Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Calif-Sized Ice Chunk Melts in Antarctica

A team of NASA and University of Colorado at Boulder scientists has found clear evidence that extensive areas of snow melted in west Antarctica in January 2005 in response to warm temperatures.

It was the first widespread Antarctic melting ever detected with NASA's QuikScat satellite and the most significant melt observed using satellites during the past three decades. Combined, the affected regions encompassed an area as big as California.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could the inhabitants of your CTH be behind global warming? Perhaps their agenda is beyond our comprehension?

Mac said...

If they live here on Earth, why would they want to render it uninhabitable?

Anonymous said...

Maybe uninhabitable, or as a causal, temporary "tipping point," _for humans_, not necessarily CT's or "aliens."

Rent the movie, "The Arrival", with Charlie Sheen, a real paranoiac SF classic: The non-humans in this flick actually _like_ a much warmer, CO2-laden climate, as it's not only more akin to their own planet's atmosphere, but has the added benefit of decimating human civilization simultaneously.

So, they operate faux power plants whose real purpose is to generate vast amounts of atmospherically "destructive" (to some) gasses!

Just think--once civilization failed to cope, and a massive population die-off occurred, wouldn't it be much easier to "clean-up" the remaining hostile human residue and calibrate the atmosphere, if they had the capicity in the first place, to whatever they preferred, and as needed? Ooooh, shiver me tympanic timbres!

Uh, but just remember--"it's only a movie!" Heh!?

8^}

Mac said...

"The Arrival" is a great movie; I liked the global warming angle. As the boss alien tells Sheen, "What you'll do in a hundred years we'll do in 10." You almost sympathize with the aliens, because he's right -- they're just hastening the process.

Anonymous said...

Hmmm..."it's just a movie."

Except that life may be imitating art, in that not only is the rate of CO2 emissions triple the best prior estimates and modeling predicted, from 2000 to 2007, but it also seems that a similar acceleration, beyond best predictions made, is occurring within the Antarctic ice shelves, Greenland's ice cap, and the Artic and other glacial systems.

I suspect "melt" hydro-dynamics within glaciers, especially, are only now being "seen" with penetrating EMR satellite tech, and that there may be an internal melt and flow process not previously accounted for in scientific modeling, until now. Hopefully, these new findings will be incorporated into the next round of scientific projections. If, then, even _those_ predictions fall short, then we have a planet-wide, interactive dynamic going on between the related human activities and the sun, land, atmosphere, oceans, and ice repositories that may really surprise us, sooner rather than later.

I wonder what the greatest "top 500" single-point greenhouse gas emitters are on earth? And what proportion of emissions they represent? Get out your rubber booties...*^/