Data Recovery German
Is recent evidence of ice melting in East Antarctica relevant to the global warming debate?
From the ScienceDaily web site:
“Using gravity measurement data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission, a team of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin has found that the East Antarctic ice sheet-home to about 90 percent of Earth’s solid fresh water and previously considered stable-may have begun to lose ice.”
and
“Grace estimate of changes in Antarctica’s ice mass, measured in centimeters of equivalent water height change per year. The study confirmed previous estimates of ice mass loss in West Antarctica, but also found ice mass loss in East Antarctica, primarily in coastal regions.”
What do you think?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091125230727.htm
Yes, it’s very relevant. Areas such as Antarctica, the Greater Himal, Greenland, the Arctic etc act as climate change barometers. Often it’s in these regions that the effects are most prevelant and can be observed sooner, thus giving an indication of things to come.
It was inevitable that significant ice loss would occur in East Antarctica, the sea, land and air temperatures have increased in this region; the questions were (and still are) where, when and how much melting will occur.
The weakened ice is more susceptible to destruction through wave action and the water around the periphery is warmer thus significantly accelerating ice loss. Higher temperatures around the globe lead to increased precipitation and in the Antractic interior (where it never gets above freezing) this falls as snow. The increased centralised mass accelerates glacial creep and pushes the ice seaward at a faster rate. Surface melting around parts of the periphery lead to run off entering the ice mass through moulins, once this permeates through the ice and reaches the solid ground below it acts as a lubricant over which the ice can flow more rapidly. These, and other factors, will undoubtedly lead to an accelerated loss of ice in the years to come.
I’m not sure where this now puts the rate of ice loss but in 2006 it reached 200 billion tons a year (approx 200 cubic kilometres), I suspect it may now be in the order of 225 billion tons a year.
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