2 Trillion Tons of Ice Gone Since 2003

More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Alaska and Antarctica have been lost since 2003 due to melting, according to new NASA satellite data. It’s the latest round of evidence of the toll global warming is taking around the world, and scientists say this is just the beginning.

More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years occurred in Greenland, and the rate of ice melt seems to be accelerating. NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke says the water melting from Greenland between 2003 and 2008 would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays.

From MSNBC:

The news was better for Alaska. After a precipitous drop in 2005, land ice increased slightly in 2008 because of large winter snowfalls, Luthcke said. Since 2003, when the NASA satellite started taking measurements, Alaska has lost 400 billion tons of land ice.

In assessing climate change, scientists generally look at several years to determine the overall trend.

Melting of land ice, unlike sea ice, increases sea levels very slightly. In the 1990s, Greenland didn’t add to world sea level rise; now that island is adding about half a millimeter of sea level rise a year, NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally said in a telephone interview from the conference.

Between Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska, melting land ice has raised global sea levels about one-fifth of an inch in the past five years, Luthcke said. Sea levels also rise from water expanding as it warms.

That’s not the only bad news that will be presented today at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. Other research points to more melting concerns from global warming, especially with sea ice. Scientists are expected to announce that parts of the Arctic north of Alaska were 9 to 10 degrees warmer this past fall, which is a strong early indication of what researchers call the Arctic amplification effect. That’s when the Arctic warms faster than predicted and warming there is accelerating faster than elsewhere around the world.

Two other studies being presented at the conference assess how Arctic thawing is releasing methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The methane production is caused by a loss of sea ice warming the water, which then melts the permafrost in Alaska.  The second study shows that large amounts of frozen methane trapped in lakebeds and sea bottoms in Siberia are starting to bubble to the surface in alarming amounts. The amounts of methane in the region could dramatically increase global warming if they get released.

Link [MSNBC]

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