Rubber Ducks Deployed in Attempt to Track Melting Glacier

What was a rocket scientist’s solution to help figure out what’s happening inside the fastest-moving Greenland glacier? An army of rubber ducks.  It sounds like a joke, but a U.S. rocket scientist really did send 90 rubber ducks into the ice in the hopes that someone will find them if they emerge in Baffin Bay.

From Reuters:

“Right now it’s not understood what causes the glaciers themselves to surge in the summer,” Behar said. One theory is that the summer sun melts ice on the top glacial surface, creating pools that flow into tubular holes in the glacier called moulins.

The moulins can carry some water all the way to the underside of the glacier, where it acts as a lubricant to speed the movement of ice toward the coast. But because it cannot be seen, no one really knows what occurs.

That’s where the rubber ducks come in, along with a probe about the size of a football loaded with a GPS transmitter and instruments that can tell much about the glacier’s innards.

The ducks are labeled with the words ‘science experiment’ and ‘reward’ in three languages, along with an email address.  So far, they haven’t received any emails, but the places where the ducks might end up are pretty remote.

What an awesome idea – sort of low-tech (the rubber ducks), but high-tech (the probe) at the same time.  Who would have thought rubber ducks could play a part in global warming research?

Link [Reuters]
Photo credit: EarthFirst composite - REUTERS/Konrad Steffen/University of Colorado/Handout

Scientists Warn that the North Pole May Have No Ice this Summer

What’s the North Pole without ice? Can you even imagine it? When there’s no ice at the North Pole, something is very very wrong. And indeed, scientists are predicting that Arctic sea ice may disappear entirely from the area this year. The disappearance of North Pole ice would be one of the most dramatic and frightening examples of the impact of global warming thus far.

Santa is not happy.

From The Independent:

“From the viewpoint of science, the North Pole is just another point on the globe, but symbolically it is hugely important. There is supposed to be ice at the North Pole, not open water,” said Mark Serreze of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado.

If it happens, it raises the prospect of the Arctic nations being able to exploit the valuable oil and mineral deposits below these a bed which have until now been impossible to extract because of the thick sea ice above.

Seasoned polar scientists believe the chances of a totally ice-free North Pole this summer are greater than 50:50 because the normally thick ice formed over many years at the Pole has been blown away and replaced by huge swathes of thinner ice formed over a single year.

One-year ice is highly vulnerable to melting in the summer. So far this year, satellite data has shown that the ice is melting even faster than last year, when there was an all-time record loss of Arctic sea ice. The North Pole has never before been exposed, and it’s likely that we’ll see that happen over the next few months.

What’s that you say, global warming deniers? Oh, right, you have no argument aside from the same old tired idiotic ‘not caused by humans’ spiel. Get your heads out of the fucking sand. This is the point where intelligent people – even those who have been stubbornly wrong about global warming for whatever reasons – should be seeing the light.

Link [The Independent]
Photo credit: The Independent

Dramatic Photos of Melting Glaciers Just a Hoax?

We’ve all heard it: proclamations that global warming is ‘the biggest hoax ever perpetuated on the people of the world, bar none.’ (That quote, of course, comes courtesy of the renowned village idiot Tom DeWeese of the American Policy Center). Global warming deniers think that the entire green movement is a conspiracy to take their money and, as we’ve mentioned several times, ‘end the American way of life’.

So, I guess these dramatic photos of a melting glacier in Norway are just one big trick – photoshopped, or set up. Perhaps Al Gore himself was there with a blowtorch, melting it back so he could claim it was an effect of global warming. Because, as Rush Limbaugh wants you to think, Al Gore is just getting rich off of all us stupid treehuggers that care about the environment. Ignore the man behind the curtain!

These photographs were taken over a period of eight years. The change is, indeed, mind boggling.

Link [Glacsweb]