Green Group discussion

Greenland ice reached its tipping point 20 years ago:

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31...

It's not about the grandchildren who are going to feel it, our lives are already changing everyday.

No doubt about that.

Ireland and Britain will feel this more than some nations. The fresh cold water entering the sea is dense and so it blocks the path of the Gulf Stream, also called North Atlantic Conveyor. If the top of the Gulf Stream is pushed back down south, the warmth will be lost to the British Isles.
Glasgow is at the same latitude as Moscow, but the more temperate climate Glasgow enjoys is due to the moderating influence of the Atlantic. For instance, Glasgow can grow cordyline palm trees which cannot survive a winter in Aberdeen on the eastern coast of Scotland.

The initial gains from climate change for some countries are probably an illusion. More warmth goes under the heading of careful what you wish for. The northeast has warmer winters but dryer summers. Changing one part of the climate changes another. It will push the changes around like slow falling dominoes. The importance of wind flow is now beginning to be seen only because it is changing. That could be more responsible for the local weather than anything else.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.ph...

NASA reveals new forms of ice loss in a glacier.

Someday people will start to realize we in are in the middle of this and not at the beginning.

They only discovered the new form of ice loss [Solitary Wave] because scientists were looking for a reason to keep the monitoring system in place that no one was monitoring. Someone probably thought it was a waste of money.

In some energy cycles, when it is halfway through the process, only 10 percent of the energy involved has flowed to where it is going. That means the remaining 90 percent rushes through during the second half.

http://sploid.gizmodo.com/at-least-cl...

Kitesurfing in Greenlandic waters, for those who are not sure what the icebergs look like. Don't just look at the first tiny clip, run the film lower down the article.
I want to do that!

So why is Greenland not classed as a continent?

For those who have not seen it, award winning footage in 'Chasing Ice'.
http://www.metaspoon.com/glacier-calv...

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.p...

Helpful Jimmy, thanks! I had a feeling it might come down to continental plates.
New Guinea is one of the largest islands and shares (tree) kangaroos and other fauna with Australia because the island sits on the same continental plate. At one time there would have been a dry land passage between the two masses, then as the Ice Age ended and more water entered the ocean, the two masses were separated.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environm...

Wildfires in Greenland.

Glacier science just got a new page under the what else are we missing section?

Lake Catalina in Eastern Greenland has been the source of four major outburst floods over the last 50 years - and no one noticed anything unusual.

It is possible that the water pressure on the glacier below the lake becomes so great that the glacier can no longer function effectively as a 'cork' -- which in turn causes water to start flowing under the glacier and thereby lifting it up until the pressure of the backed up water is relieved and it falls back down again, acting as a cork again.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...

Robert,
Thanks for sharing that release. Wow! The pressure equals an "astounding mass of energy, equaling up to 240 Hiroshima-bombs!" Unbelievable.

This is occurring in Alaska, but the process of glacier erosion is being studied which will have its counterpart in Greenland.
I love the robot submersibles and I learnt that the liquid-filled holes are called moulins.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.ph...

Many of Greenland's glaciers are sitting on ocean water which is warming up, accelerating the rate of ice melt from beneath the glacier surface, out of satellite surveillance which is why it went unnoticed for nearly 40 years.

“Over the period of the 1980s to 2010s, rapid increase of meltwater and sediment fluxes caused dramatic advance of these deltas into the ocean,” said Irina Overeem, one of the study’s authors and a researcher at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtm...

Not Greenland but its neighbour, Iceland is the subject of this NYT article. Both have glaciers but Iceland is volcanic. The article looks at tree cover and reforesting challenges as Iceland seeks to lock up carbon. Greenland will face similar issues as they try to plant trees in future.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...

NASA has a computer tool to show how water from various parts of Greenland's ice is causing sea level rise elsewhere.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.ph...

Now you can view sea level rise around the world of the future with a NASA tool which runs on the agency's computers through a cloud interface, so you don't need to load a lot of software or have running power.
This one allows you to model glaciers or Greenland ice, and study changes to shorelines.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.ph...

That looks very interesting.

US base, where potentially hazardous materials are melting to the surface of Greenland.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/ar...

The melting ice and permafrost are creating situations that will be hard to fix.

If you have had your fill of cat videos and need a good depressing read, here is a blogpost with lots of info on artic ice, permafrost, methane etc. I have fact checked about 1/4 of it and have not found anything wildely incorrect... which makes the whole post even more disturbing.

http://arctic-news.blogspot.ca/p/the-...

Thanks.
Six Degrees
all over again. Although the Arctic site doesn't mention hydrogen sulphides. That comes after the methane clathrate releases in the book.
The site also just goes by heat and ice, not salinity of water. The melting of Greenland ice (because it sits on land) is predicted to slow, push back or stop the flow of the North Atlantic Current. Which might reduce the amount of heat getting to the Arctic Ocean.
Plant more trees and stop the methane leaks by frackers.

Open water north of Greenland in winter. Temps above freezing at the North Pole.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/top...
A useful book for this topic: Future Arctic: Field Notes from a World on the Edge

Also Our Ice Is Vanishing / Sikuvut Nunguliqtuq: A History of Inuit, Newcomers, and Climate Change

NASA announces a new study of the cryosphere, including Greenland and Arctic sea ice.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.ph...

Are we entering Alice's Wonderland where we will be painting the glaciers white?

Dark areas on Greenland's ice covered land seem to be getting darker, which speeds up the melting process. The darkness is caused by dirt and other impurities that were trapped in the ice in layers as each new layer was added. When a layer melts, the water goes into the sky or the ocean, leaving the dirt behind which just builds up making a thicker layer as the ice continues to melt and free up the trapped material.

"These impurities include trapped dust and soot that have accumulated over the years from faraway fires and factories, as well as dark-colored algal blooms from microbes that, scientists recently discovered, can thrive in Greenland's harsh environment."

"Scientists recently discovered [microbes], can thrive in Greenland's harsh environment." This is a direct result of the failure of the human first policy. We think that if we can't easily live somewhere, then it is unlikely anything else can. And when we do find something that is easily living there, we then say that it is an extreme form of life. If microbes can live anywhere from hundreds of miles below the Earth's surface to far out into space, and we compare that to the narrow zone that we naturally inhabit, it is our situation that is extreme, not the microbes.

To compound the situation, these microbes living on the ice are apparently able to use the soot and condensed smoke from chimneys and smoke stacks that got trapped in the ice for the past couple of hundred years as a ready source of food. Our efforts to make our lives more comfortable at the expense of others is fueling these microbes as they contribute to the decline of the world's ice covered land which in turn makes our lives less comfortable. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

One silver lining for this dark cloud is that we are on the lookout for microbes that eat petrochemical pollutants. A considerable amount of money and time has been spent trying to make these kinds of microbes. The irony is that theses pollutant eating microbes occur naturally and it will only be a matter of time before someone of the human first persuasion seeks to patent them as a "discovery" that they will claim as their own.

If these microbes are harnessed, put to work cleaning up the petrochemical pollutants, maybe they will get out of control and eat all the plastic that we have made over the past 80 years that is strewn about the landscape as if it were ordinary garbage of no consequence.

https://www.space.com/40266-greenland...

Glaciologists have long known that lichens can live on glacial ice.

Don't forget the nice fertile volcanic dust from Iceland.

Maybe that's how ice covered places get their dirt, from periodically big meltdowns.

Antarctic ice cores were able to show the date of the volcano Thera that destroyed Santorini and the Minoan civilisation.

Video of 4 mile iceberg calving in Greenland

https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2018...

Wow. Great footage.

Now a large iceberg is threatening a village.

https://www.bbc.com/news/video_and_au...

They probably have to move whether they want to or not. They may not get much warning before a piece on the land side drops off. It is grounded so it's apparently not going anywhere for a while. There is a scenario where a chunk of Malta drops off into the ocean and the resulting tsunami wipes out Long Island, 3,000 miles away.

I think not Malta but La Palma, one of the volcanic Canaries. Though when I visited Malta I did indeed see a part of the limestone that will drop off in the future. That area has been made an environmental park.

I hadn't heard about it in the while. Seems amazing that something so far out in the ocean could have an impact on a shore 3,000 miles away.

I always thought the height of a tsunami was limited to the distance the land dropped out from underneath the water. Tsunami's generated by things falling into water apparently have different parameters.

After the 1958 Alaskan Earthquake triggered a landslide in a remote bay on the Alaskan coast, a 2,400 feet by 3,000 feet, and 300 feet thick, slab of rock dislodged from the face of the northern wall of the inlet, and fell 2,000 feet into the bay. It had a wave height of 1720 feet, tallest recorded tsunami in recent history. The bay is around 700 feet at its deepest point.

As more ice falls off the glaciers and the structural strength of the ice deteriorates from warmer air and water temperatures and increased water flows inside the glaciers making the bases soggy there could be more instances of big icebergs sitting off populated coasts just waiting to fall apart.

I've placed an interview with a French author in another thread; this is his exact plot.

The Greenland Breach

A tragic outcome to this wake up call for Greenland scientists.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/...

A few points I noticed:
Polar bear, which spends its life at sea level, climbed high into the ice sheet as well as far from the sea.
Bear was starving.
With more scientists and support teams doing more science in Greenland than ever, not to mention those keen to exploit what they can find as the ice retreats, more bears are meeting more people.
Nobody suggested going away and leaving the bear alone.

Clare wrote: "A tragic outcome to this wake up call for Greenland scientists.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/...

A few points I noticed:
Polar bea..."

Polar bears and humans in proximity is a scary proposition for all concerned. Considering what we've done to their habitat, I guess it's inevitable. Tragic indeed the way this encounter turned out! :-(

Instead of there goes I cept for the grace of god, it becomes everyone take an identity number for medical billing and your place in the line leading to the gangplank that goes out over the cliff called Welcome to the future. At some point in time or maybe not, people are going to learn that animals are ahead of us, and everyone of them a canary.

It is hard to tell what is going on in Greenland. Everyone seems to have a different idea of what it all means. This article gives a good approximation of ice activity which seems somewhat positive. It ends noting that the melt season is only halfway through and the data from ice cores over the past 500 years shows nothing in common with the ice cycles we are currently seeing. I still maintain that the quality of the mechanical structure of the ice has been over rated and that it is not as strong as it is assumed to be, which would decrease the time it takes for the ice masses to fall apart.

http://nsidc.org/greenland-today/

This compilation of photos is of a Russian ice cap which had been thought to be quite stable. Suddenly during the past few years it started shifting that ice.
This is a foretaste of Greenland.

https://earther.gizmodo.com/watch-a-r...

I never knew it but the frozen ice zone that is all ice, located all over the world, is called the Cryosphere.

The problem with ice structures is that they are only structurally sound when they are completely frozen solid. As soon as it starts to melt anywhere but the outer surface it's structural strength goes right out the window.

This changes all the projected time frames for how long the glaciers sitting on rocks or land will last from a hundred years to much sooner than expected. The integrity of the ice was something that should never have been assumed to be a constant like a piece of rock. They will fall off the land when still basically intact, instead of slowly melting down like an ice cube on a counter top.

They are all going to do this unless they are sitting in a basin. The question is how many glaciers are sitting in basins.

NASA shows how the latest thinking on polar drift is that three factors contribute.
Core / mantle movements.
Loss of polar and Greenland ice.
Post-glacial rebound.
So the faster our top-heavy planet loses ice, the more the spin will wobble away from the current position.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.ph...

This is covering a time span of around 50,000 million years, a distance of 5000 kilometers. North America would not where it is pictured on the map. It's anybody's guess where it will be in 50 million years. I'm guessing the southern axis will go north past where Australia is now. The axis has moved 10 meters south in the last hundred years. I'm figuring nothing much is happening with the Earth's axis in the next 50,000 years or so.

I am thinking the displacement of the northern ice will have a much bigger effect on the planet in other ways in the short run. I'm figuring the poles have already melted, just haven't finished melting yet. That means there are three weight displacements. The ice mass disappears on Greenland, the ground underneath rebounds, and the melted ice water goes down around the equator.

It's more complex than I think we can comprehend and who cares, really. We will be dead. I mean, who cares about climate change when we will be dead anyway, right?

Let's think about our family's descendants and all the animals and plants, if we can't see ourselves living that long. Just because you or I may be dead in X years is not a reason to litter and light forest fires today.

NASA measures sea and meltwater data off Greenland. Here is the job description. I like that the probes decompose.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.ph...