From Penn State
Underlying ocean melts ice shelf, speeds up glacier movement
Warm ocean water, not warm air, is melting the Pine Island Glacier’s floating ice shelf in Antarctica and may be the culprit for increased melting of other ice shelves, according to an international team of researchers.
“We’ve been dumping heat into the atmosphere for years and the oceans have been doing their job, taking it out of the air and into the ocean,” said Sridhar Anandakrishnan, professor of geosciences, Penn State. “Eventually, with all that atmospheric heat, the oceans will heat up.”
The researchers looked at the remote Pine Island Glacier, a major outlet of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet because it has rapidly thinned and accelerated in the recent past.
“It has taken years and years to do the logistics because it is so remote from established permanent bases,” said Anandakrishnan.
Pine Island Glacier or PIG lies far from McMurdo base, the usual location of American research in Antarctica. Work done in the southern hemisphere’s summer, December through January 2012-13, included drilling holes in the ice to place a variety of instruments and using radar to map the underside of the ice shelf and the bottom of the ocean. Penn State researchers did the geophysics for the project and the research team’s results are reported today (Sept. 13) in Science.
The ice shelf is melting more rapidly from below for a number of reasons. The oceans are warmer than they have been in the past and water can transfer more heat than air. More importantly, the terrain beneath the ice shelf is a series of channels. The floating ice in the channel has ample room beneath it for ocean water to flow in. The water melts some of the ice beneath and cools. If the water remained in the channel, the water would eventually cool to a point where it was not melting much ice, but the channels allow the water to flow out to the open ocean and warmer water to flow in, again melting the ice shelf from beneath.
“The way the ocean water is melting the ice shelf is a deeply non-uniform way,” said Anandakrishnan. “That’s going to be more effective in breaking these ice shelves apart.”
The breaking apart of the ice shelf in the channels is similar to removing an ice jam from a river. The shelf was plugging the channel, but once it is gone, the glacier moves more rapidly toward the sea, forming more ice shelf, but removing large amounts of ice from the glacier.
The melting of floating ice shelves does not contribute to sea level rise because once they are in the water, the ice shelves have already contributed to sea level rise. However, most of the Antarctic glaciers are on land, and rapidly adding new ice shelf material to the floating mass will increase sea level rise.
“Antarctica is relatively stable, but that won’t last forever, said Anandakrishnan. “This is a harbinger of what will happen.”
The researchers believe that the interaction of the ocean beneath the ice shelf and melting of the ice shelf is an important variable that should be incorporated into the sea level rise models of global warming. Other recent research shows that without the channelized underbelly of the ice shelf and glacier, melting would be even more rapid.
“The Antarctic has been relatively quiet as a contributor to sea rise,” said Anandakrishnan. “What this work shows is that we have been blind to a huge phenomenon, something that will be as big a player in sea level rise in the next century as any other contributor.”
Also working on this project were Tim Stanton, research professor, and William J. Shaw, research assistant professor, Department of Oceanography, Naval Postgraduate School; Martin Truffer, professor of physics, Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska, Fairbanks; Hugh Corr, British Antarctic Survey; Leo E. Peters, research associate, Kiya L. Riverman, graduate student, both of Penn State; Robert Bindschadler, emeritus scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; and David M. Holland, professor of mathematics, New York University.
The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Natural Environment Research Council, UK, supported this work.
They are going to keep making stuff up – anything, everything – until every last person on the planet stares at them blankly and there is not a drop of funding left. And then they’ll probably Just Keep On Making Stuff Up.
I wish some of them would actually do some science.
Joe Bastardi says: at 9:38 pm Meanwhile, the total picture at the antarctic was one of record high ice.
Huge point! And the Arctic has experienced record ice growth. This Daily Mail article has really great comparison pictures of the Arctic in Aug 2012 vs Aug 2013. It really makes the point strongly compared to some more abstact-ish representations of the Arctic ice. Also, just an excellent article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/Global-cooling-Arctic-ice-caps-grows-60-global-warming-predictions.html
I suppose of late we are winessing the birth of a new phenonemon. The hypothesis was that the burining of fossil fuels resulted in somethey they called Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). This is has become a no go area however as the planet has become globally cooler over the last decade or so as even as judged by warmist adjusted data.
The solution is a new acronym. As far as I am aware not one of them has been courageous enough to come forward with it so I’ll name the new peril that is about to endanger mankind and keep the grant money rolling in:
Anthropogenic Local Warming of ALW.
It is all they have left.
Entropy be damned!
Expect a flood of ALW papers over the coming months.
If you ask a Penn State alumni about natural geothermal warming and volcanic ridges below the ice on the peninsula they will ask if you want fries with that. Bless their hearts.
What rubbish! This paper highlights what is wrong with much of contemporary science.
In observing and analysing the natural world, you need benchmarks, history, geography and a bunch of other things. This paper could have been a useful addition to the sum of knowledge if it had just stuck to the facts. There is a lot to learn about the Antarctic, glaciers and so on. Instead, it debased itself and destroyed its own credibility with outright partisanship.
CodeTech says at 10:13 pm
That fact is: CO2 does not drive climate. Never has, doesn’t now, never will.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = == = = == = = = = = =
Well, that’s the major point we are trying to make. Historically, there’s no empirical evidence that CO2 does anything, and in this short but key 3 minute video on the CO2 lag see Al Gore’s and the ipcc’s faulty claim of evidence on CO2 shot down: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK_WyvfcJyg&CO2Lag
The above video shows that temperature is the cause of changes in CO2. No evidence exists that C02 is both a cause and an effect of temperature change, but that is exactly what the warmists maintain. They say there is “established century old physics” behind the notion that CO2 has any appreciable effect on climate temperature, but that’s all they have, is an old theoretical model (no evidence) to back everything that they propose they do to our economies, like taking us toward the stone age with the 83% CO2 cuts mandated in the cap & trade bill that passed the US House in 2009! Well, going against their theory on CO2 is, per The Economist: “The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures [15 years].” And even more important, as has been covered here at wuwt, is the effectively identical rate of temperature rise during the first (low CO2) and second (higher CO2) halves of the 20th century. During the more recent time with “dangerous high levels” of CO2, and at low CO2 levels, the climate is acting exactly the same. There is no other explanation but that CO2 is doing absolutely nothing. That is the actual evidence. The only thing the fear mongers have is a theoretical model, but a different theoretical model exists that suggests Co2 has ~ zero effect beyond 200ppm. So, discount the “established physics,” as something is terribly wrong with the GHE theory as propounded by the establishment warmists.
Pine Island is the silver lining on the dark cloud Alarmists are increasingly facing. It is the microcosm that defies the macrocosm. It is the exception that proves the rule, the rule being: “Global Warming is not happening.”
“The way the ocean water is melting the ice shelf is a deeply non-uniform way,”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Wow. The heat which isn’t warming the atmosphere is going into the oceans where it isn’t warming the water and from there it is going into the ice where it is selectively melting some ice more than other ice.
That’s some smart heat.
Eric Simpson says:
September 13, 2013 at 10:03 pm
“We’ve been dumping heat into the atmosphere for years” said Sridhar Anandakrishnan
We haven’t been dumping heat; the actual heat imparted directly from human activity is, in a relative sense, completely trivial. We’ll assume he meant we’ve been “dumping” CO2.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I made the same assumption which makes the claim even more bizarre. Greenhouse gas theory does not, and never did, rest upon increases in CO2 accumulating heat. Not in the atmosphere or anywhere else. The theory always rested upon a change in the temperature profile between surface and TOA with upper atmosphere becoming cooler, and lower atmosphere becoming warmer, but the average from surface to TOA remaining exactly the same. Nowhere in the theory is there any significant increase in heat in the first place, the effective black body temperature at equilibrium remains EXACTLY the same after doubling of CO2 as before. They are effectively making claims that are the result of a theory which makes no such claim!
Uh… Did I miss the part about the volcanoes at Pine Island and all along the sea floor in that region that could, possibly, maybe, provide a small amount of heat???
“We’ve been dumping heat into the atmosphere for years and the oceans have been doing their job, taking it out of the air and into the ocean,” said Sridhar Anandakrishnan, professor of geosciences, Penn State. “Eventually, with all that atmospheric heat, the oceans will heat up.”
Since the oceans and land absorb incoming sunlight energy, and the atmosphere does not, it is the ocean and land that heat the air, not the other way around. A minor point. Hope they weren’t planning to publish a paper.
We saw with the Wilkins ice shelf that the mechanical action of multi-week ocean swells was responsible for the breakup. The air temperature down there was so cold it was freezing the salt water in the open cracks.
This sounds sketchy. Water below the antarctic ice is below freezing and doesn’t solidify due to pressure. warm that water by a degree or two and it is still below freezing, and the heat alone shouldn’t melt the ice above any more than it would otherwise. However, if the water is moving or if you increase movement, would it then melt the ice regardless of temperature? We are told to thaw perishable food in cold running water instead of soaking in hot water, not because of bacteria, but because frozen things melt faster in cold running water than soaking in hit water because of the heat transfer. I’m not seeing this study addressing this.
Did Penn State award any PhD’s for this? No mention of glacial flow? Oh, well. No one seems to have any sympathy for the poor penguins who now have to walk over 200 kilometres of ice to bring food to their young. Lot of penguins die on that long march. Maybe a Russian nuclear icebreaker, currently escorting Chinese cargo ships through the Arctic, could be persuaded to pop down and cut a channel. Blast! Penguins can’t pay for the service. Ah, the charities of course. Yes.
So the atmosphere is heating the Ocean?
How does that work? The ocean has 4000 times more heat than the atmosphere.
Or maybe the atmosphere is only heating the Southern Ocean?
I think the BS meter has just bounced off the stop.
We’re all doomed. Send more money to the brain washed eco whack scientists.
well there s something true, the omly way you can say that there is a global warming is either mesure total energy in cliamte system, including ocean of course, or to measure radiative budget of the planet. So do we ever lnow if there is actually global warming?
I love what ipcc sayed…
we know with 90% certainy that the more than half of warming that occured since the war was caused by human…
first an hypothesis is falsified or not…90% is meanlingless …last not least ,where this 90% comes from ; nobody knows…
second warming is not warming it is the variation of global temerature , ie not a temperature, ie not even able to say if a body is warmer or not, and certainly unable to measure it…wlast but not least there is not definition of globall temperature.
third you have to admire what” since the war” means : it means they know that global temperature is meaningless , with el nino it can vary of 1 degree in a few months.
so “serious climatologist “know they have to make some king of averaging to know what is the global temperature…..
Maybe some one should email Dr. Anandakrishnan to tell him that the heat flow through the climate system consists of the sun’s radiation warming the surface and the surface warming the atmosphere and the atmosphere finally radiating the heat back on out. In other words, the ocean does not take the heat out of the atmosphere.
Here’s the link to his web page and email:
http://www3.geosc.psu.edu/people/faculty/personalpages/sanan/index.html
“It has taken years and years to do the logistics because it is so remote from established permanent bases,” said Anandakrishnan.>>We’ve found somewhere at last to keep our flawed theories alive.
i don’t agree with you steve case, you have no evidence that the system is in balance and that s one of the reason why you can’t conlude anything about a “global warming” …of the laower atmosphere/ocean surface.
dp, I’m tempted to start using that every time I’m referring to a climate “scientist”…
Like say, Michael Mann, bless his heart. Or James Hansen, bless his little heart 🙂
Did they explain the mechanism by which this heat is transfered or was it just Harry Potter magic.
Heat capacity of water is close to 4 kilojoules per degree per kilogram (litre). To convert ice from solid to liquid at 0.01C requires 334 kilojoules to produce 1 litre of (very cold) water. Assume we have an unlimited quantity of sea water at 4C (pick your own temperature). The energy in our seawater is 4 x 4 = 16 kilojoules per litre. Divide 334 by 16 tells us we will need 20.875 litres of sea water at 4C to provide sufficient energy to produce 1 litre of melted ice water. We now have 21.875 litres of water at 0.01C.
So if 1 cubic kilometre of ice gets melted we will end up with 21.875 cubic kilometres of very cold, slightly less salty, water which will remain on the surface of the sea. That is enough cold water to cover the global sea area to a depth of 62 centimetres, over half a metre.
And now we can expect the air, with a heat capacity of just 1 kilojoule per kilogram, to warm up that water so it can do it all again. Someone told me once that hot air rises, I believe it now.
“The researchers looked at the remote Pine Island Glacier, a major outlet of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet because it has rapidly thinned and accelerated in the recent past.”
Maybe that should read the researchers cherry picked the remote Pine Island Glacier……..past………and then worked out how to link this to alarmist stories for warmist propaganda
In life it is always best to give people the benefit of the doubt?
I doubt if this paper has any merit whatsoever.
When a scientists uses perjorative words such as dumping then they must be talking crap. (No pun intended)
NSIDC site is down due to flooding and severe weather?
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/