From a University of Leeds press release, comes this scary headline that seems to be picked up by the MSM. A Google search yields 16,400 hits on the title below.
Melting icebergs causing sea level rise
(Note: Be sure to see the reality punch line at the end of the article)
Scientists have discovered that changes in the amount of ice floating in the polar oceans are causing sea levels to rise.
The research, published this week in Geophysical Research Letters, is the first assessment of how quickly floating ice is being lost today.
According to Archimedes’ principle, any floating object displaces its own weight of fluid. For example, an ice cube in a glass of water does not cause the glass to overflow as it melts.
But because sea water is warmer and more salty than floating ice, changes in the amount of this ice are having an effect on global sea levels.
The loss of floating ice is equivalent to 1.5 million Titanic-sized icebergs each year. However, the study shows that spread across the global oceans, recent losses of floating ice amount to a sea level rise of just 49 micrometers per year – about a hair’s breadth.
According to lead author Professor Andrew Shepherd, of the University of Leeds, it would be unwise to discount this signal. “Over recent decades there have been dramatic reductions in the quantity of Earth’s floating ice, including collapses of Antarctic ice shelves and the retreat of Arctic sea ice,” said Prof Shepherd.
“These changes have had major impacts on regional climate and, because oceans are expected to warm considerably over the course of the 21st century, the melting of floating ice should be considered in future assessments of sea level rise.”
Professor Shepherd and his team used a combination of satellite observations and a computer model to make their assessment. They looked at changes in the area and thickness of sea ice and ice shelves, and found that the overall signal amounts to a 742 cubic kilometres per year reduction in the volume of floating.
Because of differences in the density and temperature of ice and sea water, the net effect is to increase sea level by 2.6% of this volume, equivalent to 49 micrometers per year spread across the global oceans.
The greatest losses were due to the rapid retreat of Arctic Sea ice and to the collapse and thinning of ice shelves at the Antarctic Peninsula and in the Amundsen Sea.
For more information
To arrange an interview with Prof Andy Shepherd, contact Hannah Isom in the University of Leeds press office on 0113 343 4031 or email h.isom@leeds.ac.uk
Notes to editors
“Recent loss of floating ice and the consequent sea level contribution” by Andrew Shepherd, Duncan Wingham, David Wallis, Katharine Giles, Seymour Laxon, and Aud Venke Sundal is published this week in Geophysical Research Letters (doi:10.1029/2010GL042496).
ICE SHELVES are thick, floating platforms of ice that form where a glacier or ice sheet flows down to a coastline and onto the ocean surface. Ice shelves are found mainly in Antarctica , and range from about 100 to 1000 metres in thickness.
SEA ICE is formed on the surface of sea water as the ocean freezes, and is typically less than 3 metres in thickness. It is found extensively in both the Arctic and Antarctic regions, and it’s extent varies considerably over the seasons.
This study was funded by the UK National Centre for Earth Observation and the Philip Leverhulme Trust.
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OK here’s the reality punch line:
Assuming their theory of 49 micrometers per year rise (this conversion equals 0.0019 inch or 0.00016 feet ) due to the differences is salty and fresh water holds true, then we can assess the threat level.
At this rate, to see an inch of sea level rise from melting icebergs we’d need:
1 inch/0.0019 inch/yr = 526 years
Yeah, I’m worried about that.
it that English does not have different words for different sizes of waterways like the Scandinavian languages?? Etymologists and language historians, where are you when needed??
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English does
Intermittent and ephemeral streams
drybeds
brook
stream
creek
river
M. White said
From the CATLIN ARCTIC TEAM:……
These guys caused quite a stir yesterday, claimed it rained on them. Environment Canada says it has never rained in April where they are:
“”It’s definitely a shocker the general feeling within the polar community is that rainfall in the high Canadian Arctic in April is a freak event,” Pen Hadow, the team’s expedition director, told Reuters in an interview from London this week.
“Scientists would tell us that we can expect increasingly to experience these sorts of outcomes as the climate warms.””
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/cbc/100429/canada/canada_north_north_pole_rainfall
Of course no video of it.
@Staffan Lindström
We do, it’s just that they aren’t so commonly used. River is the generic, but you can have creeks, brooks, runs, runnels, rivulets, rills, becks, courses and streams. A brook is smaller than a creek, which is smaller than a stream, which is then smaller than a river and a rivulet is smaller than them all. Runs tend to be anything that you wouldn’t normally call a brook or a creek or a stream. Rills and becks are originally dialectal names for small rivers but they tend to be used for particular sized watercourses as well; and to make things interesting, any of the above can and often will be applied to any river smaller than the Thames.
Eureka!
OT – Just ran across the amazing ice charts on the Environment Canada site which include year to year old ice and depth. I stumbled across a chart showing the Northwest Passage open in 1998. It turns out that October 1, 1998 was the sea ice minimum for Canada.
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/Ice_Can/Arctic/MINYRNCW_MAP.gif
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=10&fd=01&fy=1998&sm=10&sd=01&sy=2007
Environment Canada
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/app/WsvPageDsp.cfm?ID=1&Lang=eng
OMG soon the world will be bald ‘an we’re all gonna drown.
Will hair restorer bring the ice back?
The real question is: “Who’s going to tell Prince Charles about this?”
I’m surprised they didn’t warn about a 49,000 nm rise in sea level. That is a scarier number. Do you remember what the IPCC did following their first report? The graph of sea level rise based on six predictive computer models showed a worst-case sea level rise of 0.64 m. The graph was wider than is was tall (200-year time axis longer than sea level axis). The graphs produced for public consumption and in subsequent IPCC publications had squeezed the 200-year time axis so the image was taller than wide (increasing the apparent scope of the line) and showed a worst-case rise of 64 cm. Obviously, 64 is a bigger number than 0.64.
Very big story
http://au.messages.yahoo.com/news/top-stories/1595100/ So Nature has decided it better save face while it can of course with this data it has to now….
How the hell will RC get out of this one…..
I thought competition for journal space was fierce. Surely they could have held of for a “mm” of sea level rise to let the authors collect more data.
Some other papers accepted look interesting, e.g. Wang, L., and W. Chen (2010), Downward Arctic Oscillation signal associated with moderate weak stratospheric polar vortex and the cold December 2009 and Huss, M., R. Hock, A. Bauder, and M. Funk (2010), The 100-year glacier mass changes in the Swiss Alps linked to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.
I wonder what paper got rejected in favor of this one.
It’s not all doom though. I expect that post ice age land rise might offset the odd micron here or there. Add in sedimentary deposits in river basins and coral build and there’s always the possibility that some of areas around 2″ above sea level might be safe for maybe as much as 527 years.
That should leave about 150 years for anyone living less that 0.5″ above sea level to enjoy better weather. We can then spend the next 400 years to adding an average of 0.5″ per century to their sea level defences.
It might not be worse than we thought but it sure is funnier.
And a lot less expensive.
I call this ‘National Enquirer’ journalism.
All the crazy made up stories take place in far away places that are impossible for the reading population to fact check.
Examples:
‘Alien Baby Boy Born in Katmandu, Nepal!’
‘Calamitous Ice Melting at the North Pole Sure to Kill Millions! – Wasteful Auto Driving by Caucasian Christian Hetero Conservative Males to Blame’
This has to be an example of ‘False Precision’.
Oh come on, its 518.36734647330279092193218774357 years.
At the risk of being practical for a second, can we ask the world’s hairdressers to take all of their cuttings to the seaside one year?
I know it might only buy us another millenium or so but, as they say, every little helps.
Yes, I’ve finally figured it out.
There IS a slight increase in the volume of the sea, when you add “fresh water”, to whit – – –
Buoyancy
When floating ice melts, does water level rise?
When floating ice melts, does the water level rise?
Seed Expert Claude Baudoin writes:
Water expands when it freezes, so you might think that when it melts and reduces in size, the water level will go down. Alternatively, because part of the ice floats the water, you might think that when it melts, the water level will rise.
Neither is true, as explained by Archimedes principles.
When an ice cube (or an iceberg, which is a big ice cube) floats in water, then by definition the weight of the ice cube is exactly equal to the buoyancy force, which is equal to the weight of the displaced water.
When the ice cube melts, its volume changes, but its weight is conserved (law of the conservation of mass). So the melted water from the ice cube has exactly the same weight as the water that was displaced by the ice cube when it was frozen — therefore the volume of melted water fits exactly in the previously displaced volume — and the water level stays the same.
Note that this argument applies only if the ice cube is made of the same water as the water that it is floating in. This is true, for example, with the Arctic ice pack, which is made of frozen sea water. However, it is not true for Antarctic icebergs, which are blocks of fresh-water ice from the continent that are floating in salt-water sea. In this case, we must take into account that the salt water is denser than the fresh water. The fresh-water iceberg still weighs as much as the weight of the displaced salt water, but because of the difference in density, the volume of melted fresh water will be slightly greater than the displaced volume of salt water — so when the iceberg melts, the water level will rise, although the difference is very small.
BUT this means one has to TOTALLY IGNORE THE PROCESSES WHICH ARE CONTINUOUSLY ADDING TO THE SOLUTES IN THE OCEAN. Which of course, may make the claim by the authors moot, due to a lack of “due diligence”. (I’m going to hedge on this, having NOT SEEN the actual article, and being too cheap and financially unable to afford such papers as a matter of priority right now.)
This, aside from the ludicrous nature of the minuscule effect that the authors DO point out.
Nobody seems to have noticed that as the temperature rises people sweat more.
My team of researchers have a sophisticated model running on a supercomputer and have calculated that this sweat will add 3 nanometres to the sea level by 2050.
Can I have a Nobel Prize?
I looked up paper http://www.agu.org/journals/pip/gl/2010GL042496-pip.pdf .
They say that the effect they studied contributed 1.6% to the measured sea level rise to date. I don’t see the scientists exaggerating their findings. How it gets reported in the media is another matter.
It is worth noting that if the melt rate accelerates the 1 inch mark would come before Anthony’s 500 years. Also, sea level rise is not uniform. In the Arctic the rise would likely be higher. Still the effect is small. A better headline would be: “Melting sea ice contributes slightly to sea level rise.”
I only got 5500 hits with Google. I’m not sure why the difference.
“Over recent decades there have been dramatic reductions in the quantity of Earth’s floating ice, including collapses of Antarctic ice shelves and the retreat of Arctic sea ice,” said Prof Shepherd.
“These changes have had major impacts on regional climate……..
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“Major impacts” on the regional climate, would surely have been touted by the MSM, but are curiously unreported of late.
Not too worry, the sun is ascending in the Northern Hemishere.
DAVID C SEZ:
It’s obvious that universities need to be shut. This kind of garbage doesn’t even help the alarmist cause. All it shows is that taxes are being paid to fools who do nothing but proclaim their foolishness. They can’t even lie well.
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Universities, and the politicians who enable them, lie just fine. Problem is most folks just don’t think (especially add) good.
The recent silence from messrs. Pachauri and Gore has been deafening.
I’m rather puzzled by the extent of Arctic sea ice this year. And the fact that it continues to seem to be warming up in the Arctic. With El Niño conditions in the Pacific about to come to an end and the Arctic sea ice extent at normal levels would this not mean that we are in for a much colder than normal summer.After all the reflectivity of the ice in the Arctic is probably at the highest level it’s being in over a decade. Especially now that China is starting to clean up its smokestacks and reduce the amount of soot it puts into the atmosphere.
“Professor Shepherd and his team used a combination of satellite observations and a computer model to make their assessment. ”
Last time I checked the TOPEX/ JASON satellites that they use to measure sea level orbit at an altitude of about 1335 km. That’s 1,335.000,000 mm. The sat. instruments measure altitude by sending a signal to the ocean surface and calculating the distance from the time of reflectance. In another life I spent a fair number of years working in the surveying field with instruments that operate on very similar, though not identical principles. It’s been nearly 20 years since I was actively involved, but even today a topline survey instrument’s standard error is 2mm
+/- 2ppm. That’s from an instrument setup on a solid tripod, well leveled, with proper atmospheric corrections entered, reading from a block of precision retroprisms similarly situated at something less than 2.5 miles. Reading from a natural surface loses 1-3 or more orders of magnitude of precision. The time required for each reading is usually over a minute.
The sat. instruments are reading an ocean surface that is constantly variable in elevation and reflectance, both systemically and chaotically. They are scanning swaths of ocean that are hundreds of kilometers across, which brings correction for the curvature of the Earth into play. Measurement times are a second or two. At the altitude at which they orbit deviations from orthogonality to the center of the Earth which are within the range of any instrument’s ability to detect introduce significant error. The newer JASON satellites have improvements which greatly enhance atmospheric corrections and orbit precision, but orbit error is still only claimed to be less than 10cm.
Given all that, even if the satellites could somehow match the survey instrument’s best performance, the error per measurement would be +/-2.7 meters. I would suspect, if they’re only doing an order of magnitude worse than that, it would be a minor miracle. If you take a million measurements in which the range for the standard error for each measurement is a close match of the range of variability of the distances measured it won’t be surprising if the distance derived when you attempt to analyze the numbers resolves to a very precise degree. That won’t mean that you know the distance that precisely, but only that the variability is concealing the error.
I haven’t been able to access anything that describes in any detail the exact methodology by which the satellite sea level numbers are derived and it is possible that modern science has somehow been able to resolve these seeming contradictions. I am willing to be convinced if anyone wants to argue the point. But, unless or until I can be shown something pretty miraculous, I will continue to consider the the notion that sat. measurements can derive values for mean sea level, a concept which is in itself more meaningless than even global average temperature, accurate to a tenth of a millimeter to be essentially laughable.
You know what this means!
That’s right… time to send in S.W.A.T.
“At this rate, to see an inch of sea level rise from melting icebergs we’d need:
1 inch/0.0019 inch/yr = 526 years
Yeah, I’m worried about that.”
Well, I’m worried for my descendents. At this rate, the whole planet will be completely covered in water by the time my great^100 grand children are born. I won’t sleep tonight knowing this. Will write to my government and ask them for a new tax to stop the ice melting.
@ur momisugly P.F. says:
April 30, 2010 at 3:23 pm
I’m surprised they didn’t warn about a 49,000 nm rise in sea level. That is a scarier number.
They probably would have, but I suspect that someone may have told them that nm can also be interpreted as Nautical Miles . Which would be really scary! 🙂