Posted by John Goetz
CNN posted an AP story tonight on their website regarding the separation in early August of a 19-square-mile ice shelf from Elsmere Island. It starts:
TORONTO, Ontario (AP) — A chunk of ice shelf nearly the size of Manhattan has broken away from Ellesmere Island in Canada’s northern Arctic, another dramatic indication of how warmer temperatures are changing the polar frontier, scientists said Wednesday.
It sure sounds impressive and scary, but then most people probably think of New York City when they hear “Manhattan”. They might even think of the greater NYC Metro Area. But in reality, Manhattan is but one of the five Boroughs in NYC. And 19 square miles is roughly 4.4 x 4.4 miles. Is it really that impressive or alarming? It is actually smaller than the town limits of the little community I live in.
Furthermore, the ice did not actually melt. The article states that it is adrift in the arctic.
Here is the rest of the article:
“The Markham Ice Shelf was a big surprise because it suddenly disappeared. We went under cloud for a bit during our research and when the weather cleared up, all of a sudden there was no more ice shelf. It was a shocking event that underscores the rapidity of changes taking place in the Arctic,” said Muller.
Muller also said that two large sections of ice detached from the Serson Ice Shelf, shrinking that ice feature by 47 square miles — or 60 percent — and that the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf has also continued to break up, losing an additional eight square miles.
Muller reported last month that seven square miles of the 170-square-mile and 130-feet-thick Ward Hunt shelf had broken off.
This comes on the heels of unusual cracks in a northern Greenland glacier, rapid melting of a southern Greenland glacier, and a near record loss for Arctic sea ice this summer. And earlier this year a 160-square mile chunk of an Antarctic ice shelf disintegrated.
“Reduced sea ice conditions and unusually high air temperatures have facilitated the ice shelf losses this summer,” said Luke Copland, director of the Laboratory for Cryospheric Research at the University of Ottawa. “And extensive new cracks across remaining parts of the largest remaining ice shelf, the Ward Hunt, mean that it will continue to disintegrate in the coming years.”
Formed by accumulating snow and freezing meltwater, ice shelves are large platforms of thick, ancient sea ice that float on the ocean’s surface but are connected to land.
Ellesmere Island was once entirely ringed by a single enormous ice shelf that broke up in the early 1900s. All that is left today are the four much smaller shelves that together cover little more than 299 square miles.
Martin Jeffries of the U.S. National Science Foundation and University of Alaska Fairbanks said in a statement Tuesday that the summer’s ice shelf loss is equivalent to over three times the area of Manhattan, totaling 82 square miles — losses that have reduced Arctic Ocean ice cover to its second-biggest retreat since satellite measurements began 30 years ago.
“These changes are irreversible under the present climate and indicate that the environmental conditions that have kept these ice shelves in balance for thousands of years are no longer present,” said Muller.
During the last century, when ice shelves would break off, thick sea ice would eventually reform in their place.
“But today, warmer temperatures and a changing climate means there’s no hope for regrowth. A scary scenario,” said Muller.
The loss of these ice shelves means that rare ecosystems that depend on them are on the brink of extinction, said Warwick Vincent, director of Laval University’s Centre for Northern Studies and a researcher in the program ArcticNet.
“The Markham Ice Shelf had half the biomass for the entire Canadian Arctic Ice Shelf ecosystem as a habitat for cold, tolerant microbial life; algae that sit on top of the ice shelf and photosynthesis like plants would. Now that it’s disappeared, we’re looking at ecosystems on the verge of distinction,’ said Muller.
Along with decimating ecosystems, drifting ice shelves and warmer temperatures that will cause further melting ice pose a hazard to populated shipping routes in the Arctic region — a phenomenon that Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper seems to welcome.
Harper announced last week that he plans to expand exploration of the region’s known oil and mineral deposits, a possibility that has become more evident as a result of melting sea ice. It is the burning of oil and other fossil fuels that scientists say is the chief cause of manmade warming and melting ice.
Harper also said Canada would toughen reporting requirements for ships entering its waters in the Far North, where some of those territorial claims are disputed by the United States and other countries.
I really like the comment “we’re looking at ecosystems on the verge of distinction“
This is the time of year when Arctic sea ice reaches its minimum. Yes, right now it stands at the second lowest level measured in nearly thirty years. But is what we find reported in this article truly alarming and out of the ordinary? I don’t know. I’m asking.
Talk amongst yourselves.
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If I had any bats left I would ask them what they know.
“Ellesmere Island was once entirely ringed by a single enormous ice shelf that broke up in the early 1900s.”
Hmm.
What caused that then?
At least the CBC reported that most of the break-up occurred in the 30s and 40s. Of course, most posters on that board ignore that part of the story.
Small detail. New York City has “boroughs” not “burroughs”
Reply: Steve, thanks, no small detail. I let the spell-checker take control and should not have.
What happened to the ice that broke off? Did it float away and merge with other ice? Did it evaporate in a giant puff of steam? We have only part of the story.
Anthony, in Oregon, we call them asses, AND we have bats. Lots easier to spell.
These changes are irreversible under the present climate and indicate that the environmental conditions that have kept these ice shelves in balance for thousands of years are no longer present,” said Muller.
During the last century, when ice shelves would break off, thick sea ice would eventually reform in their place.
“But today, warmer temperatures and a changing climate means there’s no hope for regrowth. A scary scenario,” said Muller.
irreversible ,no hope for regrowth,
do you see the lies too?
LMAO
This guy Muller is just another AGW alarmist along the same lines a David Suzuki,
Canada has plenty of them. I remember in the spring he was whining about another chunk of ice that broke away. It was playing 24/7 on the local news channel CP24.
I forget the headline but it was linked to climate change or global warming. He like David Suzuki want’s to lay the blame on Stephen Harper, because Harper is actually sane and has not drank the AGW kool-aid.
That the Liberal party has, it is going to go down in flames this fall because Canadians are getting sick and tired of being preached to by these fanantics. So bring on the elections the liberal “green shift” that they are trying to pedal is going to bring us, I hope a Conservative majority
government.
As I sit and look at my glass. Oh my a piece of ice has come apart from the mass. It is melting and it is irreversible. In its current climate it can’t refreeze. It’s scary, must be climate change.
But the tea is still good.
Bill Derryberry
Please, science is supposed to be “color” blind. I hate this artificial divide. “Liberals believe in AGW, Conservatives do not.” Horse poo. Here in the US we even have colors assigned to us. Liberal is blue, conservative is red. That has nothing to do with observed scientific phenomena. I am as liberal as they come. And as conservative as they come. I pick up gum wrappers, try to leave no footprint, I hate governmental rules regarding my household, I believe in unfettered adult individual rights (if you find love, you should have the right to marry it), I believe that corporate entities sometimes don’t consider anything other than their stock holders, I believe in full family planning choices, I believe in public education, and I don’t consider AGW to be a scientific phenomena.
It gets me in a pissy mood when political views enter into this debate on BOTH sides! So stop it!
Speaking of global warming, or lack thereof, RSS for August is out. The anomaly is out at ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/monthly_time_series/rss_monthly_msu_amsu_channel_tlt_anomalies_land_and_ocean_v03_1.txt
Mo/Yr 2007 2008
July.. +0.363 +0.147
Aug.. +0.367 +0.146
The Aug 2008 number is +0.146 versus +0.147 in July. It’s 0.221 lower than August 2007. This brings down the 12-month running mean to +0.086, which is very slightly lower than the +0.091 12-month running mean to the end of November 1987. That’s almost 21 years ago.
What I’m really waiting for is Hadley and GISS 12-month means to drop below their 1995 values. Hadley might make it in the next couple of months. GISS by year end. Once we get annual means matching temperatures on the other side of 1998, global cooling will be undeniable.
“Ellesmere Island was once entirely ringed by a single enormous ice shelf that broke up in the early 1900s.”
Must have been all the SUVs that people were driving around in that caused that one.
Or perhaps ice shelves just break up naturally every now and again due to tidal / weather / climatic pressures?
It’s OK. According to DailyTech, the Arctic as more ice twice the size of Germany this year: http://www.dailytech.com/Arctic+Sees+Massive+Gain+in+Ice+Coverage/article12851.htm
Here is a nice picture of when hell froze over – 20,000 years ago.
http://www.athropolis.com/arctic-facts/graphics/ice-age-globe.gif
Listening to the looney left, we can infer that times must have been much happier when all of Canada and much of the United States was buried under two miles of ice. More ice is obviously a good thing, if you have an IQ of about 20.
How old was the ice that broke off? The article stated this ice was thousands of years old. Was it there while the Vikings were raising cows and growing grain on the West side of Greenland?
How do we know?
A conservative friend of mine (who I truly like) was aghast when I told him I did not believe in AGW. He could not understand how in the world a democrat could state that AGW is a farce. He believed that if you are a conservative, you must not agree with AGW. If you are a Dem, you must agree. Do you see the stupidity in that statement? His argument was as unscientific as it gets. Nuf said.
It is misleading to refer to an ice shelf as being thousands of years old. As I understand it, an ice shelf exists thanks to never-ending movement of glaciers as they slowly push ice out onto the sea. At some point in time, the further out to sea the shelf extends, the more fragile it becomes until a piece of it eventually breaks off. Seems like a regularly occurring normal event to me.
Quoth’d Pamela:
Pamela, it’s pretty much only one side of the aisle that wants use “governmental rules regarding our households” and “fetter everyone’s individual rights” when it comes to Al Gore Warming. The Left has been, and continues, using pseudo-science, scare tactics and propaganda campaigns that would make Goebbels blush with envy to push forward a worldwide Socialist agenda that aims to control every single aspect of our lives.
The Left has turned this argument into a political one. They’re the ones who fired the first shot, declared victory without even engaging the enemy head-on (Algore & Hansen, et al.: “The debate is over!” Us “Uuuh, there was a debate? When? Ya’ don’t say? Well, let’s have one now. Algore & Hansen, et al.: “Lalalalalala… We can’t heeeear you!”) and they move the goalposts (or try to assassinate someone’s character) every time another one of their idiotic canards is shot down in flames with actual facts.
You may find it “shocking” that many of us Eeeevil Right Wingers™ actually work in the conservation field and do far more good for the planet than 99.9999% of the supposedly “caring” Leftists out there. Many of us also took oaths to protect and defend the US Constitution, and our individual rights as American citizens, and we don’t take those oaths lightly, even if we’re no longer in the military.
I’ll be thinking of Anthony and the rest of you fine folks as we’re sending TONS of carbon into the atmosphere tomorrow while setting fire to Mother Gaia. (It’s only about 100 acres, but it’ll be reeeeeal pretty.) 🙂
Tim Ball has an interesting article (15 page pdf) on a similar story and the manipulation of words and facts. Its at
Sorry not sure if the link showed. http://www.fcpp.org/main/publication_detail.php?PubID=2334
Here it is from the horses mouth…
http://www.madzu.com/ellesmere/News/Entries/2008/9/2_Massive_Ice_Shelf_Loss_During_Summer_2008.html
There are several errors in the article. Ellesmere land has certainly never been surrounded by a continuous ice shelf. Only the north coast. This shelf is different from Antarctic ice shelves, since it is not fed by glaciers. Basically it is sea-ice that has remained frozen for a very long time and has built up to a thickness of several tens of meters. This ice-shelf was first seen by the Nares expedition in the 1870’s and was already breaking up at that time. This process has been going on since then, and will probably be finished in a few decades more. As for the age of the shelf, it is known to be less than 3,000 years since there is 3,000 years old driftwood on the beaches landwards of the shelf. Most likely it is from the Little Ice Age.
Incidentally Greenland Inuit has/had a special word for this type of coastal ice that never melts, but the word may be extinct now, since there hasn’t been any such in Greenland for a century.
That bit about “unusual cracks in a northern Greenland Glacier” is intriguing. A glacier *without* cracks would indeed be most unusual.
Pamela Gray:
I’ll try to be a bit more civilized than BC, but he is essentially correct. I don’t find it surprising that you don’t believe in AGW and are still a liberal and/or Democrat. I doubt you find it very surprising that many conservatives actually work in ecological conservation. But the radical environmentalists are Leftists and mix in really well with the liberals, and much of the modern Democratic Left is “owned” by radicals such as those these days (read: Moveon.org & fellow-travelers). Let us say you are the victim of poor political company, even though I am sure you do not intend to be. Nonetheless, I applaud you for being one that thinks about things and does not just imbibe party doctrine as do too many on both sides of the red/blue divide. Don’t get too offended though at those who may be surprised. Stereotypes are around for a reason: they’re usually true to a large degree. But as I said, I am glad you don’t conform to the stereotype. And as for the stereotype of loud-mouthed, rude, the-only-good-liberal-is-a-dead-liberal conservatives, I must apologize for those with whom I myself keep political company. I am a conservative in good standing, typically voting Republican, and I disagree in part or in whole with some of what you say in both of your postings, but I am glad you have not been duped by the AGW crowd. If we had more of your kind that would be a step in the direction back towards sanity. But try not to let the political banter get under your skin too much. Science is about rational discourse, and to that we should keep as much as is possible here.
A bit OT but along the vein of the general senitment on this site towards the Warmists:
Here is an interesting tidbit I found while trying to find the lowest recorded minimum pressure for an Atlantic Hurricane. It was hurricane Wilma, by the way, in 2005 at 882 mb. See if you can spot the pro-AGW sentence in this paragraph.
First, the link: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2005/wilma.html
Now the quote:
“Characteristics of an active multi-decadal signal in the Atlantic include: warmer SSTs in the tropical Atlantic region, an amplified sub-tropical ridge at upper levels across the central and eastern North Atlantic, reduced vertical wind shear in the deep tropics over the central North Atlantic, and an African Easterly Jet (AEJ) that is favorable for promoting the development and intensification of tropical disturbances moving westward off the coast of Africa. Recent studies also indicate that in addition to this multi-decadal oscillation the destructive power of hurricanes has generally increased since the mid-1970s, when the period of the most rapid increase in global ocean and land temperatures began. However, it is important to note that increased tropical cyclone activity does not necessarily translate into an increase in the number of landfalling tropical storms or hurricanes. Six of the past 11 years have had one or fewer landfalling hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, and there is no long-term trend in the number of landfalling hurricanes since 1900.”
I did a mental double-take when I read that. But it goes to show you how sneaky the AGW crowd can be. “We’re not saying that global warming causes more destructive land-falling hurricanes, since there’s been no trend in that since 1900, but well…” I suppose we must pity all those poor folks who somehow managed to build their houses in the middle of the tropical Atlantic only to have them smashed by hurricanes? Or am I missing something?
Whereas, from page 35 Dr. William Gray’s August 2008 report:
“For the entire United States coastline, 39 major hurricanes made landfall during the earlier 42-year period (1924-1965) compared with only 22 for the latter 42-year period (1966-2007). This occurred despite the fact that CO2 averaged approximately 365 ppm during the latter period compared with 310 ppm during the earlier period (Figure 17). This figure illustrates that caution must be used when extrapolating trends into the future. Obviously, U.S. major hurricane landfalls will continue.”
http://hurricane.atmos.colostate.edu/Forecasts/2008/aug2008/aug2008.pdf
Yeah, obviously, but illustrated by the first above it is equally as obvious that some people are tough to convince otherwise.
Also, Pamela, in Canada the political parties are “CONSERVATIVES” (blue) and “LIBERALS” (red). There are also some whacko nutjob fringe parties that can be safely ignored.
The liberals have made this URGENT NEED TO DEAL WITH AGW an important part of their entire party, and the Conservative Prime Minister is going to allow an election to happen. See? These kind of articles will be filling the media for the next few weeks.
And, well, face facts. It IS a political issue, and the majority of liberal-types are more than willing to submit to whatever it takes to “save the planet”. Until the bill arrives, of course, at which time they’ll be casting about for a way to blame the Conservatives.