![ThwaitesTongue-600x423[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/thwaitestongue-600x4231.png?quality=75)
Remember the wailing from Suzanne Goldenberg over the “collapse” of the Thwaites glacier blaming man-made CO2 effects and the smackdown given to the claim on WUWT?
Well, never mind. From the University of Texas at Austin and the “you can stop your wailing now” department, comes this really, really, inconvenient truth.
Researchers find major West Antarctic glacier melting from geothermal sources
AUSTIN, Texas — Thwaites Glacier, the large, rapidly changing outlet of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is not only being eroded by the ocean, it’s being melted from below by geothermal heat, researchers at the Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin (UTIG) report in the current edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The findings significantly change the understanding of conditions beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet where accurate information has previously been unobtainable.
The Thwaites Glacier has been the focus of considerable attention in recent weeks as other groups of researchers found the glacier is on the way to collapse, but more data and computer modeling are needed to determine when the collapse will begin in earnest and at what rate the sea level will increase as it proceeds. The new observations by UTIG will greatly inform these ice sheet modeling efforts.
Using radar techniques to map how water flows under ice sheets, UTIG researchers were able to estimate ice melting rates and thus identify significant sources of geothermal heat under Thwaites Glacier. They found these sources are distributed over a wider area and are much hotter than previously assumed.
The geothermal heat contributed significantly to melting of the underside of the glacier, and it might be a key factor in allowing the ice sheet to slide, affecting the ice sheet’s stability and its contribution to future sea level rise.
The cause of the variable distribution of heat beneath the glacier is thought to be the movement of magma and associated volcanic activity arising from the rifting of the Earth’s crust beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Knowledge of the heat distribution beneath Thwaites Glacier is crucial information that enables ice sheet modelers to more accurately predict the response of the glacier to the presence of a warming ocean.
Until now, scientists had been unable to measure the strength or location of heat flow under the glacier. Current ice sheet models have assumed that heat flow under the glacier is uniform like a pancake griddle with even heat distribution across the bottom of the ice.
The findings of lead author Dusty Schroeder and his colleagues show that the glacier sits on something more like a multi-burner stovetop with burners putting out heat at different levels at different locations.
“It’s the most complex thermal environment you might imagine,” said co-author Don Blankenship, a senior research scientist at UTIG and Schroeder’s Ph.D. adviser. “And then you plop the most critical dynamically unstable ice sheet on planet Earth in the middle of this thing, and then you try to model it. It’s virtually impossible.”
That’s why, he said, getting a handle on the distribution of geothermal heat flow under the ice sheet has been considered essential for understanding it.
Gathering knowledge about Thwaites Glacier is crucial to understanding what might happen to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. An outlet glacier the size of Florida in the Amundsen Sea Embayment, it is up to 4,000 meters thick and is considered a key question mark in making projections of global sea level rise.
The glacier is retreating in the face of the warming ocean and is thought to be unstable because its interior lies more than two kilometers below sea level while, at the coast, the bottom of the glacier is quite shallow.
Because its interior connects to the vast portion of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that lies deeply below sea level, the glacier is considered a gateway to the majority of West Antarctica’s potential sea level contribution.
The collapse of the Thwaites Glacier would cause an increase of global sea level of between 1 and 2 meters, with the potential for more than twice that from the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
The UTIG researchers had previously used ice-penetrating airborne radar sounding data to image two vast interacting subglacial water systems under Thwaites Glacier. The results from this earlier work on water systems (also published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) formed the foundation for the new work, which used the distribution of water beneath the glacier to determine the levels and locations of heat flow.
In each case, Schroeder, who received his Ph.D. in May, used techniques he had developed to pull information out of data collected by the radar developed at UTIG.
According to his findings, the minimum average geothermal heat flow beneath Thwaites Glacier is about 100 milliwatts per square meter, with hotspots over 200 milliwatts per square meter. For comparison, the average heat flow of the Earth’s continents is less than 65 milliwatts per square meter.
The presence of water and heat present researchers with significant challenges.
“The combination of variable subglacial geothermal heat flow and the interacting subglacial water system could threaten the stability of Thwaites Glacier in ways that we never before imagined,” Schroeder said.
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“Yet some would argue that we can model Earth’s climate (a system more complex by many orders of magnitude), and that we should rely upon these model projections for froming policy decisions.”
Anyone who takes note of the almost-universal convergence of these policy decisions to the very same end point would conclude that science is a willing tool of socialism or at least statism. The way to figh global Lukewarming is always the same: higher taxes, bigger government, less personal liberty.
“Now someone correct me here, but -if- this glacial is largely below sea level, and ice having a larger volume compared with water, will the complete melting of this glacier not tend to make the sea level fall?”
Yep.
Of course there is another dynamic to consider. Should all this ice melt and somehow flow into the ocean the compressed bedrock below will spring back to sea level or so and perhaps the oceans might rise.
Of course there is another SET of dynamics to consider. ..
iOW we have NO damn idea what will happen.
Oh what a tangled web we weave …
Meanwhile back on earth we have a burgeoning tyranny here in the USA we may want to pay attention to. A massive transfer or power from we the people to the tyranny in the form of muli-titrillion dollar taxes is the LAST thing we need.
My only question to man-made global warming deniers — and I actually, presently, suspend judgement still, on the causes of the indisputable rise in temperatures, be they man made or natural variations — is…If you have ever flown in an airplane at night, and looked down at the splotches of light that represent every urban area; if you have ever had to walk a mile or so in an urban area like Los Angeles on a hot day with traffic passing and belching burned fossil fuel emissions; or if you have ever contemplated the logarithmic increase in population and fossil fuel consumption over the last 100 or so years; How can you not feel, in your gut, with “horse sense” that any sentient human should have…that maybe, just maybe…the off-the-charts experiment that is man’s insatiable, precipitous, and unprecedented sucking, drilling, and consuming of fossil fuels just might — possibly– have an effect on climate. To me, to deny the effect that must occur as a result of this unprecedented dumping in the atmosphere is akin to a two year old denying he pooped in his diaper. I detect in the “no human cause” movement an embrace of the combustion engine, of coal fired power plants, of a libertarian denial of the importance of preserving the ecological commons, and so much more. This view that I have isn’t helped by the fact that most “climate change deniers” are not environmentalists or scientists but rather people infatuated with man’s industrial and technological creativity, and in bed with all of the energy companies’ propaganda about how useful, convenient, and wonderful their endeavors are to the modern, estranged-from-nature, and short-term-profit-seeking human. Feel free to read that clunky sentence one more time.
Man’s activity on earth is unprecedented, obviously warming, and obviously interfering with what would otherwise be a normal variation. In the end, it doesn’t matter much, as the universe is vast, and our little important appearance here shall pass regardless and indifferntly.
Just to clear things up more definitively, give you this article with statements from the lead author.
No, Volcanoes Are Not the Primary Cause For the Melting Ice Caps
Long story short: this study gives us more detailed and realistic information to model the ice sheet behavior. It does not replace any melting from climate change with melting from geothermal heat.
Tommy B ,
If you are advocating world population control/reduction, why dont you come out and say it?
All the Agenda21 and IPCC literature either advocate this directly, ( using appropriate sobriquet of course), or imply population control as the only long term (final?) solution.
Only trouble is that no one is prepared to lead from the front on this issue! (Except China perhaps).
Or how about Prince Phillip? “I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers than it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist… I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus”
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Prince_Philip,_Duke_of_Edinburgh
I guess its a bit late for him to lead from the front I guess but do you see or hear of him making at least a royal gesture?
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.wordpress.com
Hey Roger
I happen to NOT be in favor of Agenda 21 or population reduction, and I know what all that means, as I read the internet too, all the way down the rabbit hole. For all I know we might even agree on more than you know. I’m a rube and never post on sites…just happened to the other day, sorry for intruding. Thanks for inviting a flame out or whatever they’re called these days, however.
What makes you say I support Agenda 21? Just because I recognize that humans have hit 7 billion population when a hundred years ago there were only 1 billion? Couldn’t I just as well assume you are one of those literal Bible believers who think that “go forth and multiply” is literally “God’s breath” in command (quack quack)? or accuse you of wanting to kill your children and all their descendants because of the logarithmic growth in human population which if continued indefinitely will make life miserable on earth and end up really shitty? Are you in favor of 100 billion people on earth 200 years from now, or whenever…wow. Pretty smart guy. We need more of your kind in politics.
Are you able to comprehend a logarithmic scale? Do you know that the result of all logarithmic scales end in … um, what is the word? Oh please. Can you show me an example, in nature or physics, where a population grows logarithmically in a finite area, and survives? Duh, de dum, de dum de dum…The issue is much more complex than your over-simple knee-jerk binary mind can comprehend. You probably believe that Jesus is a communist because he wants to feed the poor. Or that people who believe in the pill or condoms or just simply replacing ourselves and not having 9 children have some hidden agenda. Or that anyone seeking a common forum for world peace really only wants to create a world government to enslave the populace (sure, it can be taken over or co-opted — which I oppose — but opposing earnest efforts to make the world a better place is just stupid)…or that caring for the environment tramples your right to pollute downstream whenever you feel like it. Couldn’t I just start attaching beliefs about particular issues to you, like this, just the same?
If you’d like to quote what I said, and then state your qualification to that, then fine, argue it. But if you don’t want me to fantasize about your erroneous thinking process, and then attribute it to you, as you have done to me, then lay off that. Stick with quotes and rebuttals, duh. Otherwise you’re just a guy sitting in front of a computer with a belief system of so much sound and fury, signifying…
And if you don’t rebut quotes, I will cease to reply, with relief
Tommy B,
My only issue it that population control is being inflicted on us unwitting ones, by Agenda 21 et al.
I agree something will need to be done at some time in the not too distant future, but it should be discussed and debated up front. However certain influential people appear to be thinking of something somewhat more catastrophic
In the case of Agenda 21 and its supporters, it appears to me and many others that the top dogs, or rather the people that consider themselves the top dogs, want to get rid of the world population to manageable levels, (ranging from 500,000,000 to 1 Billion), for their own purposes rather than with any concern for society. One can only presume that the people left from this purge will be serfs beholden to these “elite”.
Perhaps this article, although one does not need to agree with it in totality, says it all better than I.
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/from-7-billion-people-to-500-million-people-the-sick-population-control-agenda-of-the-global-elite
Thanks for your answer, discussion is always healthy.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
Roger yes I agree particularly for the third world countries. But how do you stop people having sex? Other than sterilisation! Or just let them starve to death, that is happening in many countries. If we didn’t have the red crescents and cross, they would undergo natures natural culling that happens to other animal species.
Ice below sea level, in contact with the sea, will lower sea level if it melts; the overburden above sea level will increase it. But not much, and the timelines are centuries and millennia.
Friends:
I write to dispose of the fallacy of overpopulation in hope that this thread can return to its subject.
The fallacy of overpopulation derives from the disproved Malthusian idea which wrongly assumes that humans are constrained like bacteria in a Petri dish: i.e. population expands until available resources are consumed when population collapses. The assumption is wrong because humans do not suffer such constraint: humans find and/or create new and alternative resources when existing resources become scarce.
The obvious example is food.
In the 1970s the Club of Rome predicted that human population would have collapsed from starvation by now. But human population has continued to rise and there are fewer starving people now than in the 1970s; n.b. there are less starving people in total and not merely fewer in in percentage.
Now, the most common Malthusian assertion is ‘peak oil’. But humans need energy supply and oil is only one source of energy supply. Adoption of natural gas displaces some requirement for oil, fracking increases available oil supply at acceptable cost; etc..
In the real world, for all practical purposes there are no “physical” limits to natural resources so every natural resource can be considered to be infinite; i.e. the human ‘Petri dish’ can be considered as being unbounded. This a matter of basic economics which I explain as follows. bold
Humans do not run out of anything although they can suffer local and/or temporary shortages of anything. The usage of a resource may “peak” then decline, but the usage does not peak because of exhaustion of the resource (e.g. flint, antler bone and bronze each “peaked” long ago but still exist in large amounts).
A resource is cheap (in time, money and effort) to obtain when it is in abundant supply. But “low-hanging fruit are picked first”, so the cost of obtaining the resource increases with time. Nobody bothers to seek an alternative to a resource when it is cheap.
But the cost of obtaining an adequate supply of a resource increases with time and, eventually, it becomes worthwhile to look for
(a) alternative sources of the resource
and
(b) alternatives to the resource.
And alternatives to the resource often prove to have advantages.
For example, both (a) and (b) apply in the case of crude oil.
Many alternative sources have been found. These include opening of new oil fields by use of new technologies (e.g. to obtain oil from beneath sea bed) and synthesising crude oil from other substances (e.g. tar sands, natural gas and coal). Indeed, since 1994 it has been possible to provide synthetic crude oil from coal at competitive cost with natural crude oil and this constrains the maximum true cost of crude.
Alternatives to oil as a transport fuel are possible. Oil was the transport fuel of military submarines for decades but uranium is now their fuel of choice.
There is sufficient coal to provide synthetic crude oil for at least the next 300 years. Hay to feed horses was the major transport fuel 300 years ago and ‘peak hay’ was feared in the nineteenth century, but availability of hay is not significant a significant consideration for transportation today. Nobody can know what – if any – demand for crude oil will exist 300 years in the future.
Indeed, coal also demonstrates an ‘expanding Petri dish’.
Spoil heaps from old coal mines contain much coal that could not be usefully extracted from the spoil when the mines were operational. Now, modern technology enables the extraction from the spoil at a cost which is economic now and would have been economic if it had been available when the spoil was dumped.
These principles not only enable growing human population: they also increase human well-being.
The ingenuity which increases availability of resources also provides additional usefulness to the resources. For example, abundant energy supply and technologies to use it have freed people from the constraints of ‘renewable’ energy and the need for the power of muscles provided by slaves and animals. Malthusians are blind to the obvious truth that human ingenuity has freed humans from the need for slaves to operate treadmills, the oars of galleys, etc..
And these benefits also act to prevent overpopulation because population growth declines with affluence.
There are several reasons for this. Of most importance is that poor people need large families as ‘insurance’ to care for them at times of illness and old age. Affluent people can pay for that ‘insurance’ so do not need the costs of large families.
The result is that the indigenous populations of rich countries decline. But rich countries need to sustain population growth for economic growth so they need to import – and are importing – people from poor countries. Increased affluence in poor countries can be expected to reduce their population growth with resulting lack of people for import by rich countries.
Hence, the real foreseeable problem is population decrease; n.b. not population increase.
All projections and predictions indicate that human population will peak around the middle of this century and decline after that. So, we are confronted by the probability of ‘peak population’ resulting from growth of affluence around the world.
The Malthusian idea is wrong because it ignores basic economics and applies a wrong model; human population is NOT constrained by resources like the population of bacteria in a Petri dish. There is no existing or probable problem of overpopulation of the world by humans.
So, can we please ignore the non-issue of overpopulation and return the thread to its subject?
Richard
You can do better than this.
The reports authors are very careful NOT to state what you claim that they state. It is ‘reasonably obvious’ from their claims that they may agree with you absolutely-off-the-record after quite a few beers in a friendly closed membership gathering. BUT making the jump in assumptions that they refuse to make and by drawing conclusions which are conjectural. no matter how well they may seem to be founded, and stating them as if they are the conclusions of the report’s writers, allows your opponents to claim that your methods are shoddy and your reportage is lacking.
Better, I suggest, would be a ‘steady as she goes’ addition of the information to known facts and known maybes and looking for other material which is now shown to support your premises in the light of the latest information.
Interestingly – In his brilliant fictional Red – Green – Blue Mars trilogy Kim Stanley Robinson posited a massive sudden global sealevel rise due to the West Antartic iceshelf having been rapidly destabilised by underlying volcanic action. That was published in about 1999 (!). KSR usually bases his “future maybes” on very well established science. There appears to have been minimal if any material on geothermal action as a source for differential antarctic melting in recent peer reviewed literature. If a novelist can “get it right” (perhaps) 15 years ago – what papers are available over that sort of time span that support this thesis?