Greenland glacier calves island 4 times the size of Manhattan, UD scientist reports it last happened at this scale in 1962. Must have been climate change back then too. Watch the media now as this story is only about an hour old. BTW it fractured, not melted, and in case some people forget: glaciers calve to the sea there, it is what they do. – Anthony
1:40 p.m., Aug. 6, 2010—-A University of Delaware researcher reports that an “ice island” four times the size of Manhattan has calved from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier. The last time the Arctic lost such a large chunk of ice was in 1962.
================================================
Here is a NASA Image of the day from August 30th, 2007 – Anthony:
==================================================
“In the early morning hours of August 5, 2010, an ice island four times the size of Manhattan was born in northern Greenland,” said Andreas Muenchow, associate professor of physical ocean science and engineering at the University of Delaware’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment. Muenchow’s research in Nares Strait, between Greenland and Canada, is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Satellite imagery of this remote area at 81 degrees N latitude and 61 degrees W longitude, about 620 miles [1,000 km] south of the North Pole, reveals that Petermann Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 43-mile long [70 km] floating ice-shelf.
Trudy Wohlleben of the Canadian Ice Service discovered the ice island within hours after NASA’s MODIS-Aqua satellite took the data on Aug. 5, at 8:40 UTC (4:40 EDT), Muenchow said. These raw data were downloaded, processed, and analyzed at the University of Delaware in near real-time as part of Muenchow’s NSF research. Petermann Glacier, the parent of the new ice island, is one of the two largest remaining glaciers in Greenland that terminate in floating shelves.
The glacier connects the great Greenland ice sheet directly with the ocean. The new ice island has an area of at least 100 square miles and a thickness up to half the height of the Empire State Building. “The freshwater stored in this ice island could keep the Delaware or Hudson rivers flowing for more than two years. It could also keep all U.S. public tap water flowing for 120 days,” Muenchow said.
The island will enter Nares Strait, a deep waterway between northern Greenland and Canada where, since 2003, a University of Delaware ocean and ice observing array has been maintained by Muenchow with collaborators in Oregon (Prof. Kelly Falkner), British Columbia (Prof. Humfrey Melling), and England (Prof. Helen Johnson). “In Nares Strait, the ice island will encounter real islands that are all much smaller in size,” Muenchow said. “The newly born ice-island may become land-fast, block the channel, or it may break into smaller pieces as it is propelled south by the prevailing ocean currents. From there, it will likely follow along the coasts of Baffin Island and Labrador, to reach the Atlantic within the next two years.”
The last time such a massive ice island formed was in 1962 when Ward Hunt Ice Shelf calved a 230 square-mile island, smaller pieces of which became lodged between real islands inside Nares Strait. Petermann Glacier spawned smaller ice islands in 2001 (34 square miles) and 2008 (10 square miles). In 2005, the Ayles Ice Shelf disintegrated and became an ice island (34 square miles) about 60 miles to the west of Petermann Fjord.
)
UPDATE: At 2:15 PM I added an Aqua sat image (source here) in visible light with rotation to North and annotation at the head of this article. – Anthony
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I wish they would shut up about the size of Manhattan for once
40 shades of green says (August 6, 2010 at 1:42 pm): “Good news. This island will float off south and, as it is so big, won’t melt. It will therefore increase the Sea Ice extent. :-)”
New York Times, September 20, 2010: Today R Gates conceded that Steve Goddard’s predicted Arctic ice minimum was right on the money, but insists the plucky prognosticator was just lucky: “If it hadn’t been for that damn glacier on Greenland…” 🙂
Snowlover123
wcp is correct. An expanding glacier moves forward and calves. A declining glacier retreats away from the sea.
Warmists blame everything on global warming.
Snowlover123: August 6, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Anthony? Steve? Do you agree with wcp’s conclusions? They seem quite solid to me.
It’s ice, so it’s quite solid.
Except for the part where the front fell off — a wave probably hit it.
(Good one, Sean Peake!)
If it’s really the Day after Tomorrow, will the beer still be free? (Free Beer Tomorrow);-)
Well, we all know that as soon as this hits the media (and blogosphere) there’ll be panic in the streets.
The cap and trade proponents will be jumping for joy… It’s exactly what they needed (aka the media ignoring what caused the breakoff and just running with the AGW excuse du jour).
And to add muchly needed exaggeration in the reporting of this incident (just to ensure that it strikes the heart spot on), they compare the size to Manhatten. Why not compare it to the size of, say, the old district in Paris ? Naw… that wouldn’t have the same impact now would it ? So Manhatten it is.
… and the band plays on
So nature is acting like natureshould today ??
That’s about all the time I will spend on this matter!
Hope that calf is corraled.
Bet the Globe and Mail will jump on this one…
Svalbard Chronicle:
! Land grab reported in South Greenland !
Here we go, USA Today blames warming oceans:
“Ocean warming currents are circulating around the fjord here and eroding the underbelly of Petermann glacier at an incredible rate, which is 25 times that of the surface melt,” said Alun Hubbard, a glaciologist at the University Of Wales. There’s been a revelation in the last couple of years in the role that warming oceans play in triggering the enhanced acceleration, breakup and thinning of these outlet glaciers.”
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2010/08/giant-ice-island-breaks-off-greenland-glacier/1
tty says:
August 6, 2010 at 1:25 pm
“Shelf ice from a glacier is floating in the sea, but it is not sea ice in the normal sense. It is vastly thicker and accumulated on land rather than being frozen seawater.”
==============
Your comment brought this to mind.
Couldn’t the glacier, if moving fast enough, continue its downward slope until it was below sea level, before its bouyancy overcame its tensile strength causing it to crack?
IMO, this is what is happening, but at a slower pace.
In breaking news….
Manhatten broke off the North American continent today, initially remaining close to its original position, until the tide sucked it out into the Atlantic ocean. Which was FAB-BUU-LOUS!
Scientists say this is a sign of catastrophic AGW, as the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere builds up, rock becomes bouyant, like latte foam or hair gel.
Concerned scientists say that this is just the start, Japan, Crete and New Zealand could be next.
The Mayor of New York was asked if this event would effect Wall Street, he replied:
“Not really, Sex in the City production has been delayed, but thats mostly Manhatten was really used for.”
I agree with Paul Deacon above. The Arctic didn’t lose this ice. Greenland lost this ice and the Arctic gained this ice.
Oh my god .. we’re all dead! Sea levels will now surely rise and drown us all.
Watch the MSM/AGW moonbats as they go apetihs on this.
…-
“Thirteen campers airlifted after melting glacier triggers avalanche in B.C.
RCMP in British Columbia say a melting glacier triggered a two-kilometre avalanche that came to rest atop the Meager Creek hot spring outside Pemberton, B.C., trapping about 13 campers who were in the area.
Police don’t believe anybody was hit by the sliding mass of muddy debris but say a group was camping on the wrong side of a service road that became blocked by debris.”
“The overnight incident was initially reported as a landslide but Sgt. Lemay confirmed it was actually the Capricorn glacier atop Capricorn Mountain that gave way.”
“The area has a long history of geological instability. A flood swept through the Meager Creek hot springs in 1985, damaging cars and bridges and forcing the rescue of visitors by helicopter. And in 1975, four consulting geologists doing geothermal studies for BC Hydro were buried in an avalanche at nearby Devastation Creek.
Three landslides were reported around Meager Creek in October 1990, triggered by heavy rains. The slides blocked access to the hot springs, a popular tourist spot, and stranded five tourists by knocking down a bridge.
The area is also home to B.C.’s largest, most recently active volcano — a series of peaks known as the Mount Meager complex, officially listed as dormant. It last erupted more than 2,360 years ago.”
http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/08/06/people-trapped-by-b-c-landslide-reports/
EFS_Junior says:
August 6, 2010 at 1:22 pm
Did anyone else not notice that the number of melt ponds in the vicinity of and on the surface of the Petermann Glacier is considerably diminished in the August 5 2010 picture at the top of the post compared with picture taken on June 18 2003 below it?
“The freshwater stored in this ice island could keep the Delaware or Hudson rivers flowing for more than two years. It could also keep all U.S. public tap water flowing for 120 days,”
Wrap it in aluminum foil and tow it to Russia, I hear they are having a drought.
Al Gore’s Holy Hologram says: August 6, 2010 at 2:33 pm
I wish they would shut up about the size of Manhattan for once
Why, haven’t you heard yet? Manhattan, the size of a large iceberg, has broken off The Bronx leaving behind a huge rift called Harlem River.
But warming ocean currents are a local event (as we know from stable ocean average temperatures) that don’t implicate global warming, the way a warming atmosphere would. There was a story here on WUWT in February about how the determination that warming currents were responsible for the break-off of an Eastern Greenland glacier refuted alarmist claims that it was due to warming atmospheric temperatures. Here’s the link:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/16/greenland-glaciers-melt-due-to-sea-current-change-not-air-temperature/
So it is worse than we thought; are we all gonna die ?
If I had a humvee I could hitch up to this thing and tow it to Los Angeles where they could use some extra water.
I could get rich with that much bottled water.
Anybody know why the ocean never freezes and crawls up onto Greenland and climbs uphill to the top of those glaciers. How the hell does all that ice get up there anyway; enquiring minds want to know ?
Maybe Santas Elves cart all that ice up to the top during the night just to see the greenies squirm as it all bowls downhill again.
Ice in thicknesses as great as these, plasticity plays a big part. The thicker the ice the faster it moves. The colder it gets the more icebergs will be floating around the worlds waterways.
This idea of more floating icebergs, is an AGW’s dream come true…Every single warmer I talked to thinks this is proof that the planet is becoming a burnt potato.
How long will AGWers cling to that bogus theory.
Can we dunk the Bronx in the sea instead?
Yup. The good old BBC has it. “Hottest year ever” etc. They’re not sure if it’s because of global warming though.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10900235
Or this from http://www.cejournal.net/?p=3358
“… ice shelves still are significant because they can hold back the flow of a glacier into the ocean.”
Though given the pictures that the tounge had been detached from the side of the fjord since 2008, I’m not sure how it would apply in this case.
I’m just trying to figure out how many cases of vodka one can make from a berg the size of Manhattan, which is kind of ironic since a Manhattan is made with Canadian rye, vermouth and bitters (what AGWers are spewing these days).