Greenland's Ice, Going, Going. . .
| Wed Aug. 20, 2008 4:05 PM PDT
Daily satellite images of Greenland's glaciers reveal the break-up of two of its largest glaciers in the last month. A massive 11-square-mile piece broke off the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland between July 10th and by July 24th. That's half the size of Manhattan. Between 2000 and 2001 the same glacier lost 33 square miles of floating ice.
What worries researchers from the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University is what appears to be a massive crack further upstream. A break-up there would doom 60 square miles, or one-third of what's left of the massive ice field.
An 11 square mile area of the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland (80˚N, 60˚W) broke away between July 10th and by July 24th. Petermann has a 500-square-mile floating section, the longest floating glacier in the Northern Hemisphere. Photo courtesy Byrd Polar Research Center, Ohio State University.
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Meanwhile, the margin of the enormous Jakobshavn Glacier has retreated inland further than at any time in the last 4,000 to 6,000 years. The Northern branch broke up in the past several weeks, and the glacier has lost at least three square miles since 2007.
The Jakobshavn Glacier dominates the roughly 130 glaciers flowing out of Greenland's interior to the sea, and is the island's most productive glacier, calving one of every 10 Greenland icebergs. Between 2001 and 2005, it suffered a massive 36-square-mile loss of ice that raised awareness worldwide of global climate change.
Oh, yeah, and Greenlanders are growing potatoes for the first time since the Viking Age.
Julia Whitty is Mother Jones' environmental correspondent, lecturer, and 2008 winner of the Kiriyama Prize and the John Burroughs Medal Award.
Comments
The WMO reports that the first half of this year is the coldest since 2000. Despite this, it is the tenth warmest since 1850. They attribute the effect to La Nina, which predictably lowers world temperatures. The anticipate a rise again when the weather pattern shifts again into El Nino mode.
Finn, "10th" place is not amongst the top 3. I guess in the University that you went to, coming in 10th in your class was something to crow about. Not here in America. This is all about normal climate fluctuations. If you believe in Darwinism, you look at the history of the earth, and you see that we are usually in an ice age. That is the normal situation for us. We are going into another now.
George, Olaf,
Talk is cheap, you guys. How much are you willing to personally bet that this is "normal climate fluctuations"? 'Cause that's what we're doing right now -- placing a massive societal bet that the human factor in climate change is insignificant and/or manageable. Not many punters out there would take that bet.
You are wrong byrdman. Look at all the over consumers in our society, eating like pigs to driving like a pigs in SUVs and pickup trucks. People will talk a good talk like Al Gore, but their piggy lifestyle shows otherwise. Don't forget the green house gases produced by the meat eatings, more than the autos.
Are you a vegetarian?
Submitted by Dan (not verified) on Mon Aug. 25, 2008 3:37 PM PDT.
This is just another drop in the Warming bucket, another tweak of the gas knob under the soon-to-boil frog-pot. And we (Olaf and George W, at any rate) are glad to watch our balanced world slide not-so-slowly into a new regime of ordered chaos.
The programmed science-illiterates out there will likely seize on my use of the word "ordered," and say "Look: even a climate-change rabble-rouser admits that there is order to nature, whether warmed or not." Well yes, there is order to everything that happens in this universe; but it's not necessarily an order that you'll like.
We're adapted to this planet as it now is, in terms of where we've chosen to live, where to work, grow food, fish, dump our wastes, etc. Every large-scale human activity is tied to the climate patterns we've perceived and become used to, over the centuries and decades. Climate deniers love to point to the Little Ice Age or other fluctuations as "proof" that climate change is an environmentalist's figment. Perhaps they should draw another lesson, from such shifts.
Look what chaos (in the usual human meaning of the word) was caused by the temporary shift of sub-arctic climate patterns into the north of Europe for a few decades in the Little Ice Age. Thousands starved from a simple inability to grow a crop. World population now, and already-stretched relief mechanisms, mean that such crises in the modern world will be many times worse -- and the warming isn't going to settle back to "normal" in a few decades, either. Even optimistic scenarios see it continuing for centuries longer than humans keep putting out the CO2 that pumps the cycle.
And honestly, don't you think it's a bit disingenuous for climate deniers to cite "natural" patterns, as an excuse to avoid considering the quite substantial arguments of climate scientists, that the underlying energy-dynamics that drive our climate engine are shifting gear? In no other realm, do these knee-jerk (hey, I said "knee-"!) me-first so-called thinkers reference nature in any other light than as a resource-sink to be exploited. Now nature is being exploited yet again, as a supposedly unlimited (sound familiar?) source of a quite valuable resource called stability.
As the "unending" forests and "unlimited" oil were before it, Mother Nature's "stability" is touted as the cure-all for human overexploitation. What does it matter if we DO screw it up, these folks blatantly say; nature will fix it and come back for another round of resource-rape.
This is thinking so limited that I'm at a loss to describe it. It's black-box thinking, magical thinking, and limited-horizon thinking all rolled into one; with several cutouts along the way to accommodate internal violations of logic.
Put simply, the "logic" used by the deniers has as many exceptions as it does tenets. The key to understanding their logic, indeed, is to give up the idea that it needs to make sense at all. Anything will do for a point, so long as the polarity of the "evidence" is right (against man-caused climate change).
Point out to a denier that the year-to-date temps, while seeming cold, are nevertheless warmer than all but ten of the last 150 years, and a denier will pop out of the sweating woodwork to complain, as one did above, that so what, all-but-ten isn't all-but-three! This then serves as a three-meter board from which to launch a quite nonsensical attack on the rest of the solid climate case.
That the denier giddily thinks he's actually making sense and scoring points, when he's doing no such thing, speaks volumes about the level of scientific literacy in the denier community. It takes zero scientific credibility to convince such "relaxed" minds, so long as the polarity of the persuasion agrees with that mind's pre-existing prejudice.
Just to be clear: that's not science. Science is a willingness to be proved wrong in the interest of finding out the actual truth; not a willingness to bend truth over backward to fit your own prior convictions.
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Turn. Off. The. Television.
ferguson, look at yourself in the mirror. You are the problem. You eat meat, the raising of meat accounts for more greenhouse gas than autos. If Americans were to eat only 10 percent less meat, it would free enough land and resources to grow over twelve million tons of grain annually for human consumption, "more than enough to adequately feed every one of the 40 to 60 million human beings who will starve to death on the planet this year." Nearly half of the grains from world harvests are fed to "livestock." According to Robbins, it takes sixteen times more resources to produce a pound of food from livestock than it does to produce a pound of food without raising animals as "livestock." It takes only one pound of grain to produce a pound of bread. In his book May All Be Fed, Mr. John Robbins wrote: "By cycling our grain through livestock and into beef, we end up with 6 percent as much food to feed human beings as we would have if we ate the grain directly."
The denialists love talking about how the human race will adapt to rapid climate change, but as is the normal case with these self-centered cornucopians they think nothing about the world's other animal and plant life. Further, how do the denialists propose we deal with ocean acidification? Anyone who has taken a high school level chemistry course will understand that when CO2 is combined with H2O the result is H2CO3 or in other words carbonic acid. Today the oceans are 30% more acidic than at the beginning of the industrial revolution and based on present trends the oceans will be 150% more acidic than today, which will spell the complete extinction of all marine life. How stupid we are and what a shame the world's biodiversity is being relegated to extinction thanks to our actions.
lucy ... i'm actually vegan but the point was i didn't say anything in my original post about eating or not eating meat. unfortunately burning fossil fuels to produce veggies also has a deleterious effect on the environment. over population is at the heart of some of our problems globally. but if we collectively keep a cool head we'll solve these problems as we've solved problems in the past.
ferguson "over population is at the heart of some of our problems globally". Children are a blessing from God, they are not a burden. I am pregnant with my 6th and I consider it to be a privilege to bring another Sanchez into this wonderful world. I recycle and have fluorescent light bulbs in all the rooms of my house. I also walk to get around and take the bus and I take cloth bags when I go shopping.
Lucy, For the record, I do eat meat, though I have cut back significantly in recent years. (I'm approaching vegetarianism asymtotically...) But do you really think it's productive to see vegetarianism as a litmus test on this issue? I mean, the planet could carry more vegetarians or it could carry fewer meat eaters, but while it's absolutely true that we could squeeze more vegetarians who bicycle onto the planet, aren't you really just pointing to the broader issue of carrying capacity? I tend to think that what we really need, in addition to more sustainable consumption habits, is one child per family and a rapid reduction in population. Love to hear your thoughts on that...
Please to correct the
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun Nov. 15, 2009 6:01 PM PST.
Please to correct the potatoes comment. This stuff is serious enough not to let people jab holes in these stories by the tactic of centering on one error.
Potatoes were never grown in Greenland before now. They are all from the western hemisphere, specifically the area that I live in in Peru is believed to be where the mutation was cultivated for food. So, before the little ice age, they could not have been in Greenland, since that was before the devil's spawn Columbus stopped nursing.
