From the “it still doesn’t matter, your SUV is melting the continent” and the 0.3 watts/sq meter it contributes isn’t ANYTHING close to the “about two-tenths of a Watt per square meter ” forcing measured from CO2 department. Just ignore the big red dot first mapped in 2012..
UC Santa Cruz team reports first direct measurement of heat flow from deep within the Earth to the bottom of the West Antarctic ice sheet
The amount of heat flowing toward the base of the West Antarctic ice sheet from geothermal sources deep within the Earth is surprisingly high, according to a new study led by UC Santa Cruz researchers. The results, published July 10 in Science Advances, provide important data for researchers trying to predict the fate of the ice sheet, which has experienced rapid melting over the past decade.
Lead author Andrew Fisher, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, emphasized that the geothermal heating reported in this study does not explain the alarming loss of ice from West Antarctica that has been documented by other researchers. “The ice sheet developed and evolved with the geothermal heat flux coming up from below–it’s part of the system. But this could help explain why the ice sheet is so unstable. When you add the effects of global warming, things can start to change quickly,” he said.
High heat flow below the West Antarctic ice sheet may also help explain the presence of lakes beneath it and why parts of the ice sheet flow rapidly as ice streams. Water at the base of the ice streams is thought to provide the lubrication that speeds their motion, carrying large volumes of ice out onto the floating ice shelves at the edges of the ice sheet. Fisher noted that the geothermal measurement was from only one location, and heat flux is likely to vary from place to place beneath the ice sheet.
“This is the first geothermal heat flux measurement made below the West Antarctic ice sheet, so we don’t know how localized these warm geothermal conditions might be. This is a region where there is volcanic activity, so this measurement may be due to a local heat source in the crust,” Fisher said.
The study was part of a large Antarctic drilling project funded by the National Science Foundation called WISSARD (Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling), for which UC Santa Cruz is one of three lead institutions. The research team used a special thermal probe, designed and built at UC Santa Cruz, to measure temperatures in sediments below Subglacial Lake Whillans, which lies beneath half a mile of ice. After boring through the ice sheet with a special hot-water drill, researchers lowered the probe through the borehole until it buried itself in the sediments below the subglacial lake. The probe measured temperatures at different depths in the sediments, revealing a rate of change in temperature with depth about five times higher than that typically found on continents. The results indicate a relatively rapid flow of heat towards the bottom of the ice sheet.
This geothermal heating contributes to melting of basal ice, which supplies water to a network of subglacial lakes and wetlands that scientists have discovered underlies a large region of the ice sheet. In a separate study published last year in Nature, the WISSARD microbiology team reported an abundant and diverse microbial ecosystem in the same lake. Warm geothermal conditions may help to make subglacial habitats more supportive of microbial life, and could also drive fluid flow that delivers heat, carbon, and nutrients to these communities.
According to coauthor Slawek Tulaczyk, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz and one of the WISSARD project leaders, the geothermal heat flux is an important value for the computer models scientists are using to understand why and how quickly the West Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking.
“It is important that we get this number right if we are going to make accurate predictions of how the West Antarctic ice sheet will behave in the future, how much it is melting, how quickly ice streams flow, and what the impact might be on sea level rise,” Tulaczyk said. “I waited for many years to see a directly measured value of geothermal flux from beneath this ice sheet.”
Antarctica’s huge ice sheets are fed by snow falling in the interior of the continent. The ice gradually flows out toward the edges. The West Antarctic ice sheet is considered less stable than the larger East Antarctic ice sheet because much of it rests on land that is below sea level, and the ice shelves at its outer edges are floating on the sea. Recent studies by other research teams have found that the ice shelves are melting due to warm ocean currents now circulating under the ice, and the rate at which the ice shelves are shrinking is accelerating. These findings have heightened concerns about the overall stability of the West Antarctic ice sheet.
The geothermal heat flux measured in the new study was about 285 milliwatts per square meter, which is like the heat from one small LED Christmas-tree light per square meter, Fisher said. The researchers also measured the upward heat flux through the ice sheet (about 105 milliwatts per square meter) using an instrument developed by coauthor Scott Tyler at the University of Nevada, Reno. That instrument was left behind in the WISSARD borehole as it refroze, and the measurements, based on laser light scattering in a fiber-optic cable, were taken a year later. Combining the measurements both below and within the ice enabled calculation of the rate at which melt water is produced at the base of the ice sheet at the drill site, yielding a rate of about half an inch per year.
###
Jeez, I hope this volcano isn’t putting CO2 into the ocean, that makes some scientists cry.
“Warm geothermal conditions may help to make subglacial habitats more supportive of microbial life, and could also drive fluid flow that delivers heat, carbon, and nutrients to these communities.”
Wait a minute – I thought heat and carbon were the bad guys, but here they support life??
But this is bad life.
The critters are anoxic which means they don’t want oxygen around and would happily remove it all from our atmosphere if they could.They possibly could want revenge for the plants destroying their original habitat’s atmosphere. Maybe they could conceivably be working towards our possible destruction.
So heat and carbon are still the bad guys, still no need to change dogma.
They could always use some sort of gravitational sensor to measure the ice…
… I’m sure it would be totally unaffected by the volcanic movement in the crust below… OOOPS!
As noted by many.
No prior measurements… but a trend is implied.
Very Mark Twain..ish.
Imagine, soon these same “experts” will notice that there is a Ring of Fire around the Pacific Ocean, or that the sky is blue and panic accordingly.
Of course what global warming are they genuflecting to?
With a single point in time indication of geothermal heat they can only compare to the “Estimate Average Global Temperature” at the same point in time.
Wait 30 years (climate you know) then compare their data sets.
I’m sure there are scientists that understand the way ice flows over bedrock.
Sometimes it is sticky and grabs boulders, at other times it just slides.
Something to do with temperature ?
Which brings me to my main point, why do my ice cube trays sometimes stick and shatter, and at other times release perfect cubes ?
let them sit out on the counter for 5 minutes before you crack them and you’ll discover the magic of a microscopic layer of liquid water.
As for making the perfect peel-able boil egg, add some salt to the boiling water.
The key to understanding the oceans and the ice it forms is to understand how 35 ppt of sodium alters its colligative properties.
Umm didn’t they only drill one hole? I think they might need more than one data point to make any conclusion. If I drilled one hole in Yellowstone park 20m from the geyser to represent all of the continents rate of heat flux how would the comparison look?
Looking at the area of red on the map, I see an area of about 38,000 square miles. That is larger than the area of the state of Indiana. How many measurements were made in this area to conclude that it is 0.8 degrees hotter than the rest of Antarctica? I don’t think that they have the data…my BS detector is registering high on this one.
you misinterpret what the color scaling means.
OK, so what does the red area represent? What is the 0.8 degrees, % what the hell is it if it’s not temperature, what the hell is it? And did they sample the temperature over that whole 38,000 sq mile area?
This isn’t the first paper to find geothermal warming.
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/25/9070
What’s more, I seem to remember the discovery of volcanic vents in the waters off the coast. The heating is not limited to just the land. Any heating of the water would help melt glacial grounding toes which would then speed up the glacial flow.
The one thing we do know is there has been no overall warming in and around Antarctica while the Southern Ocean has been cooling for a decade or more.
Ahh! … global warming heat was hiding under … polar ice!
Sneaky!
Regarding: “The geothermal heat flux measured in the new study was about 285 milliwatts per square meter, which is like the heat from one small LED Christmas-tree light per square meter, Fisher said.”
I have two 60-bulb Christmas light strings, Philips brand, one white, one red. These 120 bulbs combined are consuming 4.81 watts of power (120.7 volts, 42.6 mA, power factor measured as .935 – probably due to harmonic content in the line current). This is 40.1 milliwatts per bulb, including power dissipated in dropping resistors and anything else.
I think my case is a little on the low side, and more typical is somewhere in the range of 50-100 milliwatts per bulb including losses in dropping resistors and anything else such as at least sometimes rectifiers.
All of these figures are much less than 285 milliwatts. For that matter, they are also a lot less than the generally around .4-.5 watt consumed by incandescent low voltage holiday “mini light” string bulbs, the 4-7 watts drawn by C7 candelabra screw base bulbs, and the generally 7 watts drawn by C9 candelabra screw base bulbs.
well there goes the joy of Christmas for me. Next I suppose you’ll calculate the numbers of joules needed to move Santa’s sleigh at Supersonic, and then conclude 9 reindeer aren’t enough.
Party pooper.
Joel, we need to have a talk about Santa now that you are grown up.
It’s amazing how global warming knows to act locally.
Yea it rapidly warmed from -60˚C to -59˚C!
‘geothermal heating reported in this study does not explain the alarming loss of ice from West Antarctica that has been documented by other researchers. ‘
Which in turn does not explain why there is not only no loss but an increase in the rest of the Antarctica , but then we have ‘magic CO2’ we can blame for that which by some means only affects the West Antarctica but none of the rest of the Antarctica
“So the cycles of activity of the Sun, planetry orbits etc. had nothing to do with the LIA then?”
If these guys have it right, then it’s coming again soon as we head toward 2030.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3156594/Is-mini-ICE-AGE-way-Scientists-warn-sun-sleep-2020-cause-temperatures-plummet.html
Has anyone done the sums the other way round? How much heat is needed to melt half an inch of ice at brass monkey temperature and whatever pressure 3000m of overburden creates?
I would like to add a footnote.
Notice the map of Antartica, how the western tail appears to be torn loose from the main body of land. Also if you look at a larger map, it seems to be pulled away from S. American tip.
I did some studies of the tectonics and at one time took a map of the world and cut the land mass apart like a jig-saw puzzle. When I assembled them I found this Antartic part to fit into Pangea.
Also the Gulf of Mexico seems to fit next to Yucatan.
We have an uplift area here in Texas called the Balcones Fault Zone. Straight lines running from the peaks near Cibolo across to the hills just west of Uvalde. In between I found rusted snails in an area called the “badlands”.
It seem that all of the pushing from the south that occurred after the meteor struck (65mil years ago) that S. america moved south and left two strings of islands as a reminder.
For years I have thought about the location they picked for Byrd station. Maybe it is above the “first” strike that caused everything to happen 300mil years ago. If so, thars a hot hunk of metal under Byrd trying to cool off….
The article in Scientific American mentions NIGHT LIGHTS, power consumption .3 watts (3000 milliwatts)
it does not mention CHRISTMAS-TREE LIGHTS power consumption 40 – 60 milliwatts.
Typo: .3 watts is 300 milliwatts, not 3000.
“Lead author Andrew Fisher, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, emphasized that the geothermal heating reported in this study does not explain the alarming loss of ice from West Antarctica that has been documented by other researchers.”
There they go again. Still kowtowing to the AGW meme. Please! Don’t accuse us of being deniers!!!
The amount of heat flowing toward the base of the West Antarctic ice sheet from geothermal sources deep within the Earth is surprisingly high,
Any one per cent competent computer modeller would have said that this was baseline information for any computer model concerned with CO2 or temperature as one of the variables. So sad that the recruitment standards in climate science even in the top British and US universities is so low the holders of these posts are able to say the science is beyond question when way back we had the same information showing localised heating in the Arctic from NASA in the form of the file AMSRE_SSTAn_M.
there should be no surprises if the science is beyond question.
This is just another example where we need congressional investigations into this garbage. Congress and the Nation simply need to know what a wasteful joke spending on climate “science” is. I must admit that I love seeing that chart titled “Byrd,” given that OSU has the Byrd Polar Research Center for Fraudulent Climate Science. Clearly they don’t understand what is happening under their very noses.
BTW, watch this video clip. Al Gore accidentally debunks his own myth. He explains why the oceans are warming. He clearly identifies is incoming radiation as the cause. CO2 is transparent to incoming radiation. The sun warms the oceans, the oceans melt the ice cap, CO2 has absolutely nothing to do with it. Don’t take my word for it, just listen to Al Gore. The nit wit doesn’t seem to understand that his own video disproves his theory.
Also, Al doesn’t seem familiar with this photographic evidence.
http://leurenmoret.info/_Media/pic-23-ssn-skate-5962-globa.jpeg
BTW, the Mt Kilimanjaro glacier is 5,000 feet above the freeze line. I would love Al Gore to explain to Congress how ice melts in sub zero temperatures.
“Lead author Andrew Fisher, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, emphasized that the geothermal heating reported in this study does not explain the alarming loss of ice from West Antarctica that has been documented by other researchers. “The ice sheet developed and evolved with the geothermal heat flux coming up from below–it’s part of the system. But this could help explain why the ice sheet is so unstable. When you add the effects of global warming, things can start to change quickly,” he said.”
You absolutely have to love these climate “scientists.” They have a melting ice shelf that sits above a volcano, and they conclude that the volcano isn’t the cause. Even when provided this evidence they conclude the cause is CO2. Just read the quote above. Clearly he understands that his funding depends on finding CO2 as a cause. What a complete joke. BTW, how does IR or peak 15 microns warm the oceans? It doesn’t. How does he tie CO2 into this? He doesn’t. There is no mechanism for the CO2 to warm the oceans. There is no mechanism for CO2 to result in cooling. There in no mechanism for CO2 to cause a pause in warming. CO2 can only trap and release radiation or peak wavelength 15 microns, that is it. There is no defined mechanism by which CO2 can cause the oceans to warm. It is a non-starter.
Wild guess, but my bet is that the left side (West?) of Antarctica is the side that is losing the ice. Imagine that, but clearly the melt must be do to the localized effect of CO2. My understanding is there there is no atmospheric CO2 in the right (East?) side of Antarctica.That is why only one side of Antarctica is melting.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/AntarcticVolcanoes2.jpg
co2islife.
The melting is from a warming ocean and rising sea level. Glaciers in both east and west Antarctica are effected.
“The melting is from a warming ocean and rising sea level. Glaciers in both east and west Antarctica are effected.”
Really?
Antarctic Sea Ice Reaches New Record Maximum
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/AntarcticVolcanoes2.jpg
Sea level? Really?
Sea level from UC. Yes, those increases are in mm.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2015_rel2/sl_ns_global.png
BTW, if we are warming at an increasing rate, sea level would be increasing at an increasing rate. It isn’t.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2015_rel2/sl_ns_global.png
NASA-Funded Group Doctors Sea Level Data
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2011/05/11/nasa-funded-group-doctors-sea-level-data/
Looks like the ice loss is limited to the Western Side of Antarctica. Sorry, you seem to be wrong on all points.
http://www.dw.com/image/0,,17869570_401,00.png
[Bad link: http://www.dw.com/image/0,17869570_401,00.png also fails .mod]
West Antarctic ice sheet collapse unstoppable
http://www.dw.com/en/west-antarctic-ice-sheet-collapse-unstoppable/a-17632087
Climate change risk to icy East Antarctica
Is Antarctica really safe from climate change? A new study suggests even the icy east of the frozen continent could be at risk, with consequences for global sea levels. Scientists say the changes could be irreversible…Only the huge icy vastness of Eastern Antarctica still appeared to be safe from the perils of a warming climate.
http://www.dw.com/en/climate-change-risk-to-icy-east-antarctica/a-17613490
Sorry, my previous post had some wrong links in it:
“The melting is from a warming ocean and rising sea level. Glaciers in both east and west Antarctica are effected.”
Really? Not according to NASA
Antarctic Sea Ice Reaches New Record Maximum
https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reaches-new-record-maximum
The melt does seem to be limited to the West side:
http://www.dw.com/en/greenland-ice-melting-at-record-speed/a-17869513
If this link doesn’t work, see the article above.
http://www.dw.com/image/0,,17869570_403,00.png
co2islife.
What is with the Gish Gallop? You would not be trying to fool people would you? It is not polite to hold people in such contempt that you think it is OK to try and trick them.
Sea ice extent might be increasing in parts, but so what? Sea ice extent is seasonal. I was referring to glaciers.
Yes, the sea level is increasing at around 3.3 mm/year. Or around 8 inches in the last century or so. This with the warming oceans is enough to undermine the ends of the glaciers. And your sea level change chart does indeed show acceleration.
Your link to the Antarctic elevations chart demonstrates… nothing.
“… the 0.3 watts/sq meter it contributes isn’t ANYTHING close to the ‘about two-tenths of a Watt per square meter’ forcing measured from CO2 department.”
That’s because it’s a different type of heat — it doesn’t get amplified by water vapour.
(do I really need to add the /sarc ?)
The article makes a case for global warming alarmism.
“When you add the effects of global warming, things can start to change quickly,” he said.
Looks like they found the missing heat…
Once again, this article highlights how the Climate “Scientists” have been given enough rope (funded intended to produce a predetermined result) to hang themselves. They seem to think that the political winds will never change so they can perpetrate this fraud on the unsuspecting and trusting tax paying public. Anyone concerned with the integrity of Academia, the integrity of real science, the integrity of the Media and the integrity of our Government should be highly concerned that garbage reports like this are accepted as quality scientific research and conclusions funded by the American tax payer.
President Obama accepts this garbage as gospel.
The EPA not only overlooks the obvious flaws in this research, it actively promotes its usage in job killing regulations.
NASA, the organization that put a man on the moon has the most to lose. They have gone from the most respected applied scientific organizations in the world to an accomplice in one of the greatest hoaxes in scientific history. If we can’t trust NASA who can we trust? The IRS? Ooops, sorry, just had to throw that on in.
The 1st Amendment created a protected Media so they could act as a government watch dog. They are working with the government support policies that are sure to result in government tyranny…just ask an unemployed coal miner, or anyone threaten with prosecution for being a “denier.”
We are allowing these climate “scientists” to return us to the Dark Ages, where real science no longer matters. We are repeating the mistakes of Lysenkoism.
Our already failing public schools are also pushing this garbage on our children, so more minds are robbed of a real education in science.
Bottom line, this fraud is so vast and it undermines the most important institutions of our social fabric, that it threaten to destroy the trust in the institutions that are required ton hold us together. This is Watergate and the Tobacco fiasco on steroids. I can’t think of anything more damaging to the world than the politicization of science. Lysencoism and Eugenics resulted in the lose of countless millions of lives. Do these climate “scientists” really want to take us down that path? Should we just sit back and let them destroy the credibility, integrity and public trust in Government, Education and the Media?
Once again, we need to be calling for Congressional hearings and force these researchers to explain how CO2 can have such a focused localized affect and effect. How can CO2 warm the oceans. How can CO2 only cause ice loss on one side of Antarctica, the side with volcano.
We have replaced the watch dogs of society with a fox and put it in charge of guarding the hen house. There is no way for this situation to end well. Unless the Mathematics, Statistics, Engineering, Economics, and Physics departments start to speak up, the credibility of everyone in academia will be ruined. Their silence will be used as an admission of guilt once this hoax is finally exposed, and everyone’s funding will be threatened, not just the Climate “Scientists.” When this ship goes down, it will take everyone in Academia down with it.
Time to wake up Academia, the only thing evil needs to take root in society is for good man to do nothing. Are there no good men left in Academia? Once again, a simple stepwise regression model would never select CO2 as a significant variable, and all the IPCC models have been proven wrong. How much more evidence of a fraud do you need?
http://www.cfact.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/spencer-models-epic-fail2-628×353.jpg