Sorry if this is a bit long. But our attention to the subject is way too long overdue!
Capt'n Zap

Collapse of giant Arctic ice shelf 'incredible'

Margaret Munro, CanWest News Service
Published: Thursday, December 28, 2006
An ancient ice shelf has cracked off northern Ellesmere Island, creating an enormous, 66-square-kilometre ice island and leaving a trail of icy blocks in its wake.

''It really is incredible,'' says Warwick Vincent of Laval University, one of the few people to have laid eyes on the scene. ''It's like a cruise missile has come down and hit the ice shelf.''

The breakup was so powerful, earthquake monitors 250 kilometres away picked up the tremors as the 3,000 to 4,500 year-old shelf tore away from its fjord on Ellesmere.

It broke up 16 months ago, but no one was present to see it. The scientists say they are only now releasing details after piecing together what occurred using seismic monitors and Canadian and U.S. satellites.

They say the ice shelf collapse is the biggest in Canada in 30 years and is indicative of the transformation underway on Ellesmere, Canada's most northern landmass.

''We're seeing incredible changes,'' says Vincent, whose group is studying the island's disappearing ice shelves and their unique ecosystems.

''People talk of endangered animals - well, these are endangered landscape features, and we're losing them,'' says Vincent. In 2002, his graduate student Derek Mueller discovered Ellesmere's Ward Hunt Ice Shelf had cracked in half. The researchers have also seen the sudden collapse of ice dams and the draining of 30-kilometre-long lakes into the sea.

The Ayles Ice Shelf was one of six ice shelves left in Canada, remnants of a vast icy fringe that used to cover the top end of Ellesmere. Scientists consider the Canadian shelves, located about 800 kilometres south of the North Pole, sentinels that reflect the accelerating change in the Arctic.

The shelves are 90 per cent smaller than they were when Arctic explorer Robert Peary crossed them in 1906. And the Ayles ice shelf can now be erased from Canada's maps. ''It no longer exists,'' says Vincent.

Laurie Weir, of the federal Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, was poring over images from the RADARSAT satellite when she noticed the shelf had broken away. She passed the information on to Luke Copland, head of the new global ice lab at the University of Ottawa, who led the effort to determine what had happened.

It turned out it took less than an hour for the ice shelf to calve off in the early afternoon of Aug. 13, 2005, says Copland. Low frequency ''rumbling'' and tremors were picked up on Alert's earthquake monitors, and Canadian and U.S. satellites captured images of the shelf cracking and breaking away.

''If you were standing right on the edge of the shelf, there'd have been this huge 15-kilometre crack as far as you could see in both directions,'' says Copland. ''And then the ice drifted off.'' Within an hour, the giant ice island was a kilometre offshore. It travelled west about 50 kilometres over the next few weeks, and then moved east before freezing into the sea ice about 15 kilometres offshore.

Copland has reconstructed what happened with Weir and Mueller, who is now at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. ''We have a really good sequence of the ice shelf breaking up and then floating away,'' says Copland.



Vincent flew out from his base camp on Northern Ellesmere by helicopter earlier this year to have a first-hand look at the scene of the collapse. ''There was a huge amount of rubble associated with this breakup,'' says Vincent, explaining how the fjord is now full of ice blocks. ''And then this vast ice shelf floating offshore.''

The ice island is about 37 metres thick and measures roughly 15 kilometres by five kilometres. That's the size of a small city, or larger than 11,000 football fields. The island is now stuck in the winter ice, but the researchers believe it is just a matter of time before it is freed and floats away. They say the ice island could become a potential hazard to navigation and oil and gas extraction if it sails south towards the Beaufort Sea.

But for now, it is a monument to change.

''This is the biggest event since the '80s in terms of ice shelf loss, '' says Copland. He says two key factors appear to have triggered the break up - the exceptionally warm temperatures on Ellesmere in the summer of 2005, which was three degrees Celsius above normal, and unusually brisk winds that blew the summer pack ice offshore, exposing the Ayles shelf to waves and open water. Normally, the prevailing winds blow summer pack ice up against Ellesmere's ice shelves, where it acts likes a buffer, protecting them from the sea.

The scientists say they can't prove human-induced climate change caused the Ayles shelf to break off, but they suspect global warming may be responsible.

''We can say it is consistent with the larger body of evidence indicating the climate is warming and predictions that the greatest effects are likely to take place at high latitudes,'' says Vincent. He notes that the Ayles disintegration is just the most recent of several abrupt changes on Ellesmere.

''Suddenly lakes that existed aren't there any more. Ice dams collapse. Ice shelves break up,'' says Vincent. ''These are big changes.''

Researchers say there are many more changes in store. Last week a Canada-U.S. team predicted that the Arctic Ocean could be devoid of summer ice as early as 2040, and possibly sooner.

A few days ago a documentary movie started in our movie theatres about the life of the icebears. it was done by french documentary filmers who followed the icebears for three years . What a job. I haven't seen it yet, just the previews. It shows that the icebears are a endangered species because there living ground is getting destroyed due to the global warming. They also said that the USA plans to put the icebears on the list of endangered species. Hopefully this will persue the US government to finally sign the Kyoto treaty and start doing something about emission.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/302 ... ing02.html

love the headline, the urgency is gone, the die was cast a long time ago

I refuse to give up.

me too

For those who are either too young to remember, don't want to remenber or just have a hard time remembering, it was three decades ago when everyone was talking about the new ice age.

Hey, I actually remember riding down to Atlantic City, NJ just to take a few pictures of the frozen ocean at the Jersey Shore. I think it was January 1977. That still may be the coldest January on record.

Do you think maybe we over-reacted and warmed up the earth a bit too much? What changed?

well actually, most of the models for global warming predict a new ice age in the extreme Northern and Southern Hemispheres because the "trade winds" currents will be dissipated by the convergence of cold waters toward the equator as the polar caps melt. But hey, what is 30 or 40 years in the life of a planet? THe most interesting data I have seen on Global warming was the result of the "Gaia" movement you refer to which then further resulted in a multinational scientific effort to monitor the mean temperature change of the ocean. It is rising and the temeprature distribution is such that it is dissipating the "trade winds" and that is what all those "scientists" are refering to when they say humans are changing the environment of the planet. When they say Global warming is unavoidable, they mean the shift in equilibrium based on human activity has happened (daa), it is the magnitude and the time frame of that shift that is now in question. THere are plenty of texts on this but the "popular Science" mags like Scientific American had some very good articles in the past year.

According to the NOAA, those of you living in Massachusetts, only have remember back to 2004 when you lived through the coldest January on record. Anyone remember if Boston Harbor was frozen?

As PS said about SI, Discover magazine's also had some good but unsettling articles on global warming for many years that explained in terms even I could understand why we'll first notice that storms are more violent and occur in places they didn't in the past, and also that if the cold water coming down from the melting Arctic stops the Gulf Stream from flowing, as they think it will, New England will get much, much colder--think Siberia--and the Southwest, including Texas, will become a truly uninhabitable desert. Global warming doesn't mean every area will initially become warmer; some will become colder. Lord knows, I hope against hope that they're all wrong, but I think we're seeing the storm part already. We're sure seeing the Arctic melt. Oh, they also have politely mentioned that the much-touted (by Fox and Bush) "scientific studies" that discount global warming tend to be funded by corporations that have an interest in promoting that conclusion. I'm thinking that faction accounts for the 10 percent they didn't manage to get in Paris.

..as i remember how cold Jan 2004 is, i remember that part of Boston harbor was frozen...i'm going to check on it, but in the years i've been here i don't think it has completely frozen...it's pretty enormous, you know....

....certainly we are seeing beach erosion....losing alot of property on the Cape and South Shores....

..and we have had the warmest 10 years on record, as Al Gore spoke to....seems like the climate is becoming more moderate.... we have freezing cold spells and really hot spells but not for very long.. we have alot of 50's...in and between seasons.....they are much less defined.... for now, it's not so bad... the long term problems are another story...

...i do believe we have some time to pull some of this out of the dire predictions...i recently moved to an apartment building ... 5 years old....
that was built for and has received some citations for it's energy efficiency...heating, cooling, electricity at much lower consumption and therefore less fossil fuel emissions...

...of course it works so well...for everyone...

equilibrium is a funny thing, once you tilt it, it cascades until it finds a new "nominal set point". stopping it or changing direction is not easy. The predictions are a hotter eqyator and a colder poles when the new nominal set point is achieved (as Shel says). And whether man is affecting the environment or not, well, well, I have worked in the corporate world for some time now and I am personally amazed when I see any real achievement or accurate prediction made in that arena even at the most mundane and trivial levels let alone when they are funding research and drawing conclusions on this "world" scale, and still the stock does OK??? There is a whole industry "Corporate Consulting" where these guys come in, find out what the Corporation want's to hear, then prepare a package that will ease the Corporate Mind and Guilt, (Guilt is an important one) and as long as nobody can point and say "ahh, but you new you were wrong when you did that!" then all those high salaries are justified. Just read Dilbert! (amazingly on target). THe point is that we don't need an evil genius (behind corporate internationalism) pulling strings to mystify and confuse America, but like Shel says (and I concur) we have developed our own mechanisms for mystifying ourselves and feeling good about it because we did our best to "do the right thing!"

http://www.orionsociety.org/pages/om/05-6om/Dowie.html

i know i was speakingof contradictions elsewhere but they seem to be everywhere you go these days

conservation refugees anybody? I mean, as I recall, Woody became WOODY because he was an ecology refugee (the dust bowl was in part land mismanagement and an ecological nightmare and it did affect the indigenous population badly as well). That then resulted in the making of Arlo! Not that I don't think having Woody's and Arlo's around is a bad thing, I just don't think we need to keep developing them in the same ways all the time.

This is the sort of thing that gets out of hand when we are to busy fighting our dirty little wars instead of managing our planet.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you're trying to say. Maybe I'm just fuzzy brained today.

http://www.orionsociety.org/pages/om/05-6om/Dowie.html

sorry, open this link and it may help