There’s some surprising reaction to the press release we covered on WUWT recently.
Here’s some excerpts:
Knowing how the massive ice sheets atop Antarctica and Greenland work is key to
predicting how global warming could raise sea levels and flood coastal cities. But a new study upends what scientists thought they knew. It turns out it’s not just ancient snow that makes up the ice sheets, but water deep under the sheets also thaws and refreezes over time.
To put it in non-scientific terms, lead scientist Robin Bell told msnbc.com, the study
redefines “how squishy” the base of ice sheets can be. “This matters to how fast ice will flow and how fast ice sheets will change.”
“It also means that ice sheet models are not correct,” she said, comparing it to “trying to
figure out how a car will drive but forgetting to add the tires. The performance will be very
different if you are driving on the rims.”
Reporting in this week’s issue of the peer-reviewed journal Science, Bell and his team
described how ice-penetrating radar peeled back two miles of ice a million years old in the
center of Antarctica.
…
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“In the depths, water remains liquid even when it is below the normal freezing point, due to pressure exerted on it. But once moved up to an area of less pressure, such supercooled water can freeze almost instantly.”
Under two miles of ice, nothing is going to move quickly, and therefore “almost instantly” is a totally inappropriate descriptor.
It is always something, ain’t it? No matter what, these alarmists always find come up with something so that they can say “No, you are wrong. There is a problem and humans are to blame.” It is like playing a game with a child when the rules are always changing and, conveniently enough, always benefit the child. Dirty ice, squishy ice. What will be next? Maybe “the ice not compacted enough so that ice extent is larger but actual ice amounts are much much less”.
You mean it’s (worse, better, different, less certain…etc.) than we thought?
What’s the SI unit of squishiness?
Computer animations again.
“What’s the SI unit of squishiness?….
=Meters/Pascal
Sounds like squishy science to me. At least they didn’t claim “it’s worse than we thought!”.
Obviously this PROVES that global warming is real. I don’t know how, that doesn’t matter. It just does. There, see? The science is settled!!!
I was under the impression that Greenland at least the ice sat in a depression caused by the weight of ice so could not flow out. This does not matter at the moment as ice is building up on Greenland.
I still ask the question about geothermal heat buildup at the ice ground interface which happens under glaciers. Water here either flows downhill so exit at the snout of the glacier or remains as a fluid. It does not refreeze because of the geothermal heat, between 10 -30 w/sqm. Under the Greenland ice sheet this water will pool.
I also thought that the Russians had found a large lake under the Antarctic ice and were drilling into it. What happened to that?
Squishyness = bulk modulus, the pressure needed to give a unit decrease in volume, unit is the Pascal (SI), or psi if you are from Liberia, Myanmar or America.
So they used outputs from a climate model (whose outputs were based on modelled temperatures) to feed into a ice flow model to come up with their initial conclusion, but it turned out one of the models was wrong.
But don’t worry, once they fix it, the whole merry model chain will be re-established and the scaremongering can continue.
Well that about sums up the AGW story: driving on the rims.
First the right front Global Warming tire blew out and peeled off, followed by the left front Climate Change tire, then the right rear Climate Disruption tire, and now that the last tire is going flat, the steering is problematic at best.
It’s a good thing somebody remembered to bring the emergency mountain bike, to enable backpeddling.
Richard Black’s laughable take on this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12687272
/Mango
So, is it: Turtles all the way down? Models all the way down? or Squishy ice all the way down? Inquiring minds need to know.
I presume all hithertofore rock-solid, science-settled peer-reviewed models factored in the squishy-ice effect properly?
Ah,
if you gaze into the ice hole, the ice hole gazes also into you.
I know, someone probably said that before,
but it does seem to be a “nitch, key” phrase, does it not?
Maybe the reason why Larsen ice shelves let go a few years ago is in this!
Any thoughts from those in the know?
The glacial flow in the radar profile image is from left to right. This forces the big blog of refrozen ice up and over the mountain peaks. On the right side of the blog, you can see the downstream turbulence it creates.
Hard to imagine turbulence in something moving as slowly as the Antarctic ice sheet, but there it is.
Is there any way that they would have/could have taken this Radar Picture from ground level? That seems inconceivable to me, so I expect it was an “image” from a satellite.
That being the case, then how in the world can they produce a picture in profile?!!
Please, tell me this is not just a hoax that made it past the Peer Review Process.
More rotten ice?
The temperature at which water changes phase does actually depend on the pressure . Your car’s cooling system is an example of that, the idea that a layer of water could exist underneath a few thousand metres of ice is not out of the question. the question would be how much lubrication that layer of ice would provide. The idea that ice would be “squishy” will take some time to figure out, the technical terms that get posted sometimes confuse me. The idea that ice could turn flexible under a high pressure load is interesting and it should be testable under labratory conditions… NOTE LABORATORY EXPERIMENT NOT COMPUTER SIMULATION. It should not be very difficult to set up and run and it would solve any controversy.
I guess that settles it, the models are wrong.
Antarctic ice models “not correct”, sea level rise “complicated”
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lol, now those are headlines!! But this is because while we can identify “squishiness”, we haven’t defined the functions of squishiness nor the dynamics of the inversion of squishiness. Prolly has to do with the ratio phi.
and the BBC peddles more doom and misery for our Antarctic and Greenland glaciers:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12687272
but with a link to the actual paper:
http://www.agu.org/news/press/pr_archives/2010/2010-07.shtml
which mentions the Antarctic only twice (funny that), is full of contradictions regarding what is happening and why (e.g. increased glacial flow from central Greenland)
The required leap of “faith” by the BBC.
So… As the ice melts or sublimates, thus thinning the ice sheets, the reduction in verticle pressure of ice reduces the amount of water underneath causing the ice sheet to move more slowly over time. This sounds like good news to me. — John M Reynolds
Bob Shapiro says: “Is there any way that they would have/could have taken this Radar Picture from ground level? That seems inconceivable to me, so I expect it was an “image” from a satellite. That being the case, then how in the world can they produce a picture in profile?!! Please, tell me this is not just a hoax that made it past the Peer Review Process.”
I believe the process is called stereoscopic photographs. It was used by early airplanes for aiding mapmakers in making 3-D maps, and is used by satellites such as Cartosat-1. It is also being employed by the satellites that are near Mars. The pictures can be quite stunning, and really give you a feel for what the three-dimensional terrain looks like. It is not a hoax.