This is a press release from OSU, home of Dr. Lonnie Thompson. The press releases from there, written by Earle Holland, tend to be a bit excitable. For example, here’s one from just before COP16. Mr. Holland loves those all bold headlines. I invite readers to come up with other examples of “filling” based on regular melt as usual in other places.
What is most missing here is historical context. Howat is correct about snapshots, this press release is based on one about 10 years long, which is a blip in the history of the glaciers there. What they don’t have are comparative snapshots of the same data though 50-100-200-1000 years ago, so they can’t and don’t say if this is unusual or business as usual behavior for these glaciers in their long history.
TWO GREENLAND GLACIERS LOSE ENOUGH ICE TO FILL LAKE ERIE
COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new study aimed at refining the way scientists measure ice loss in Greenland is providing a “high-definition picture” of climate-caused changes on the island.
And the picture isn’t pretty.
In the last decade, two of the largest three glaciers draining that frozen landscape have lost enough ice that, if melted, could have filled Lake Erie.
The three glaciers – Helheim, Kangerdlugssuaq and Jakobshavn Isbrae – are responsible for as much as one-fifth of the ice flowing out from Greenland into the ocean.
 |
|
Ian Howat
|
“Jakobshavn alone drains somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of all the ice flowing outward from inland to the sea,” explained Ian Howat, an assistant professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University. His study appears in the current issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
As the second largest holder of ice on the planet, and the site of hundreds of glaciers, Greenland is a natural laboratory for studying how climate change has affected these ice fields.
Researchers focus on the “mass balance” of glaciers, the rate of new ice being formed as snow falls versus the flow of ice out into the sea.
The new study suggests that, in the last decade, Jakobshavn Isbrae has lost enough ice to equal 11 years’ worth of normal snow accumulation, approximately 300 gigatons (300 billion tons) of ice.
“Kangerdlugssuaq would have to stop flowing and accumulate snowfall for seven years to regain the ice it has lost,” said Howat, also a member of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State.
Surprisingly, the researchers found that the third glacier, Helheim, had actually gained a small amount of mass over the same period. It gained approximately one-fifteenth of what Jakobshavn had lost, Howat said.
The real value of the research, however, is the confirmation that the new techniques Howat and his colleagues developed will provide scientists a more accurate idea of exactly how much ice is being lost.
|
Past estimates, he said, have been merely snapshots of what was going on at these glaciers in terms of mass loss. “We really need to sample them very frequently or else we won’t really know how much change has occurred. “This new research pumps up the resolution and gives us a kind of high-definition picture of ice loss,” Howat said. |
“These glaciers change pretty quickly. They speed up and then slow down. There’s a pulsing in the flow of ice,” Howat said. “There’s variability, a seasonal cycle and lots of different changes in the rate that ice is flowing through these glaciers.”
Past estimates, he said, have been merely snapshots of what was going on at these glaciers in terms of mass loss. “We really need to sample them very frequently or else we won’t really know how much change has occurred.
“This new research pumps up the resolution and gives us a kind of high-definition picture of ice loss,” he said.
To get this longer-timeframe image, Howat and colleagues drew on data sets provided by at least seven orbiting satellites and airplanes, as well as other sources.
“To get a good picture of what’s going on, we need different tools and each one of these satellites plays an important role and adds more information,” Howat said.
The next step is to look at the next-largest glaciers in Greenland and work their way down through smaller and smaller ice flows.
“Currently, the missing piece is ice thickness data for all of the glaciers, but a NASA aircraft is up there getting it. When that’s available, we’ll be able to apply this technique to the entire Greenland ice sheet and get a monthly total mass balance for the last 10 years or so,” he said.
Along with Howat, Yushin Ahn, a postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State’s Byrd Polar Research Center; Ian Joughin of the University of Washington; Michael van den Broeke and Jan Lenaerts, both of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, worked on the project.
The work is supported in part by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and by the Climate, Water and Carbon Program at Ohio State.
#
Contact: Ian Howat, (614) 247-8944; Howat.4@osu.edu
Written by Earle Holland, (614) 292-8384; Holland.8@osu.edu
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Ah yes, the up-tick. Focus in close and then shout about any change, without regard for perspective or the relative value of the change. In another venue, these people would be considered barkers or shills….
I want to hear more about this. Science is usually done in the surprises, not the expected results.
Lake Erie[2] (play /ˈɪri/; French: Lac Érié) is the fourth largest lake (by surface area) of the five Great Lakes in North America, and the thirteenth largest globally.[3] It is the southernmost, shallowest, and smallest by volume of the Great Lakes…..
Picking the smallest sure sounds impressive anyway……..
A high-resolution plea for funding.
“The new study suggests that, in the last decade, Jakobshavn Isbrae has lost enough ice to equal 11 years’ worth of normal snow accumulation, approximately 300 gigatons (300 billion tons) of ice.”
last 10 years lost 11 years worth of snow, approximately.
Might this be a =/- 10% guess?
How long will it take for the glaciers to retreat back to the point when Greenland was really Green? I am sure the archealogists can’t wait.
How do you get a “monthly total mass balance for the last 10 years or so” from the data collected by an aircraft flying around NOW? I can understand if you had the data from the last 10 years sitting around and came up with a new method of analyzing it, but… how do you figure out ice loss from 10 years ago with a snapshot from yesterday?
Or is this just more modeling being passed off as proven data?
Headline: HOLOCENE POST-GLACIAL MELTDOWN CAUSES 120 METER SEA-LEVEL RISE!!!
Glaciers always calve ice, even when they are at their coldest. They move downslope to the sea and break off, thus “losing” ice. I know that the “climate scientists” have a hard time measuring the actual mass of the glacier, but even so are they adding the “lost” ice by calving to the total, as gross weight loss, rather than net weight loss? We also have a recent report that showed that glaciers can accelerate through ice forming from below and lubricating the flow, causing acceleration even in very very cold times.
In other words, what is the estimated net weight loss in the last 10 years, not the gross weight loss. For instance, at the height of the last glaciation, when ice was a mile thick over Manhattan, the ice loss at the end of the glacier must have been enormous!
If it is net weight loss versus 1976 (the coldest recent times) then this would be cherry-picking the start time, a normal “trick” for these crooks.
I am sure they created a bogus report by parsing words, the usual MO for the “Clique”.
mike restin says:
May 25, 2011 at 9:08 am
“The new study suggests that, in the last decade, Jakobshavn Isbrae has lost enough ice to equal 11 years’ worth of normal snow accumulation, approximately 300 gigatons (300 billion tons) of ice.”
last 10 years lost 11 years worth of snow, approximately.
Might this be a =/- 10% guess?
A astute reading-between-the-lines, sir. How to imply alarm by using big numbers, when really, little numbers won’t do.
Most of the melted water has recycled as snow – probably back onto the Greenland central ice cap by now.
A careful reading of supporting material shows that although Jakobshaven is indeed thinning and retreating, it has done so at a increasingly lesser rate since 1998. Hmmmm
The new study suggests that, in the last decade, Jakobshavn Isbrae has lost enough ice to equal 11 years’ worth of normal snow accumulation, approximately 300 gigatons (300 billion tons) of ice.”
Somebody check my maths, but I make that just a chunk of ice 700m x 700m x 700m, which is big enough, but I doubt it would fill Lake Erie. And pifflingly small compared with the volume of ice on Greenland.
Assume 1 tonne = 1000 Kg
1 cm3 ice weighs 1 g
Some pretty slick advertising, because reality isn’t nearly as impressive.
Volume of Greenland Ice Sheets . . . 2, 850,000 km3
Current worst case annual melt rate . . . . 220KM3
Years befor the Greenland Ice Sheets melt . . . 12, 954
Haven’t we been here before almost exactly a year ago?
I remember Willis Eschenbach dealing with this matter here
On Being the Wrong Size
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/23/on-being-the-wrong-size/
His essay also dealt with “multiples of Lake Erie”. Willis managed to put it in context!
Hmm ‘new techniques’ – its going to be worse than we thought. They are not happy with their unquestionably biased 10yrs ice loss equivalent to 11 years snow addition (scientists in the pre post normal science days would have said this is essentially a balance).
“And the picture isn’t pretty.”
==============================
At what point did supposed scientists get to viewing information in the aesthetic sense? What an awful picture, glaciers doing what glaciers do! If this keeps happening, Greenland could become (gasp!) arable again!! Oh no’s!!
Ice melt lakes are forming further from the coast now, causing much alarm. But water recently discovered 10 meters down at 3,000 meters elevation on the Arctic Circle is puzzling:
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/51854250-78/ice-greenland-forster-team.html.csp
Is this due to residual heat from the beginning of the end of the LIA (apologies to WC)?
Things like that don’t happen no more nowadays. –AGF
“…Surprisingly, the researchers found that the third glacier, Helheim, had actually gained a small amount of mass over the same period. It gained approximately one-fifteenth of what Jakobshavn had lost, Howat said…”
Being surprised when one of three glaciers GAINS mass shows their bias.
How different would their stories have been of TWO of the three gained mass? I’m sure they would have still found a unbiased way to show that the total loss is negative.
Their story has always been “all the glaciers are losing mass rapidly”, even though a few have actually gained.
I’m with Paul M. Parks (May 25, 2011 at 9:05 am). I’d like to see what conditions are allowing that one glacier to gain mass (altitude, latitude, closeness to volcanos, other stuff) that isn’t present at the other two.
Ah, Dr Lonnie Thomson. He and his wife appear to seek out the worlds most unusual glaciers and make a living out of it. Commenter ‘izen’ on a previous thread:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/23/study-on-paleo-rainfall-records-clearly-shows-existence-of-mwp-and-lia-in-southern-hemisphere/
referenced a couple of press releases about the Thomson’s work. This one in particular:
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/radsignl.htm
struck me as odd. If you read the paper:
http://bprc.osu.edu/Icecore/Kehrwald%20et%20al%202008.pdf
the authors claim that the particular glacier (Naimona’nyi or Gurla Mandhata on the edge of the Tibetan plateau) is losing so much ice that, even at 6,050 meters, it has lost the record of the post-WWII atomic bomb testing.
What they studiously ignore in the data in their own paper is that this particular glacier gets almost no precipitation. It is in a sunny desert and gets under 20mm water equivalent of precipitation per year but may have had more, perhaps twice as much, before 1860.
In my view it is quite the wrong glacier to be studying unless you are using it as a tool to foment alarmism.
Can someone explain why this Himalayan glacier should be used as the poster child for the remainder of the Himalayan glaciers (see para 6 of the paper ‘Implications for Water Resources’; the last sentence is a hoot)?
“As the second largest holder of ice on the planet, and the site of hundreds of glaciers, Greenland is a natural laboratory for studying how climate change has affected these ice fields.”
I like how they assume “climate change” is the cause. Of course the climate changes how and to what degree is the question.
Might as well ask “Have you stopped beating your wife yet.”
Approximately 6.5% of the Greenland ice sheet flows out through the Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier, and 4% through the Kangerdlugssuaq glacier. This works out to area of 69,000 square miles that feeds the two glaciers. Lake Erie has an area of about 9,900 square miles, or about one seventh of the area that feeds the glaciers. Lake Erie has an average depth of 62 feet (the shallowest of the great lakes). Therefore, if the melt from a decade would fill Lake Erie, then the melt from a year would be about 6.2 feet deep in Lake Erie. Since the ice sheet area that feeds these glaciers is 7 times the size of Lake Erie, that means that the reduction in ice thickness of the ice sheet would be less than a foot per year. When you consider that on average the ice sheet is about 6500 feet thick, the scale of loss of ice seems pretty insignificant. (All numbers rounded for ease of comprehension.)
Is it possible that there was 11 years worth of snowfall in the last decade? It would seemingly take only one “Snowmageddon” winter over the last decade to suggest that there was, based on averages, 11 years (or more) worth of snow during this period and the whole Howat conclusion simply washes out as noise in the annual cycle.
“in the last decade, Jakobshavn Isbrae has lost … approximately 300 gigatons (300 billion tons) of ice.”
Sounds scary. OK, lets figure out how much it really has lost. Wikipedia says Greenland has 2,8500,000 cubic kilometers of ice. Converting to tons:
2,8500,000 x 1000 x 1000 x 1000 = 2.85 x 10^16 tons
while the the loss is 3 x 10^11 / decade = 3 x 10^10 / year
rounding things off we get 3 x 10^16 / 3 x 10^10 = 1,000,000 years
So, at the present rate of melting, it will take only 1 million years for the greenland ice cap to melt.
Wikipedia say that sea level will go up 7.2m if that happens. So each year sea level goes up 7.2 x 10^-6 = 7 microns as a result. About the size of a bacteria.
Not quite a scary as the headlines indicate.
What’s even more interesting is the one “gaining” glacier had another paper written in 2005 (same author), which showed an increase in retreat speed: “…Using remote sensing, we measured two major periods of speedup on Helheim Glacier between 2000 and 2005 that increased peak speeds from approximately 8 to 11 km/yr…”
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2005GL024737.shtml
What happened since 2005 to cause the apparent mass increase?