REPLY: It’s important that you feel comfortable with your own beliefs. – Anthony

Dear Mr. Alberts:

In an earlier post, you quoted me as follows:

“From what I have read, geothermal energy is part of the reason why there is liquid water (even at times underwater lakes) at the bottom of glaciers. But the movement of the ice itself generates friction, which means heat, which means melting water.

“A similar process occurs when people ice skate or move sleds or sleighs over ice.”

………………………………………….

After citing this text of mine, you made the following comment::

“So then this would have nothing to do with ambient air temperature, correct?”

………………………………………….

At this point, I would like to extend my remarks further:

According to what I read, the surface of the Antarctic glaciers is melting at a faster rate. This water then goes through cracks in the glacial ice to the bottom of the glaciers, where it joins other liquid water generated apparently both through geothermal heat and from heat caused by the friction of the moving glaciers, adding to the quantity of liquid water below the glaciers and making the ground much more slippery for them.

If this is true, then the slight increase in ambient air temperatures in Antarctica would indeed increase the amount of liquid water lubricating the glaciers where they touched the ground.

One other thing I have read: The glaciers in Switzerland are shrinking rather rapidly, worrying the Swiss authorities greatly because they generate a lot of their electricity in hydroelectric plants fed by these glaciers. Once they disappear, there will be no water to feed the turbines of these plants, and they will stop generating electricity.

Harleigh Kyson Jr.

Thank you very much for your recent post. I did not know that under pressure the freezing point of water goes down.

Harleigh Kyson Jr.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7890988.stm

Admittedly, the media tends to bury their mistakes. But how many people dwell on their own? For all its faults, the mainstream media makes an effort to verify its information.

A lot of people think that ‘objective’ reporting is old hat, that the ‘he-said/she-said’ style illuminates nothing. But I believe it’s important to retain this format for straight news because it prevents the reporter from taking too many liberties with the facts and, importantly, allows the reader to make up his own mind.

Op-eds have their place, and can be a more interesting read, but their primary purpose is to persuade, and I think a commitment to inform is vital to the integrity of the media.

hkyson (18:54:44) :

The general scientific consensus is that global warming is real and that it is accelerating. What is scary is that glaciers on Greenland and Antarctica are lubricated by liquid water where they touch the earth–which could accelerate their rate of calving into the sea. If all our planet’s landlocked water melts into the sea, our coastal cities will be flooded.

How exactly do you get liquid water under hundreds of meters of ice due to a minor increase in air temp? I’ve heard this hypothesis, but have seen no evidence to back it up. The only way I can think of where this would be possible would be due to plate tectonics/vulcanism, but that would be pretty localized. “”"

Well under pressure, the freezing point of water goes down, so under enough ice pressure, the freezing point could be depressed so much that it is below the ice temperqature which would then melt.

Now at a place like Vostok Station, as you get deeper, and the freezing point is depressed, you also start running into thermal energy coming from the rocks below, so the ambient temperature rises as you go down, while the freezing point is dropping, so eventually you get water.

Vostok station is sitting on top of Lake Vostok, so they can’t drill any deeper, without breaking through the ice, and into the lake; and they don’t want to break into the lake, until they have some scientific reason to do that, because they don’t want to contaminate the lake water.

But you are correct the air temperature isn’t going to do diddley to the bottom of the ice

George

More on stupidity, from Frank Zappa.

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

and

There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.

No-one should be taken in by the BBC. As many others have already posted, the BBC doesn’t have a huge amount of credibility any more. It certainly acts like the mouthpiece of a discredited (in more ways than one) government which is getting more extreme by the day.

In the UK, it is now illegal to take a photograph of a police officer.

You can take “sledding glaciers” in Greenland off your list of disasters to worry about

FALL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION:
Galloping Glaciers of Greenland Have Reined Themselves In
Richard A. Kerr
Ice loss in Greenland has had some climatologists speculating that global warming might have brought on a scary new regime of wildly heightened ice loss and an ever-faster rise in sea level. But glaciologists reported at the American Geophysical Union meeting that Greenland ice’s Armageddon has come to an end.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/323/5913/458a

Temperatures in the interior of the Greenland ice sheet rarely if ever get above freezing.