Oh no! Greenland glacier calves island 4 times the size of Manhattan

That is how glaciers work. Snow falls in the interior and the ice spreads and moves towards lower elevations- where it breaks off or melts. Next winter, snow will again accumulate in the interior.
The Greenland ice sheet has been exceptionally cold this summer.

Temperature anomalies in Greenland over the last 30 days, showing usually cold temperatures over the ice sheet.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC1yyYgfZRI]

If a polar bear is stranded on this piece of ice, he may have to float all the way down to Tennessee before finding a blubber filled poodle for sustenance.

“E pur si muove”!

Sounds like artic ice will most definitely continue to build up next couple of years with the Nares Strait plug up.

thank God
I’ve been worried about that thing for years.
Do you realize if it didn’t break off, it could take over the world?

Layne Blanchard says:
August 6, 2010 at 12:25 pm
If a polar bear is stranded on this piece of ice, he may have to float all the way down to Tennessee before finding a blubber filled poodle for sustenance.

Actually, I think Al Gore is in California.
;^)

When you look at the number of fjords in greenland and the arctic islands this scary glacier movement thingy seems to have been going on for a long time.

So what happened up there? Did the unusually cold temps drop the local sea-level under the floating Ice Shelf and cause it to crack off?
Last time something like this happened in the Antarctic, the MSM and Warmists went stellar, after which the shelf didn’t get very far.
This thing looks like it will get stuck, adding to the Sea Ice in the Arctic. It would make a nice gap for new snow & ice to get comfy in, for many years.

I have never read any information about how cold the ice actually is , i know it is below zero but how much cold is stored in that great thing , cold enough to start to freeze the water around it and begin growing ? When the ice sheets began moving from the pole in the last ice age a similar process must have occured .

Happened in 1912 too. Or was that a rogue iceberg from the antartic?

Here’s the Aqua image the article makes reference to (about half way into the image using IE8 H/V slider bars;
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?2010217/crefl2_143.A2010217084000-2010217084500.250m.jpg

Massive chunk of ice breaks off Greenland glacier
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/2010/08/massive_iceberg_breaks_off_gre.html
“Icebergs calving off of Greenland’s glaciers are nothing new. In fact, the Canadian Ice Service and the U.S. Coast Guard’s International Ice Patrol estimate that anywhere between 10,000 and 40,000 icebergs calve from the glaciers of western Greenland in a given year.”
“What is unusual, however, is the size of this new iceberg, which is more typical of Antarctic than Arctic waters.”

They actually pre-empted the calving. When looking for more news on it, one of the first hits is from the LA times in 2008.

“Does that mean that only a handful of glaciers remain in Greenland that terminate in floating shelves? Did a lot of glaciers like that melt into oblivion already?”
Yes and no. Actually there is not that many outlet glaciers that reach the sea in Greenland. Along much of the periphery the ice melts in place on land. That there are so relatively few large tidewater glaciers also means that the remaining ones are often quite large, since they each drain a large area of the icecap. I suppose it is possible that some small tidewater glacier on Greenland has retreated onto land recently. I know that this has happened in Svalbard and Alaska.
“So, this is actually sea ice that just broke away from the land, really. This ten mile long chunk was already thirty plus miles out to sea.”
Shelf ice from a glacier is floating in the sea, but it is not sea ice in the normal sense. It is vastly thicker and accumulated on land rather than being frozen seawater.

Glacier death spiral, obviously…..

That huge ice island is probably going to get stuck by the sea-ice and in return re-uniting with the glacier again in the following winter months.

Oh no! How come they used to farm on Greenland? What was the calving like then? :o)
http://www.greenland-guide.gl/leif2000/history.htm
“…the rate of warming in 1920–1930 was about 50% higher than that in 1995–2005.”
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL026510.shtml

The front fell off the glacier… reminds me an Aussie sketch:

The ice is not “lost” as the article claims. It is still there and not likely to go anywhere any time soon. Usual BS.

wcp says…
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that calving is usually a sign of glacier growth in situations like this – it gets too big, and a chunk breaks off…
——-
You know, I’ve never actually thought about that, and I think you might be right! Anthony? Steve? Do you agree with wcp’s conclusions? They seem quite solid to me.

if you compare the 2007 photo with the current image, you can see that the glacier still ends at roughly the same spot.
it has advanced, which is consistent with the glacier gaining mass in the accretion zone.
seems like a considerable advance in just 3 years, the icecap must be gaining mass much more rapidy than previously thought!

40 shades of green says (August 6, 2010 at 1:42 pm): “Good news. This island will float off south and, as it is so big, won’t melt. It will therefore increase the Sea Ice extent. :-)”
New York Times, September 20, 2010: Today R Gates conceded that Steve Goddard’s predicted Arctic ice minimum was right on the money, but insists the plucky prognosticator was just lucky: “If it hadn’t been for that damn glacier on Greenland…” 🙂

Snowlover123: August 6, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Anthony? Steve? Do you agree with wcp’s conclusions? They seem quite solid to me.
It’s ice, so it’s quite solid.
Except for the part where the front fell off — a wave probably hit it.
(Good one, Sean Peake!)

Well, we all know that as soon as this hits the media (and blogosphere) there’ll be panic in the streets.
The cap and trade proponents will be jumping for joy… It’s exactly what they needed (aka the media ignoring what caused the breakoff and just running with the AGW excuse du jour).
And to add muchly needed exaggeration in the reporting of this incident (just to ensure that it strikes the heart spot on), they compare the size to Manhatten. Why not compare it to the size of, say, the old district in Paris ? Naw… that wouldn’t have the same impact now would it ? So Manhatten it is.
… and the band plays on

Bet the Globe and Mail will jump on this one…

Here we go, USA Today blames warming oceans:
“Ocean warming currents are circulating around the fjord here and eroding the underbelly of Petermann glacier at an incredible rate, which is 25 times that of the surface melt,” said Alun Hubbard, a glaciologist at the University Of Wales. There’s been a revelation in the last couple of years in the role that warming oceans play in triggering the enhanced acceleration, breakup and thinning of these outlet glaciers.”
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2010/08/giant-ice-island-breaks-off-greenland-glacier/1

In breaking news….
Manhatten broke off the North American continent today, initially remaining close to its original position, until the tide sucked it out into the Atlantic ocean. Which was FAB-BUU-LOUS!
Scientists say this is a sign of catastrophic AGW, as the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere builds up, rock becomes bouyant, like latte foam or hair gel.
Concerned scientists say that this is just the start, Japan, Crete and New Zealand could be next.
The Mayor of New York was asked if this event would effect Wall Street, he replied:
“Not really, Sex in the City production has been delayed, but thats mostly Manhatten was really used for.”

Oh my god .. we’re all dead! Sea levels will now surely rise and drown us all.

EFS_Junior says:
August 6, 2010 at 1:22 pm
Did anyone else not notice that the number of melt ponds in the vicinity of and on the surface of the Petermann Glacier is considerably diminished in the August 5 2010 picture at the top of the post compared with picture taken on June 18 2003 below it?

Al Gore’s Holy Hologram says: August 6, 2010 at 2:33 pm
I wish they would shut up about the size of Manhattan for once
Why, haven’t you heard yet? Manhattan, the size of a large iceberg, has broken off The Bronx leaving behind a huge rift called Harlem River.

So it is worse than we thought; are we all gonna die ?
If I had a humvee I could hitch up to this thing and tow it to Los Angeles where they could use some extra water.
I could get rich with that much bottled water.
Anybody know why the ocean never freezes and crawls up onto Greenland and climbs uphill to the top of those glaciers. How the hell does all that ice get up there anyway; enquiring minds want to know ?
Maybe Santas Elves cart all that ice up to the top during the night just to see the greenies squirm as it all bowls downhill again.

Can we dunk the Bronx in the sea instead?

Or this from http://www.cejournal.net/?p=3358
“… ice shelves still are significant because they can hold back the flow of a glacier into the ocean.”
Though given the pictures that the tounge had been detached from the side of the fjord since 2008, I’m not sure how it would apply in this case.

fp says:
August 6, 2010 at 3:26 pm
Most of the oceans haven’t yet received the news, and are growing colder as we speak.
Better yet, the Ice Shelf is floating north, not south.

Frederick Michael says:
August 6, 2010 at 1:37 pm
If this plugs the Nares strait, it’ll stay plugged for a very long time. That might matter; the ice lost through the Nares was all multi-year.
Sounds like that’s a normal occurrence, specially in times of cooling.

Cant be that serious as ClimateProgress.org has not reported it yet…
By the way every chance you get post the following link in their post comments sections as they keep removing it when I add it in :), cant think why!!
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png

The calving iceberg has been in the ocean for quite some time displacing a lot of sea water, ergo, causing and increase in sea level. However, as the ice will melt over a span of time, sea level will drop all other things being equal, as a result of the difference in density between ice and liquid water. Try it yourself by putting ice cubes in a glass of water. Mark the level of water in the glass, and check the level after the ice has melted. You will see a drop of water level in the glass.
[REPLY- Huh?! The level remains the same. Displacement is constant, isn’t it? ~ Evan]

R. LeBel says:
August 6, 2010 at 8:05 pm
The calving iceberg has been in the ocean for quite some time displacing a lot of sea water, ergo, causing and increase in sea level. However, as the ice will melt over a span of time, sea level will drop all other things being equal, as a result of the difference in density between ice and liquid water. Try it yourself by putting ice cubes in a glass of water. Mark the level of water in the glass, and check the level after the ice has melted. You will see a drop of water level in the glass.
[REPLY- Huh?! The level remains the same. Displacement is constant, isn’t it? ~ Evan]
_____________________________________________________________
AFAIK the calved section was not grounded, even if it were, most of the ice would have been very close to being neutrally buoyant, as the bathymetry and top of the ice are relatively flat based on the satellite imagery and length of the glacier near sea level.
Doesen’t matter once the ice is floating though, as it displaces it’s own weight in the fluid it occupies, just like any other floating object, see;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buoyancy

stevengoddard says:
August 6, 2010 at 2:49 pm
Snowlover123
wcp is correct. An expanding glacier moves forward and calves. A declining glacier retreats away from the sea.
———–
I don’t think that glacier starts crawling back up the hill. It’s in retreat because stuff is falling off it faster than the ice mass is sliding down. Retreating is not necessarily shrinking, it’s just where the snout terminates.
Check out the Meares and Columbia glaciers in Alaska. They’re only a few miles apart, one is advancing, the other retreating.

The Finnish news have this reported as it is still not sure how much of this event was caused by AGW The biggest paper in Finlands story (in Finnish)
(I’ve been a lurker here for some years but had put my first comment on this as the article is so stupid, its like I was sneezing this morning but it’s still undetermined how much of this was caused by AGW.)
Kenneth

” “In the early morning hours of August 5, 2010, an ice island four times the size of Manhattan was born in northern Greenland,” said Andreas Muenchow, associate professor of physical ocean science and engineering at the University of Delaware’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment.”
WOW! I did not know Manhattan was so tiny. 😉 pg

1962.. Did we have climate back then?? Holy Carbon Batman, we are caught in a vortex of…. climate repetitiveness. How boring. Bugger off, Gore & Strong. We have seen how Thugocrats run things.
regards.

For Steve Goddard: Dear Steve – I earlier posted as follows:
————————————————————————————–
August 6, 2010 at 1:57 pm
So does this mean Arctic sea ice just increased? Are sea ice and glacial ice “fungible”?
—————————————————————————————
Although this quetion was asked naively, it was meant seriously, as I find your frequent posts on Arctic sea ice entertaining and informative. Is there a classification difference between Arctic sea ice and calved glacial ice in the Arctic? If not, does this mean a calving glacier inside the Arctic circle will increase the extent of Arctic sea ice “overnight”? If so, how “chunky” is this noise in the measurements?
All the best.

As Anthony said, ‘It’s what glaciers do’. If glaciers melt they retreat up valley. A calving glacier shows a healthy glacier being supplied from up valley with plenty of ice. Ice sheets will break up due to storm surges or wave action. Very cold ice becomes brittle and more likely to fracture under stress. It still seems to be held in the bay by sea ice so I guess that it will be there next year to frighten the media again.

What’s that in elephants?

A lesson learnt: don’t order your ice-cream with extra ice – it was not meant to be that way and the extra ice will migrate.

This seems to be an appropriate place to bring up the subject of “FOG” (please allow me to ask a “Weather Question” I haven’t seen addressed lately), London Fog (the real thing NOT the raincoats) was noted for many years as Ice in the North Atlantic region melted after the LIA and things began to warm up, but – here’s the kicker –
wouldn’t the reverse also be true: during ocean cooling, glaciers growing and calving, sea water freezing and creating ice, wouldn’t the cooling also create some pretty foggy weather for the Brits, etc.?
If someone has a thing for sea fog, I sure would like to hear more on the subject sometime, especially the part about sea ice formation and the foggy effect on the N.Atlantic region during cooling phases (aka Climate Changes).

From CNN’s take on this:
The ice island, which is about half the height of the Empire State Building, is the biggest piece of ice to break away from the Arctic icecap since 1962
And then a few paragraphs later:
Environmentalists say ice melt is being caused by global warming with Arctic temperatures in the 1990s reaching their warmest level of any decade in at least 2,000 years
REPLY: Told ya so, even though there’s no mention of this in the original press release. – Anthony

It is now covered in swedish media.
http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article7584147.ab
They say that no one can tell it is caused by AGW, but on the other hand no one can say it isn’t.
I guess they had to add that last line just to make people think that it is caused by AGW. After all Sweden has one of the worlds most AGW believing media and politicians. The article also tells the glacier has grown alot in recent years so it is expected to calve alot.
It is also covered by Swedens Al Gore, a former meteorologist, Pär Holmgren, but for once he do not blame AGW directly.
http://blogg.aftonbladet.se/vaderbloggen
He did blame the growth of Antarcitc sea ice this winter on increased calving of ice at Antarctica during the winter this year though and the calving was caused by AGW.

HR, those DMI images are showing sea ice breaking off. Calving glacier ice is many, many meters thicker. Think volume.

That ice island ain’t going nowhere. Unless the sea ice in Nares Strait melts in the next ten days that ice island will become part of the Arctic Ice Extent.

Climate change was blamed for the ‘calving’ ice island on the 6pm BBC news on Radio 4 today.

Billy Liar says:
August 7, 2010 at 12:30 pm
EFS_Junior says:
August 6, 2010 at 6:55 pm
You should not compare images of melt ponds in June with those taken in August, as many of the melt ponds will have drained by the July time frame, as they have done so far in 2010.
That’s funny, there seem to be quite a lot of them in this picture taken in August one year ago today:
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?2009189/crefl1_143.A2009189000000-2009189000500.250m.jpg
Not many ponds around on 16 June of this year either:
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?2010167/crefl2_143.A2010167152500-2010167153000.250m.jpg
____________________________________________________________
Clouds clearly obscure your June image, while I can count the melt ponds on one hand from your August image.
You need to compare June with another June. July with another July, and August with another August, all being from the same two years.
Otherwise, it’s apples and oranges.
Per your original comment, what does August 5 2010 have to do with June 18 2003 anyway?
Is there some relationship between visable melt ponds at different times of year and different years with calving glaciers?

This article does not take the problem seriously enough.
Andy Revkin, a real expert on the climate change issue, puts this new ice island into its proper context. It is part of the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. If this all melts then Florida will be submerged under 20 feet of water. All the cool water flowing into the Atlantic will cool temperatures, maybe causing another ice age.
see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbMkurETxjU
and http://manicbeancounter.wordpress.com/2010/08/07/andy-revkin-doesn%e2%80%99t-know-which-way-to-panic/

I thought ice volume was the new crucial parameter, not ice area. If the claims “at least 100 square miles” and “thickness up to half the height of the empire state building’ (1250 feet = 0.38 km) are to be believed, then it is less than (0.19 km x 259 km^2) = 49 km^3. The Greenland ice sheet is somewhere around 2.5 – 5 million km^3. This represents 10-20 ppm (parts per million) of Greenland’s ice sheet, but as others have said, it isn’t going anywhere.

The run out for that tongue ends at the Nares Strait which can be a busy place. I presume the snout can never advance out into the strait save for that being frozen fast. So what is the historical range of the snout of the Petermann glacier, and is this just a matter of natural aging for this area? What is the normal advance rate? Where was the snout in 1962 prior to that calving event? What, in other words, is unusual about this? I’m asking rhetorically, so don’t anyone tell me to do my own homework 🙂
That separation line can be seen in photos dating back several years – it should hardly be a surprise it was going to break at that point – there were also other cracks where it can have broken away. Only one can be the weakest link, and I’d bet the feeder glaciers on the right side of that tongue (oriented per the photo) are part of the stress that creates the weak spots.

Dear Smokey,
I’m not quite Al Gore
Please note that Andy Revkin claims, within 3 minutes both that melting Greenland ice could cause cooling in the Atlantic AND that melting of the ice sheets will cause sea levels to rise by seven metres. A sign of a die-hard alarmist is to go for the contradictory extremes – and not notice the problem.
Anyway, please take a look at the video to see for yourself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbMkurETxjU
http://manicbeancounter.wordpress.com/2010/08/07/andy-revkin-doesn%e2%80%99t-know-which-way-to-panic/

A lot of funny remarks and it is true that normal, non-melting glaciers to calve, sometimes spectacularly. But it take a particularly out-of-touch or unobservant one (in some cases intentionally unobservant) to not know that worldwide glaciers have been retreating at a record rate, some disappearing entirely. Setting the polar ice cap aside, put “retreating glaciers” into your Google search term and you will find plenty of photographic evidence that _most_ glaciers are retreating (means “melting”) at an alarming rate.
There will be years of record cold along with record heat, that’s how it works, and some may even grow over a short period, but the trend is downward precipitously, especially in the last 30 years. Is it natural or is it the result of man’s activities? I don’t know but 98% of the world’s scientist do actually believe in global warming and that it is caused by man. Those that don’t get a big stage supplied by companies and political parties with an interest in playing down the obvious.
If 98% of your doctors tell you that you have a cancerous wart on your butt do you ignore them because you fear medical procedures or the cost thereof?
The potential consequences to where we live of not listening to the people who are trained in these sciences and taking steps are far worse and more permanent than the consequences of doing something and there being no such problem.
Set politics aside.
Joel
Atlanta

According to an AP Story by Charles L Hanley in 8/13 Columbus OH Dispatch, “Climate Predictions Ringing True”, http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/national_world/stories/2010/08/13/climate-predictions-ringing-true.html?sid=101 :
“Researchers last week spotted that a 100-square-mile chunk of ice had calved off from the great Petermann Glacier in Greenland’s far northwest. It was the largest ice island to break away in the Arctic in a half-century of observation.”
Yet according to the 8/6 UDel press release quoted above, the nearby Ward Hunt Ice Shelf calved off a 230 square mile berg in 1962.
AP should hire a fact checker!

“Must have been climate change back then too. ” Watts
Your spin vs. science. And you voted for Bush? And you hate Obama? Maybe you and Sarah and Carl and Dick can protect us from the vast left wing conspiring scientists. Of the whole wide world!
It started with a hacking November 17, 2009. According to wikipedia, “The climate-sceptic blog Watts Up With That, which had obtained a copy of the files, also received a posting from the hacker complaining that nothing was happening.”
Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center, said that sceptics were “taking these words totally out of context to make something trivial appear nefarious”,[16] and called the entire incident a careful, “high-level, orchestrated smear campaign to distract the public about the nature of the climate change problem.”[55]
The Investigatory Committee finally reported on June 4, 2010 “…there is no substance to the allegations against Mann.[15]” The Christian Science Monitor observed: “Climate scientists exonerated in ‘climategate’ but public trust damaged”.
“Columnists who gave greatest vent to their indignation have not made any revisions or corrections, let alone apologised to the scientists whose integrity they so sweepingly impugned.” Tiffen, University of Sydney
Thank you for the opportunity to respond directly to your continuing spin.

Now this has got to be pure coincidence surely or do you think that perhaps the move company The Aslyum have paid some marketing company to promote Assoc. Prof. Andrew Muenchow recent work?
I’ve just been watching cable TV and was a bit gobsmacked to find this move being shown on the the SyFy channel this morning.
http://www.cinematical.com/2010/07/28/titanic-ii-trailer-hits-threatens-to-sink-a-ship-and-hearts/
Yes, Titanic II is a disaster movie (du eto be released in the US next week) which takes place in April 2012, 100 years afer the sinking of the RMS Titanic. A new luxury cruise liner, the Titanic II, has been christened, and is soon to embark on her maiden voyage, on the same route the Titanic took 100 years before.
During the voyage, the effects of global warming cause a section (teh size of Rhode Island) of a carving glacier in Greenland to break off and to produce an enormous tsunami that sends an iceberg crashing into the Titanic II, leaving it to the same fate of her predecessor.
Here is the official trailer (Quicktime required) and photos from the film on the ‘The Asylum’ web site
http://www.theasylum.cc/product.php?id=174
and here it is also on YouTube