need it for a little while, along with some heavy duty galoshes. But if you’re a homeowner who doesn’t plan on dying over the next twenty years, you might want to consult your area’s Flood Map and do a little extrapolation.

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