Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Greenland Ice Sheet Melting at Record Rate

"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.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

..and I can't swim! Time to buy a boat methinks...

Bill

Anonymous said...

And in a related story by Seth Borenstein of AP:

WASHINGTON -- An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years.

Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by the Associated Press.

"The Arctic is screaming," said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government's snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo.
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The Artic is screaming. While the human race collectively sits by, wondering where it will all end...

Anonymous said...

Mac! I can't believe you haven't mentioned the artifact! The Google earth artifact in Greenland! It's an alien base...no?

Mac said...

Mack J.--

I'm convinced the Greenland "object" is an imaging aberration. To me, it just has that "look."

Anonymous said...

Yes, Mac is correct. This has been discussed elsewhere (OMF? ATS?) that I browsed a couple weeks ago, and the consensus is that it is an imaging artifact, caused by some computer glitch in the process of "knitting" imagery together for that region.