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.
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“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,”
Pure Genius! It also solves the conundrum that has puzzled me for ages: why it takes such a long time to heat the water for the spaghetti on the hob. I should have the gas burning above the pan!
Silly me.
UAH show no atmospheric warming at 60S to 85S since 1978, so how can it have warmed the ocean?
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/satellites-confirm-antarctic-is-getting-colder/
Diatom studies found abrupt warming on the Antarctic Peninsular between 1935 and 1950.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379113002862?np=y
Current warming is clearly part of a much longer trend.
lemiere jacques says:
September 14, 2013 at 1:04 am
“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.”
He doesn’t need evidence. The Null hypothesis is that the system is homeostatic; otherwise life would not exist. The people who claim an imbalance need to provide evidence for their case.
And the only measurement of outgoing radiation, ERBE, doesn’t play along with the GCM’s; which is just too bad for the warmist prostitutes.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/image_thumb25.png?w=624&h=488
At last some common sense and a convincing argument as to why it is not the sun …
The atmosphere warms the oceans and the oceans warm the atmosphere.
It is no wonder we are getting warmer!
Between 1980 and 2010 sea surface temperatures had been falling around Pine Island glacier.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/21/new-research-sheds-light-on-antarcticas-melting-pine-island-glacier/
In 2008 a buried volcano with molten rock churning below was discovered nearby.
http://www.livescience.com/2242-buried-volcano-discovered-antarctica.html
Specific heat of sea water 3.9 kJ/kg SHC of air 1.006 kJ/kg. Mass of oceans 1.4 x 10^21 kg Mass of Atmosphere 5.8 x 10^18 kg……. Is that a faint whiff of bullish!t coming from this claim?…..
graphicconception says: September 14, 2013 at 3:10 am
B I N G O !
Here we see a large calving event in an area that has probably seem hundreds of similar events over the past couple of millenia. Most people would see this as an awesome display of nature’s power and grandeur. The alarmist sees an opportunity that must not be wasted.
Sounds to me like a classic longshot bet.
When your bets on the supposed guaranteed warming fail, bet on the opposite; especially if it seems the ice increase can not advance any more. I the ice decreases, yippee! Fame and fortune for those who’ve lost their way in physics and science. Losers.
From the numbers I found, Antarctica loses 70 km³ every year on a total of 26.5 millions km³. This rate of melting is equivalent to about 3% of melting since the last ice age.
Also, how can water be warm enough to melt land ice and cold enough to produce a record amount of ice on the salty oceans at a latitude farther away from the pole?
The Wilkins ice shelf is on the Antarctic peninsula, about 550 nm eastward around the coast from the Pine Island glacier. The breakup that began in 2008, and is continuing. Article and March 2013 photo:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=81174
http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/81000/81174/wilkins_wv2_2013083_lrg.jpg
The Desko mountains are the hills in the photo, north is to the left, and the area is about 60 nm ENE of Charcot Island.
It is hard to see how warming is responsible for the Pine Island and Wilkins breakups. Both ice sheets are thick, several hundred meters, far too thick that temperatures that are barely above freezing to start with, could reach into the interior to weaken the shelves. The lifting and falling of the ocean would seem a far more likely candidate to be the cause.
On the sea ice page, the RSS temp plot of -60S to -70S is clearly a negative trend. The ocean immediately surrounding Antarctica is NOT warming.
I can’t bring new criticism to the table, though this crap certainly deserves it. Penn State pays Mikie’s salary too, so they must be getting the results they want.
“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….Other recent research shows that without the channelized underbelly of the ice shelf and glacier, melting would be even more rapid.”
The science is settled, and not only is it worse than we thought, but it will necessarily get worser worser and worser with 100% likelihood, which means you must send me all of your money stat, before it’s too late!
“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,”
No. No. Noooo. The floating ice does not retard the inexorable movement of the glacier behind it! These guys wouldn’t even make it as McIntyre’s “high school teachers” in an earlier generation.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/04/quote-of-the-week-high-school-climate-science/
“In my opinion, most climate scientists on the Team would have been high school teachers in an earlier generation – if they were lucky. Many/most of them have degrees from minor universities. It’s much easier to picture people like Briffa or Jones as high school teachers than as Oxford dons of a generation ago. Or as minor officials in a municipal government.
Allusions to famous past amateurs over-inflates the rather small accomplishments of present critics, including myself. A better perspective is the complete mediocrity of the Team makes their work vulnerable to examination by the merely competent.”
The nice humility of the second paragraph is refreshing in a world of self-important quacks with asterisked PhDs and asterisked Nobel Prizes.
“Eric Simpson said
So, which is it, the missing heat has heated the ocean, or a cold ocean has cooled the air??”
Both, in pop climate science you can have both, if one theory is aired and shown to be false you must always have a back up theory/excuse to silence the deniers/skeptics/realists.
Meanwhile you are always looking for more research/grant money to find even more ludicrous theories/excuse’s to fob of the above and fool the politicians, while all you spare time is taken up with travelling to far flung junkets/piss ups in exotic climes with like minded souls.
Bucket load of Sarc / or not!!
Isn’t melting ice one reason the earth’s temperature is so stable?
Put ice cubes in water. Within reason, the temperature of the water will sit at 32F/0C as long as there is ice in the water. Heating the water makes no difference to the temperature, it simply changes the rate at which the ice melts.
As a result, if the earth’s surface was warming, we could expect to see increased COLD water in the deep oceans due to increased melting of the polar ice. The recent discovery that the deep oceans are WARMING is thus a signal that the surface is not NOT WARMING.
Contrary to the claims of climate science, the pause in warming is not caused by increased warming of the deep oceans. Because the signature for this would be a cooling of the deep oceans due to increased cold meltwater from the poles.
Rather, warming of the deep oceans is a sign that the surface is not warming, and thus the flow of cold meltwater from the poles to deep oceans has been reduced.
“Antarctica is relatively stable, but that won’t last forever”
What does?!? Forever is a long time!
The level of scientific skill exhibited is amazing. GK
This guy never heard of atmospheric circulation…
Say What???? The authors remind that Ice shelf melting will not change sea level but the authors go on to say,
“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.” is the most important component of sea level rise.”
Really. Once again, we see an over-stretched climate science conclusion that rises to the level of The Inquirer reports on alien abduction. Such academic rigor!!!!!
Oops. That last sentence in the quotation is mine and was to be deleted before I hit send. My bad.
didnt read the thread before writing this, i am CERTAIN there is a volcano under that area and assume that would be the source 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.”
I see. So, it really isn’t CO2 that’s the problem, but all that waste heat we’re “dumping” into the atmosphere, which then heats the oceans. Interesting. But sometimes the heat is sneaky, and hides way down deep where we can’t find it, only magically appearing to melt sea ice, before disappearing again. Because that’s how man’s heat works. Fascinating.