Cliff Ollier
School of Earth and Geographical Sciences, The University of
Western Australia, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia.
Colin Pain
Canberra City ACT 2601, Australia.
Global warming alarmists have suggested that the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica may collapse, causing disastrous sea level rise. This idea is based on the concept of an ice sheet sliding down an inclined plane on a base lubricated by meltwater, which is itself increasing because of global warming.
In reality the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets occupy deep basins, and cannot slide down a plane. Furthermore glacial flow depends on stress (including the important yield stress) as well as temperature, and much of the ice sheets are well below melting point.
The accumulation of kilometres of undisturbed ice in cores in Greenland and Antarctica (the same ones that are sometimes used to fuel ideas of global warming) show hundreds of thousands of years of accumulation with no melting or flow. Except around the edges, ice sheets flow at the base, and depend on geothermal heat, not the climate at the surface. It is impossible for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to ‘collapse’.
In these days of alarmist warnings about climate warming, the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have an important role. Many papers have described their melting at the present times, and dire predictions of many metres of sea level rise are common. Christoffersen and Hambrey published a typical paper on the Greenland ice sheet in Geology Today in May, 2006.
Their model, unfortunately, includes neither the main form of the Greenland Ice Sheet, nor an understanding of how glaciers flow. They predict the behaviour of the Ice Sheet based on melting and accumulation rates at the present day, and the concept of an ice sheet sliding down an inclined plane on a base lubricated by meltwater, which is itself increasing because of global warming. The same misconception is present in textbooks such as The Great Ice Age (2000) by R.C.L. Wilson and others, popular magazines such as the June 2007 issue of National Geographic, and other scientific articles such as Bamber et al. (2007), which can be regarded as a typical modelling contribution. The idea of a glacier sliding downhill on a base lubricated by meltwater seemed a good idea when first presented by de Saussure in 1779, but a lot has been learned since then.
In the present paper we shall try to show how the mechanism of glacier flow differs from this simple model, and why it is impossible for the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets to collapse. To understand the relationship between global warming and the breakdown of ice sheets it is necessary to know how ice sheets really work. Ice sheets do not simply grow and melt in response to average global temperature. Anyone with this naïve view would have difficulty in explaining why glaciation has been present in the southern hemisphere for about 30 million years, and in the northern hemisphere for only 3 million years.
Read the complete paper here
There is a common misconception amongst some of the general publc that the Greenland and Artic ice sheets could suddenly melt or slide into the sea and cause catastrophic flooding. This lie has been fostered by extreme elements amongst the AGW bloc and it’s good to see a paper which firmly refutes such rubbish.
Facts are the only method of dealing with AGW doom-mongering.
Here’s another reason why the Greenland Ice Sheet is not collapsing. It snowed last night in Labrador City and Wabush (Latitude: 52°55’19″N (52.921944) Longitude: 66°51’52″W (-66.864444, altitude 525 metres) , Newfoundland and Labrador and almost 30deg S of the arctic circle – oh she’s going to be another cold one!
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/your_weather/details/620/1451178/3/canf0145?ref=ugc_city_tumbs
Skiing a few months early:
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/your_weather/details/620/1451014/5/canf0145
John G. Bell (11:54:08) :
… Our money might be better spent on figuring how to breed hairy children with massive brows. When the time comes, they will appreciate it.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK!
why is so much money spent on trying to preserve beasts who murder daily and have no reason to exist except to kill again tomorrow? Would we try to save a human who did the same thing?
Aron
I presume you have mastered the art of living without eating. Othewise it would seem to me to be if anything more immoral to let somebody else kill your food, than doing it yourself.
ak (13:10:20) :
“The ice isn’t filling in the basin with the basin edge acting as a physical barrier”
In the case of Greenland it actually is. The ice is only able to break through the coastal barrier in a limited number of places (usually deep and narrow fjords) and reach the sea. It is this that makes sites like Jakobshavns Isbrae so dramatic and sensitive to climate fluctuations (and consequently beloved as pilgrimages for the new climate religion). The ice accumulating over more than 100,000 square kilometers (6 % of Greenland) is funnelled through a gap only a few kilometers wide. The only places where the ice reaches the sea on a broad front is in the Kane Basin and Melville bugt in northwest and around Nioghalvfjersfjorden in the far northeast.
And by the way basal sliding is not completely unimportant. On Greenland it is probably dominant for a few tens of kilometers and of some importance up to 300 km from the edge of the Ice-sheet.
In Antarctica things are more complicated since there are areas of both cold-based (i. e. frozen to the ground) and warm-based (with a water film) ice een in the interior of the continent.
ak (12:24:38) :
@tty Good comments. I’m kind of at a loss about these ice slides everyone is talking about. There is no evidence for them happening before, but everyone is happy to argue against them! 🙂
I would have to conclude that you are either completely disingenuous or live a life of unprecedented isolation. As others have pointed out above, the present culture is awash in alarmist propaganda about the pending “collapse” of one ice mass or another. All of the stories are based, either implicitly or explicitly, on the the notion that AGW will inevitably lead to large masses of ice slicing into the sea. In fact, as the legs have been taken out from under the other catastrophic elements of their predictions[hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, droughts, floods. etc.] by amassing observational data and catastrophic sea level rise has become their last bullet, the stories seem to be more frequent and more hysterical. As I have stated here several times recently, I take no pleasure from and, in fact, deeply resent the compulsion I feel to, in effect, rise to the defense of the undefensible i.e. the persistence of ice. That compulsion arises from the need I feel to resist the machinations of the believers in collectivist mythology, who are the primary exponents and funders of the “climate crisis” and its only possible beneficiaries. If you should question my need to resist their efforts, I recommend a short review of the history of the 20th century, focusing on the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, China under Mao, Cambodia under PolPot, and Cuba under Castro for starters. Each case clearly demonstrates the murderous lengths the collectivists were willing to go to to preserve their utopian delusions every time they’ve had an opportunity to inflict them on humanity. You may choose to believe that such a descent into chaos is not possible here and now, but I’m sure the millions of people who eventually found themselves ensnared in those historical disasters would not have believed it possible in their situations either, at least at the beginning. My view of history and grasp of “the precautionary principle” tells me the only prudent course is to resist their plans now, rather than awake at some point in the future with sad regrets over having failed to recognize what their goals really were.
Daryl M (12:55:48) :
I wouldn’t but I have seen it. Those truckers drive the bridge with their door opened. In the Spring it is even more scary as the bridge is flooded with water. But the ice is usually thicker where they remove the snow to make the ice bridge, but off the road the ice can be very thin because of the insulation effect of the snow over the ice.
Ray (11:08:45) : “One single meteor smashing in the ocean would cause more damage instantly than any catastrophic melting of all ice bodies of earth, even if it melted over a few years… which obviously will never happened. So, where should we put money to save the earth?”
Al Gore has a meteor offset trading scheme in the works.
An excellent paper. Why aren’t school children being taught this stuff instead of alarmist rubbish ?
Dave (10:38:25) : Taking your references in turn:
Catastrophic Melting of Ice Sheet Is Possible
If your simulations show the catastrophic collapse of ice sheets, under what circumstances can you ignore these predictions?
The catastrophic increase in sea level, already projected to average between 16 and 17 feet around the world, would be almost 21 feet in such
How fast would the ice sheets melt?
The summer melting rate for snow and ice can be estimated by using a heat balance equation of
Change should deal with the “frightening” possibility that both the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets start melting at the same time
So which of you references states that catastrophic melting IS occuring?
ak (09:43:31) : I am looking forward to reading your refuting paper!
I like the emotionalizing lately with the article warning about the potential loss of our national parks. They, of course, site Glacier. But Glacier isn’t named after the glaciers that are there now. It is named after the glaciers of the last ice age the created the form of the land that is there now.
But, what the heck, as long as it sounds plausible and has emotional impact, there is no downside to being wrong. The major broadcast media will not ridicule you and you will not be held accountable as long as you follow the narrative. Now if you are country to the narrative, you are mentally deranged. You are some kind of raving lunatic on the payroll of the “big corporations” (which are really cool to hate and really uncool to like).
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are not collapsing, Anthropogenic Global Warming is.
The warming of the seas have been spuriously exaggerated and influence of the main driver of our climate, the Sun, not adequately taken into account.
The nails are being hammered into the Anthropogenic Global Warming coffin.
Here’s a better cross-section of the Greenland ice sheet. Sections of central Greenland are below sea level, which is different on the east and west sides of the country.
http://img.kb.dk/tidsskriftdk/gif/gto/gto_0063-IMG/gto_0063_0147_1.jpg
Northern, central, and southern cross-sections, from the top of the image.
Interesting that nowhere in the linked article do they show any map or cross-section of either Greenland or Antarctica. They just say “Greenland and West Antarctica are roughly similar to the Southern Africa in cross section, but with an ice cap in the depression.” While this generalisation seems to be largely true for Greenland, it doesn’t hold up for West Antarctica.
Did someone make another ridiculous “peak oil” reference to the “oil drum”? This is a ridiculous argument that I am soooo tired of hearing. It is pure unadulterated BS. Please stop it !! We certainly will run out if we stop looking and we stop drilling. This is the agenda of the “oil drum”. The claim that no new large deposits are being found is rubbish and has been shown to be rubbish over and over. I would love to see the world get off oil, but at the moment we need it to provide us with the energy needed to develop an alternative that is not subsidized up the wazoo. The “oil drum” wants you to believe we only have a few minutes left. Have we not been fooled before? If it happens again, it will be shame on us this time. David L. Hagen, I’m sorry, but you have been misled.
David Ball,
Not to get into a debate on peak oil, but the last time I looked we are building a fleet of 6th generation rigs to go drill deepwater (10,000 feet) at a cost of $600 million and with well costs often north of $60 million per well.
I can assure you we will NOT run out of oil anytime soon, however, you can be assured that with rising demand from the developing world (especially China) – the days of cheap easy oil are largely over. Sure there will be oil price peaks and troughs but on average, over the long term, oil prices are only headed one direction: UP.
Read Peter Terzakian’s book if you want to grasp the issues. He correctly points out that as oil prices rise there will be a natural economic tendency to seek alternatives and to reduce consumption.
For sure, those who say we will “run out” are being overly pessimistic but “cheap oil” looks likely to become a thing that future generations may look back on kind of like the “roaring twenties”.
The analogy of hunters picking on the most abundant large prey first is quite valid with oil. We definitely got a lot of the easy stuff – certainly not ALL the easy stuff but everyone agrees we have already used up many if not most of the very biggest giant fields (cheapest oil)
ginckgo (17:55:06) :
You are right about West Antarctica. The ice there lies largely in a rift valley more similar to the Red Sea but wider. East Antarctica has more typical “Gondwana topography” with raised escarpments or mountain chains around most of the periphery (except the Prydz Bay rift and the Wilkes subglacial basin).
crosspatch (09:26:44) :
“…………..Footnote 14 points to the Steig paper published in Nature that has been shown to be faulty in its conclusions. Maybe someone with more authority than I would care to correct that portion of the article.”
I’m afraid that there is in fact a warming wiki tag team – these people do understand the power of (mis)information. Or probably “control of the narrative” as they would call it. Plain lying in my book.
Richard:
The nails are being hammered into the Anthropogenic Global Warming coffin.
The problem is it isn’t dead yet, continually reinvents itself, and keeps pushing the lid back up. We either need to kill it once and for all, or switch to sheetrock srews.
My own research shows that Greenland ice is only resisting the centrifugal force of the earths rotation due to the frozen ice at the base that sticks it to the bedrock. In 95 months the friction of that base ice will give way and the whole ice sheet will travel tangentally across the globe like a hammer being released by an Olympic thrower. This ice sheet will travel into the stratosphere on a parabolic trajectory finally returning to earth in the Gulf of Mexico. This will cause a tsunami 500 meters high that will travel across the globe at the speed of sound.
Thanks for clarifying. I think “basin”, though, is a fairish descriptor, even if it’s not, scale-wise, like a bowl filled to the top with ice.
I’ll leave it to folks more knowledgeable than I about glaciation in Greenland (which is just about everyone, I think) to discuss that sort of thing with you.
Again, thanks for clarifying.
Jeremy (21:36:40) The reason that deep sea drilling is looked at as a solution is simply because the envirowackos will not let us drill our own resources, oil or anything else. The amount of misinformation and obfuscation regarding oil resources are driven by the same agenda that is driving CAGW. Aside from the fact that the technology for location and extraction is moving by leaps and bounds, no one can predict the future. Who can say what developments are to come? Who can say what remains underground? There is so much that we do not know, that to claim that someone “knows” is a blatant fallacy. Paul Erlich has claimed that we are “running out of this and that” for a long time now, and the reverse has happened. Are you familiar with Saskatchewan? Your claim that we have drilled the “easy stuff already” is proven false in that province, as the resources there, other than potash and some uranium, have remained untouched. Saskatchewan is a very large chunk of real estate. There is a lot of oil that is already known about, and they are just starting to look closer. If you can show me that I am wrong, I humbly defer to you, sir.
AUSTRALIA is on track for a record hot August, and this winter is likely to be the hottest on record as well.
The Bureau of Meteorology yesterday issued a special climate statement in which it said this month was set to be the warmest August on record “by a substantial margin”.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25987193-601,00.html