[Rhodes22-list] More on global warming.

[Slim]

Good thing you folks out east own boats!
Slim

On 1/17/07 1:36 AM, "R22RumRunner at aol.com" <R22RumRunner at aol.com> wrote:

> 
> LIVERPOOL LAND, Greenland (Jan. 16) ‹ Flying over  snow-capped peaks and into
> a thick fog, the helicopter set down on a barren  strip of rocks between two
> glaciers. A dozen bags of supplies, a rifle and a can  of cooking gas were
> tossed out onto the cold ground. Then, with engines whining,  the helicopter
> lifted off, snow and fog swirling in the rotor wash.
> Changing  Coastlines
> When it  had disappeared over the horizon, no sound remained but the howling
> of the  Arctic wind.
> 
> ³It feels a little like the days of the old explorers,  doesn¹t it?² Dennis
> Schmitt said. 
> 
> Mr. Schmitt, a 60-year-old explorer  from Berkeley, Calif., had just landed
> on a newly revealed island 400 miles  north of the Arctic Circle in eastern
> Greenland. It was a moment of triumph: he  had discovered the island on an
> ocean 
> voyage in September 2005. Now, a year  later, he and a small expedition team
> had returned to spend a week climbing  peaks, crossing treacherous glaciers
> and 
> documenting animal and plant life.
> 
> Despite its remote location, the island would almost certainly have been
> discovered, named and mapped almost a century ago when explorers like
> Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, charted these coastlines.
> Would 
> have been discovered had it not been bound to the coast by glacial ice.
> 
> Maps of the region show a mountainous peninsula covered with glaciers.  The
> island¹s distinct shape ‹ like a hand with three bony fingers pointing north
> ‹
> looks like the end of the peninsula.
> 
> Now, where the maps showed only  ice, a band of fast-flowing seawater ran
> between a newly exposed shoreline and  the aquamarine-blue walls of a
> retreating 
> ice shelf. The water was littered with  dozens of icebergs, some as large as
> half an acre; every hour or so, several  more tons of ice fractured off the
> shelf with a thunderous crack and an  earth-shaking rumble.
> 
> All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising  temperatures are not simply
> melting ice; they are changing the very geography of  coastlines. Nunataks ‹ ³
> lonely mountains² in Inuit ‹ that were encased in the  margins of Greenland¹s
> ice 
> sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds,  exposing a new chain of
> islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to  write their names on
> the 
> landscape. 
> 
> ³We are already in a new era of  geography,² said the Arctic explorer Will
> Steger. ³This phenomenon ‹ of an  island all of a sudden appearing out of
> nowhere and the ice melting around it ‹  is a real common phenomenon now.²
> 
> In August, Mr. Steger discovered his  own new island off the coast of the
> Norwegian island of Svalbard, high in the  polar basin. Glaciers that had
> surrounded it when his ship passed through only  two years earlier were gone
> this 
> year, leaving only a small island alone in the  open ocean.
> ³We saw  it ourselves up there, just how fast the ice is going,² he said.
> 
> With  27,555 miles of coastline and thousands of fjords, inlets, bays and
> straits,  Greenland has always been hard to map. Now its geography is becoming
> obsolete  almost as soon as new maps are created.
> 
> Hans Jepsen is a cartographer at  the Geological Survey of Denmark and
> Greenland, which produces topographical  maps for mining and oil companies.
> (Greenland is a largely self-governing region  of Denmark.) Last summer, he
> spotted 
> several new islands in an area where a  massive ice shelf had broken up. Mr.
> Jepsen was unaware of Mr. Schmitt¹s  discovery, and an old aerial photograph
> in 
> his files showed the peninsula  intact.
> 
> ³Clearly, the new island was detached from the mainland when the  connecting
> glacier-bridge retreated southward,² Mr. Jepsen said, adding that  future maps
> would take note of the change.
> 
> The sudden appearance of the  islands is a symptom of an ice sheet going into
> retreat, scientists say.  Greenland is covered by 630,000 cubic miles of ice,
> enough water to raise global  sea levels by 23 feet.
> 
> Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice  physics at the University
> Center of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing  more than 80 cubic miles
> of 
> ice per year. 
> 
> ³That corresponds to three  times the volume of all the glaciers in the Alps,²
> Dr. Boggild said. ³If you  lose that much volume you¹d definitely see new
> islands appear.² 
> 
> He  discovered an island himself a year ago while flying over northwestern
> Greenland. ³Suddenly I saw an island with glacial ice on it,² he said. ³I
> looked  at the map and it should have been a nunatak, but the present ice
> margin 
> was  about 10 kilometers away. So I can say that within the last five years
> the 
> ice  margin had retreated at least 10 kilometers.²
> 
> The abrupt acceleration of  melting in Greenland has taken climate scientists
> by surprise. Tidewater  glaciers, which discharge ice into the oceans as they
> break up in the process  called calving, have doubled and tripled in speed
> all over Greenland. Ice  shelves are breaking up, and summertime ³glacial
> earthquakes² have been detected  within the ice sheet.
> 
> ³The general thinking until very recently was that  ice sheets don¹t react
> very quickly to climate,² said Martin Truffer, a  glaciologist at the
> University of Alaska at Fairbanks. ³But that thinking is  changing right now,
> because we
> ¹re seeing things that people have thought are  impossible.²
> 
> A study in The Journal of Climate last June observed that  Greenland had
> become the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise.
> 
> Until recently, the consensus of climate scientists was that the impact  of
> melting polar ice sheets would be negligible over the next 100 years. Ice
> sheets were thought to be extremely slow in reacting to atmospheric warming.
> The  
> 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, widely
> considered  to be an authoritative scientific statement on the potential
> impacts of 
> _global warming_ (javascript:;)  , based its  conclusions about sea-level rise
> on 
> a computer model that predicted a slow onset  of melting in Greenland.
> 
> ³When you look at the ice sheet, the models  didn¹t work, which puts us on
> shaky ground,² said Richard Alley, a geosciences  professor at Pennsylvania
> State University.
> 
> There is no consensus on how  much Greenland¹s ice will melt in the near
> future, Dr. Alley said, and no  computer model that can accurately predict the
> future of the ice sheet. Yet  given the acceleration of tidewater-glacier
> melting, a sea-level rise of a foot  or two in the coming decades is entirely
> possible, he said. That bodes ill for  island nations and those who live near
> the 
> coast. 
> 
> ³Even a foot rise is a  pretty horrible scenario,² said Stephen P.
> Leatherman, director of the  Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida
> International 
> University in Miami.
> 
> On low-lying and gently sloping land like coastal river deltas, a  sea-level
> rise of just one foot would send water thousands of feet inland.  Hundreds of
> millions of people worldwide make their homes in such deltas;  virtually all
> of coastal Bangladesh lies in the delta of the Ganges River. Over  the long
> term, much larger sea-level rises would render the world¹s coastlines
> unrecognizable, creating a whole new series of islands.
> 
> ³Here in Miami,²  Dr. Leatherman said, ³we¹re going to have an ocean on
> both sides of us.²
> 
> Such ominous implications are not lost on Mr. Schmitt, who says he hopes
> that the island he discovered in Greenland in September will become an
> international symbol of the effects of climate change. Mr. Schmitt, who speaks
> Inuit, 
> has provisionally named it Uunartoq Qeqertoq: the warming island.
> 
> Global warming has profoundly altered the nature of polar exploration,  said
> Mr. Schmitt, who in 40 years has logged more than 100 Arctic expeditions.
> Routes once pioneered on a dogsled are routinely paddled in a kayak now; many
> features, like the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in Greenland¹s northwest, have
> disappeared for good.
> 
> ³There is a dark side to this,² he said about the  new island. ³We felt the
> exhilaration of discovery. We were exploring something  new. But of course,
> there was also something scary about what we did there. We  were looking in
> the 
> face of these changes, and all of us were thinking of the  dire consequences.²
> 
> Copyright ©  2007 _The New York Times  Company_ (http://www.nytimes.com
> /ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html)
> 2007-01-16 09:43:21
> 
> (http://news.aol.com/elections/president/story/_a/obama-takes-first-step-in-pr
> esidential/20070116102609990001)
> Read the  
> 
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