Experts: Alps glaciers will melt by 2050

NF Reporter · 01-22-2007, 11:43 PM

AP - Glaciers will all but disappear from the Alps by 2050, scientists warned Monday, basing their bleak outlook on mounting evidence of slow but steady melting of the continental ice sheets.

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waltky · 12-11-2007, 12:42 PM

Greenland ice cap melting too...

Greenland ice sheet melting at record rate
10 Dec 2007 - The Greenland ice sheet melted at a record rate this year, the largest ever since satellite measurements began in 1979, a top climate scientist reported on Monday.

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"The amount of ice lost by Greenland over the last year is the equivalent of two times all the ice in the Alps, or a layer of water more than one-half mile (800 meters) deep covering Washington DC," said Konrad Steffen of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Using data from military and weather satellites to see where the ice is melting, Steffen and his colleagues were able to monitor the rapid thinning and acceleration of ice as it moved into the ocean at the edge of the big arctic island. The extent of the melt area was 10 percent greater than the last record year, 2005, the scientists found.

Greenland is about one-fourth the size of the United States and about 80 percent of it is covered by the ice sheet. One-twentieth of the world's ice is in Greenland; if it all melted it would be equivalent to a 21-foot (6.4 metre) global sea level rise, the scientists said. One factor in the speed-up of Greenland's ice melt is an increase in cylindrical shafts in the ice called moulins. These huge tunnels in the ice act like drains and appear to let the ice sheet respond more rapidly than researchers expected to spikes in temperature at the beginning of the annual warm season, Steffen said.

In recent years, melting has started earlier in the year than normal. Air temperatures on the ice sheet have risen by about 7 degrees F (3.9 degrees C) since 1991, mostly because of the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the scientists said in research presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. This is in keeping with persistently gloomy news about the state of the Arctic this year. In October, a U.S. government "report card" found less ice, hotter air and dying wildlife. In May, a U.S. expert at the National Snow and Ice Center in Colorado found that Arctic ice cap is melting much faster than expected and is now about 30 years ahead of predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N10178654.htm

waltky · 12-15-2007, 01:04 AM

Wonder if the sun is having an effect on the warming magma?

Greenland Glaciers Getting Heat From Underground Magma
December 14, 2007 - Some scientists now say that underground magma, along with warming surface temperatures, might be contributing to melting glaciers in Greenland.

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Researchers say that a thin spot on the Earth's crust is enabling the hot magma underground to melt the ice. While no one knows if the molten magma is now contributing to ice melt in Greenland, it is known that heat from inside the Earth has been used to heat homes there since the 10th century when residents harnessed hot springs as a heating source. Water in a hot spring is heated either by geothermal heat from the Earth's interior or by coming in contact with hot magma, scientists say.

Researchers say they don't the temperature of the hot spot under a recently discovered ice stream in Greenland. "Crustal heat flow is still one of the unknowns -- and it's a fairly significant one, according to our preliminary results," lead researcher Ralph von Frese said in a statement. Von Frese, who is a professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University also said that while the way major ice sheets behave is "an important barometer of global climate change" that to understand climate change they had to be able to "effectively separate and quantify human impacts on climate change" and understand "natural impacts."

Early results of the study on the situation in Greenland were presented Thursday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco by a graduate student who worked on the study with von Frese. The melting glaciers have a particular significance for Americans, as the water from them flows into the sea raising sea levels around the world. "The complete melting of these continental ice sheets would put much of Florida, as well as New Orleans, New York City and other important coastal population centers, under water," von Frese said.

Greenland Glaciers Getting Heat From Underground Magma | December 15, 2007 | AHN

See also:

Is a New Solar Cycle Beginning?
Dec. 14, 2007: The solar physics community is abuzz this week. No, there haven't been any great eruptions or solar storms. The source of the excitement is a modest knot of magnetism that popped over the sun's eastern limb on Dec. 11th, pictured below in a pair of images from the orbiting Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).

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It may not look like much, but "this patch of magnetism could be a sign of the next solar cycle," says solar physicist David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center. For more than a year, the sun has been experiencing a lull in activity, marking the end of Solar Cycle 23, which peaked with many furious storms in 2000--2003. "Solar minimum is upon us," he says. The big question now is, when will the next solar cycle begin?

"New solar cycles always begin with a high-latitude, reversed polarity sunspot," explains Hathaway. "Reversed polarity " means a sunspot with opposite magnetic polarity compared to sunspots from the previous solar cycle. "High-latitude" refers to the sun's grid of latitude and longitude. Old cycle spots congregate near the sun's equator. New cycle spots appear higher, around 25 or 30 degrees latitude.

The region that appeared on Dec. 11th fits both these criteria. It is high latitude (24 degrees N) and magnetically reversed. Just one problem: There is no sunspot. So far the region is just a bright knot of magnetic fields. If, however, these fields coalesce into a dark sunspot, scientists are ready to announce that Solar Cycle 24 has officially begun.

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waltky · 12-16-2007, 05:59 PM

Glaciers meltin' in China too...

Glaciers in west China shrinking
Dec 15, 2007 - Glaciers in China's high-altitude western areas have shrunk seven to 18 percent over the past five years, according to a new survey.

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The research that started in May this year on the country's glaciers indicated an average shrinking of 7.4 percent compared with the results of the first survey completed in 2002. A total area of nearly 20,000 square km, or around one-third of the country's total, has been surveyed in the new project. The yet-to-be-completed survey was launched by experts from the ministry of science and technology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). It was the second nationwide survey undertaken and would be finished in five years.

The first survey was conducted from 1978 to 2002. Glaciers in the Junggar Basin and Ili River areas in northern Xinjiang and the upper reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo River in Tibet had the most evident shrinkage of 18 percent or more, the survey showed. In Qilian mountain in the northwest and the Lancang river area in the southwest, glaciers shrank by about 10 percent on average. 'The change of glaciers is in fact a manifestation of the pressure upon China's environment by global warming,' said Ding Yongjian, a CAS research fellow. Global warming has led to an increase in the average temperature in the western area of China over the past few decades. This has caused the glacial shrinking, a thawing of frozen earth and worsening arid conditions, said the scholar.

Qin Dahe, a CAS academician and head of the panel of experts for the survey, said the project would provide basic data for the study on the effects of climate change upon Chinese glaciers in the past 20 years. It would also provide information about the use of water resources in the arid western areas. China has about 46,000 glaciers covering a total area of nearly 60,000 sq km. These accounted for more than 50 percent of the glaciers in the middle and low latitude areas of the Earth.

Glaciers in west China shrinking

waltky · 01-07-2008, 11:03 PM

New solar cycle confirmed...

Sunspot signals new solar cycle
Jan. 7, 2008 -- U.S. researchers say the first sunspot of a new solar cycle has appeared in the sun's Northern Hemisphere.

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the new 11-year cycle of heightened solar activity brings increased risks for power grids, critical military, civilian and airline communications, global positioning system signals, and even cell phones and automated teller machine transactions.

"This sunspot is like the first robin of spring," solar physicist Douglas Biesecker of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center said in a release. "In this case, it's an early omen of solar storms that will gradually increase over the next few years." A sunspot is an area of highly organized magnetic activity on the surface of the sun.

During a solar storm, highly charged material ejected from the can bring down power grids, disrupt critical communications and threaten astronauts with harmful radiation. Storms can also knock out commercial communications satellites and swamp GPS signals, NOAA said.

Source

waltky · 03-16-2008, 07:48 PM

Maybe even sooner than first thought...

Glaciers suffer record shrinkage
Sunday, 16 March 2008, The rate at which some of the world's glaciers are melting has more than doubled, new data says.

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The rate at which some of the world's glaciers are melting has more than doubled, data from the United Nations Environment Programme has shown. Average glacial shrinkage has risen from 30 centimetres per year between 1980 and 1999, to 1.5 metres in 2006.

Some of the biggest losses have occurred in the Alps and Pyrenees mountain ranges in Europe. Experts have called for "immediate action" to reverse the trend, which is seen as a key climate change indicator. Estimates for 2006 indicate shrinkage of 1.4 metres of 'water equivalent' compared to half a metre in 2005.

Achim Steiner, Under-Secretary General of the UN and executive director of its environment programme (UNEP), said: "Millions if not billions of people depend directly or indirectly on these natural water storage facilities for drinking water, agriculture, industry and power generation during key parts of the year. "There are many canaries emerging in the climate change coal mine. The glaciers are perhaps among those making the most noise and it is absolutely essential that everyone sits up and takes notice.

Litmus test