I thought I’d take a moment from my R&R to write about all the hullabaloo surrounding the calving of the large iceberg off the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica. First, a few of the headlines:
LA Times: After Antarctica sheds a trillion-ton block of ice, the world asks: Now what?
The Grauniad: Iceberg twice size of Luxembourg breaks off Antarctic ice shelf
Each of these stories has dire warnings in it about warming and climate change, I found this quote from NYT to be most telling:
Talk to scientists who have worked in the Arctic, Antarctic or the world’s glacial zones for decades, and what they keep coming back to is that they have witnessed
monumental physical changes in these once-frozen regions within their professional lifetimes.
So what? There weren’t any “Arctic or Antarctic scientists” a mere half-decade ago, and bases weren’t even established until World War II followed by a hectic post-war expansion:
Bases were established during February (1944) near the abandoned Norwegian whaling station on Deception Island, where the Union Flag was hoisted in place of Argentine flags, and at Port Lockroy (on February 11) on the coast of Graham Land. A further base was founded at Hope Bay on February 13, 1945, after a failed attempt to unload stores on February 7, 1944. These bases were the first ever to be constructed on the mainland Antarctica.[10]
The Operation provoked a massive expansion in international activity after the war. Chile organized its First Chilean Antarctic Expedition in 1947–48. Among other accomplishments, it brought the Chilean president Gabriel González Videla to personally inaugurate one of its bases, thereby becoming the first head of state to set foot on the continent.[11] Signy Research Station (UK) was established in 1947, Australia’s Mawson Station in 1954, Dumont d’Urville Station was the first French station in 1956. In the same year McMurdo Station was built by the United States and the Mirny Station was established by the Soviet Union.
And, our record of observing Antarctica by satellite only extends back to 1979, as shown by this graph from NASA up to March 2017:
So basically, we’ve got about the length of a scientific career’s worth of observing actual data from Antarctica, and from NYT, we get history lessons:
The ice shelf has been floating in the frigid waters on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula for at least 10,000 years.
OK, so what was there before? No Antarctic ice shelf due to a warmer climate then?
How many icebergs the size of Delaware or Luxemborg (neither of which existed 10k years ago) broke off in that time that we never observed? They don’t know.
Just because we can see changes happening on the most remote region of our planet in exquisite detail for the first time in the history of mankind doesn’t necessarily mean those changes are unprecedented. The media has this odd viewpoint that Earth’s processes act over human lifetimes, but in reality they act over millennia.
I can’t get too worked up about this, even though the usual suspects are. Back to R&R, Ta – Anthony
P.S. Be sure to read the quote in my bold below, from Swansea’s Dr Martin O’Leary.
The 1 trillion tonne iceberg
Larsen C Ice Shelf rift finally breaks through
SWANSEA UNIVERSITY
July 12, 2017 – A one trillion tonne iceberg – one of the biggest ever recorded — has calved away from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica, after a rift in the ice, monitored by the Swansea University-led MIDAS project, finally completed its path through the ice.
The calving occurred sometime between Monday 10th July and Wednesday 12th July, when a 5,800 square km section of Larsen C finally broke away.
The final breakthrough was detected in data from NASA’s Aqua MODIS satellite instrument, which images in the thermal infrared at a resolution of 1km.
- The iceberg, which is likely to be named A68, weighs more than a trillion tonnes.
- Its volume is twice that of Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes.
The iceberg weighs more than a trillion tonnes (1,000,000,000,000 metric tonnes), but it was already floating before it calved away so has no immediate impact on sea level. The calving of this iceberg leaves the Larsen C Ice Shelf reduced in area by more than 12%, and the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula changed forever.
The development of the rift over the last year was monitored using data from the European Space Agency Sentinel-1 satellites — part of the European Copernicus Space Component. Sentinel-1 is a radar imaging system capable of acquiring images regardless of cloud cover, and throughout the current winter period of polar darkness. The detachment of the iceberg was first revealed in a thermal infrared image from NASA’s MODIS instrument, which is also able to acquire data in the Antarctic winter when cloud cover permits.
Although the remaining ice shelf will continue naturally to regrow, Swansea researchers have previously shown that the new configuration is potentially less stable than it was prior to the rift. There is a risk that Larsen C may eventually follow the example of its neighbour, Larsen B, which disintegrated in 2002 following a similar rift-induced calving event in 1995.
Professor Adrian Luckman of Swansea University, lead investigator of the MIDAS project, said:
“We have been anticipating this event for months, and have been surprised how long it took for the rift to break through the final few kilometres of ice. We will continue to monitor both the impact of this calving event on the Larsen C Ice Shelf, and the fate of this huge iceberg.
The iceberg is one of the largest recorded and its future progress is difficult to predict. It may remain in one piece but is more likely to break into fragments. Some of the ice may remain in the area for decades, while parts of the iceberg may drift north into warmer waters.
The recent development in satellite systems such as Sentinel-1 and MODIS has vastly improved our ability to monitor events such as this.”
The Larsen C Ice Shelf, which has a thickness of between 200 and 600 metres, floats on the ocean at the edge of The Antarctic Peninsula, holding back the flow of glaciers that feed into it.
Researchers from the MIDAS Project have been monitoring the rift in Larsen C for many years, following the collapse of the Larsen A ice shelf in 1995 and the sudden break-up of the Larsen B shelf in 2002. They reported rapid advances of the rift in January, May and June, which increased its length to over 200 km and left the iceberg hanging on by a thread of ice just 4.5 km (2.8 miles) wide.
The team monitored the earlier development of the rift using a technique called satellite radar interferometry (SRI) applied to ESA Sentinel-1 images. While the rift is only visible in radar images when it is more than 50m wide, by combining pairs of images, SRI allows the impact of very small changes in ice shelf geometry to be detected, and the rift tip to be monitored precisely.
Dr Martin O’Leary, a Swansea University glaciologist and member of the MIDAS project team, said of the recent calving:
“Although this is a natural event, and we’re not aware of any link to human-induced climate change, this puts the ice shelf in a very vulnerable position. This is the furthest back that the ice front has been in recorded history. We’re going to be watching very carefully for signs that the rest of the shelf is becoming unstable.”
Professor Adrian Luckman of Swansea University added:
“In the ensuing months and years, the ice shelf could either gradually regrow, or may suffer further calving events which may eventually lead to collapse – opinions in the scientific community are divided. Our models say it will be less stable, but any future collapse remains years or decades away.”
Whilst this new iceberg will not immediately raise sea levels, if the shelf loses much more of its area, it could result in glaciers that flow off the land behind speeding up their passage towards the ocean. This non-floating ice would have an eventual impact on sea levels, but only at a very modest rate.
###
Massive iceberg breaks off from Antarctica
NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER
An iceberg about the size of the state of Delaware split off from Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf sometime between July 10 and July 12. The calving of the massive new iceberg was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA’s Aqua satellite, and confirmed by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite instrument on the joint NASA/NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi-NPP) satellite. The final breakage was first reported by Project Midas, an Antarctic research project based in the United Kingdom.
Larsen C, a floating platform of glacial ice on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula, is the fourth largest ice shelf ringing Earth’s southernmost continent. In 2014, a crack that had been slowly growing into the ice shelf for decades suddenly started to spread northwards, creating the nascent iceberg. Now that the close to 2,240 square-mile (5,800 square kilometers) chunk of ice has broken away, the Larsen C shelf area has shrunk by approximately 10 percent.
“The interesting thing is what happens next, how the remaining ice shelf responds,” said Kelly Brunt, a glaciologist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the University of Maryland in College Park. “Will the ice shelf weaken? Or possibly collapse, like its neighbors Larsen A and B? Will the glaciers behind the ice shelf accelerate and have a direct contribution to sea level rise? Or is this just a normal calving event?”
Ice shelves fringe 75 percent of the Antarctic ice sheet. One way to assess the health of ice sheets is to look at their balance: when an ice sheet is in balance, the ice gained through snowfall equals the ice lost through melting and iceberg calving. Even relatively large calving events, where tabular ice chunks the size of Manhattan or bigger calve from the seaward front of the shelf, can be considered normal if the ice sheet is in overall balance. But sometimes ice sheets destabilize, either through the loss of a particularly big iceberg or through disintegration of an ice shelf, such as that of the Larsen A Ice Shelf in 1995 and the Larsen B Ice Shelf in 2002. When floating ice shelves disintegrate, they reduce the resistance to glacial flow and thus allow the grounded glaciers they were buttressing to significantly dump more ice into the ocean, raising sea levels.
Scientists have monitored the progression of the rift throughout the last year was using data from the European Space Agency Sentinel-1 satellites and thermal imagery from NASA’s Landsat 8 spacecraft. Over the next months and years, researchers will monitor the response of Larsen C, and the glaciers that flow into it, through the use of satellite imagery, airborne surveys, automated geophysical instruments and associated field work.
In the case of this rift, scientists were worried about the possible loss of a pinning point that helped keep Larsen C stable. In a shallow part of the sea floor underneath the ice shelf, a bedrock protrusion, named the Bawden Ice Rise, has served as an anchor point for the floating shelf for many decades. Ultimately, the rift stopped short of separating from the protrusion.
“The remaining 90 percent of the ice shelf continues to be held in place by two pinning points: the Bawden Ice Rise to the north of the rift and the Gipps Ice Rise to the south,” said Chris Shuman, a glaciologist with Goddard and the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. “So I just don’t see any near-term signs that this calving event is going to lead to the collapse of the Larsen C ice shelf. But we will be watching closely for signs of further changes across the area.”
The first available images of Larsen C are airborne photographs from the 1960s and an image from a US satellite captured in 1963. The rift that has produced the new iceberg was already identifiable in those pictures, along with a dozen other fractures. The crack remained dormant for decades, stuck in a section of the ice shelf called a suture zone, an area where glaciers flowing into the ice shelf come together. Suture zones are complex and more heterogeneous than the rest of the ice shelf, containing ice with different properties and mechanical strengths, and therefore play an important role in controlling the rate at which rifts grow. In 2014, however, this particular crack started to rapidly grow and traverse the suture zones, leaving scientists perplexed.
“We don’t currently know what changed in 2014 that allowed this rift to push through the suture zone and propagate into the main body of the ice shelf,” said Dan McGrath, a glaciologist at Colorado State University who has been studying the Larsen C ice shelf since 2008.
McGrath said the growth of the crack, given our current understanding, is not directly linked to climate change.
“The Antarctic Peninsula has been one of the fastest warming places on the planet throughout the latter half of the 20th century. This warming has driven really profound environmental changes, including the collapse of Larsen A and B,” McGrath said. “But with the rift on Larsen C, we haven’t made a direct connection with the warming climate. Still, there are definitely mechanisms by which this rift could be linked to climate change, most notably through warmer ocean waters eating away at the base of the shelf.”
While the crack was growing, scientists had a hard time predicting when the nascent iceberg would break away. It’s difficult because there are not enough measurements available on either the forces acting on the rift or the composition of the ice shelf. Further, other poorly observed external factors, such as temperatures, winds, waves and ocean currents, might play an important role in rift growth. Still, this event has provided an important opportunity for researchers to study how ice shelves fracture, with important implications for other ice shelves.
The U.S. National Ice Center will monitor the trajectory of the new iceberg, which is likely to be named A-68. The currents around Antarctica generally dictate the path that the icebergs follow. In this case, the new berg is likely to follow a similar path to the icebergs produced by the collapse of Larsen B: north along the coast of the Peninsula, then northeast into the South Atlantic.
“It’s very unlikely it will cause any trouble for navigation,” Brunt said.
###
A lot of subtle double-speak going on from the usual suspects. They ALL know this is a perfectly normal event yet slyly allude to some sort of human influence, even if they don’t specifically say so. It’s there for all to see. If they can’t be unambiguously honest about this incident – and they’ve shown they can’t, what hope is there that they’ll clean up their act for the future? I’d say about zero. Sad.
The Grauniad are pretty explicit in laying the blame on CAGW
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/jun/12/the-larsen-c-ice-shelf-collapse-hammers-home-the-reality-of-climate-change
Whereas the Independent are more crafty and lead with a screaming doomsday CAGW headline and say nothing at all incriminating in the article text http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/antarctic-donald-trump-global-warming-paris-agreement-delaware-size-iceberg-climate-change-decision-a7766456.html
The single fact that the Guardian disallows free and open debate in their comment sections tells the astute reader all they need to know about the Guardian’s veracity and intent.
Could we please have an equivalent level of reporting about the recent building of snow levels on Greenland.
We don’t talk about increases or mass balances … only loss & calving
This is a good time to note there is cyclic warming, in all cases followed by cyclic cooling in the paleo record, both hemispheres same periodicity for the cycles, both hemispheres. Of course the past warming cycles were not caused by changes in atmospheric CO2.
Question: Does the Current Global Warming Signal Reflect a Recurrent Natural Cycle?
Answer: Yes
The temperature analysis used for the paper “Does the Current Global Warming Signal Reflect a Recurrent Natural Cycle” is a study of ice cores from the Antarctic Peninsula.
The finding of that paper is that there has been 242 warming events, on the Antarctic Peninsula in the last 240,000 years. It also notes this particular warming event is not unusual in rate of warming and amount of warming. It also notes that warming and cooling events both hemisphere have the same periodicity which supports the assertion that the have the same cause.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/davis-and-taylor-wuwt-submission.pdf
I see a tremendous opportunity here. Some public-spirited nation should sponsor an Experimental Research Station right on this huge lump of ice! Instruments could record how it reacts to finding the open sea, what stresses might cause it to fracture, how the currents guide it, whether the water in front of it cools when it passes over, and a host of other things. Someone could even plant a colony of penguins on it (or, if one is already there, see how it fares). Someone could even transplant a few lucky polar bears there to see if they like it or perhaps become disoriented because the sun is in the wrong half of the sky. The biggest danger I see (besides waste of money) is that the research station itself could influence the iceberg, perhaps even stimulating it to split underneath it, leaving part of the station on each part of the newly-split berg.
Any guesses as to how penguins ended up in the Northern Hemisphere, on one of the Galapagos Islands?
They rode in on an iceberg.
Apart from the fact that most of the Galapagos Islands are in the Southern Hemisphere, (and see below), you could ask the same question of any Species or Order of animals, e.g. polar bears. It’s just the way things evolved.
According to this site:
https://seaworld.org/en/animal-info/animal-infobooks/penguin/scientific-classification
“To date, the discovery of all penguin fossil fragments has been limited to the Southern Hemisphere. Records show that prehistoric penguins were found within the range of present-day penguins. ”
But I believe that there have birds in the NH which were the equivalent of penguins and I don’t exactly see how you could be absolutely know something was, (or was not) a penguin, from fossils.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galapagos_penguin
In a case of penguin vs polar bear, my money is on the bear. More intriguing is why there are no Polar Bears in Antarctica. I suspect it has to do with a lack of nearby land – it’s not particularly hospitable for terrestrial mammals.
I don’t know! A gang of unruly Penguins could give a Polar Bear quite the smacking about. They might lose a couple of paesans, in the end they can drown his a$$, since we all know Polar Bears CAN’T SWIM. 😉
This website states:
“However, all known species of penguins live naturally in the southern hemisphere.”
http://www.penguins-world.com/where-do-penguins-live/
Although the WWF agrees with Wikipedia:
https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/galapagos-penguin#
Here is a map of the Galapagos Islands:
http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/samerica/galap.htm
According to the distribution map on Wikipedia, a few may live just inside the NH but I think they
are effectively a SH species.
It might be more accurate to say they live on the Equator.
Actually had a couple of people yesterday proclaim that this melting will raise sea level. Being at the bar I did the glass of water and ice demonstration. They totally did not expect result. Gave them a short list of places on the web where they can get information other than what the stuporgeniuses on TV hand out. Gots to take opportunity where you find it!
Google Timelapse of the area in question. From 1984 to 2016, but it appears the animation only really starts in the year 2000. So this is an animation from 2000 to 2016 or just 16 years of the ice-sheet flow.
The ice-flow here is very rapid. It has literally moved out to sea at least 8 kms over those 16 years or 0.5 km/year.
There is an outcropping under the ice-sheet here which bulges the sheet up and causing large cracks to form with the rapid flow. There are at least 8 cracks coming in behind this last crack/ice-berg.
Given the distance from where the cracks start forming to where the current crack/ice-berg is now, the scale says it has moved 30 kms out to sea from where it started. At 0.5 kms per year, this means that this crack that made this berg was first formed about 60 years ago. Furthermore, there is a major crack every 5 to 8 kms which means this ice-shelf will send a berg out to sea every 10 to 16 years. Big farkin’ deal.
Have a look. Animated from 2000 to 2016.
https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/#v=-68.26262,-62.63021,7.886,latLng&t=0.42
Even furthermore, this is an extreme zoom-in for where the cracks actually to form.
One can see there is an outcropping of rock which sticks above the ice-sheet here. The ice-flow is moving very rapidly past it here from the interior ice-sheets and the flow is stripping material off the out-cropping. This is where the cracks start. Google Timelapse again.
https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/#v=-68.46074,-62.75405,9.888,latLng&t=3.24
Last April, a geologist noticed from sat pictures that it almost looked like there was a volcanic ash-fall from this out-cropping. But it is not volcanic ash, but it is actually material from the outcropping getting dragged along by the rapid flow of the Larsen ice-shelf. Satellite processing gave a false impression.
So, NOT A VOLCANO – don’t get carried away – but this is exactly where these ice-berg cracks start to form.
It seems that seismic activity helps in breaking the ice.
Bill,
Is that an IR image in the bottom right? If so, it would appear to show heat (red) from a volvanic event. I could be wrong but, if it is not IR I don’t know what it represents.
Ray
Ray, yes, the bottom right image is IR. But then, it is a dark out-cropping in the sunshine on a white ice-sheet that has Albedo of 80%. It is naturally going to have higher IR than the ice-sheet and depending on the processing done, would show up as an outlier.
Current temperature over Antarctica and sea ice condition.
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/clisys/STRAT/gif/jikei_tep_sh.gif
http://images.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/TLT_v40/plots/RSS_TS_channel_TLT_Southern%20Polar_Land_And_Sea_v04_0.short.png
In case you wanted to see Al Gore’s reaction: https://twitter.com/algore/status/885117450093768704
Hey Al! What do you call it when a mama cow has a baby cow?
Uh, “calving”?
No. “Cattle change!”
Hey Al! What do you call it when a glacier keeps growing to infinity and never calves?
Uh, a low-carbon, stable climate?
No. Impossible! It’s impossible, Al! It’s called ‘physics’!!
OK. So we have a trillion ton mass of ice cantilevered off the edge of a continent. If this doesn’t eventually break off, something is wrong with physics.
Any good way to putter this iceberg to an oil-rich desert country?
Areas around the icebergs are an excellent environment for the development of marine life.
Here is Canada the usual fake news outlets, CBC, CTV, Global the talking heads breathlessly reported this event throwing in”” climate change. Some unidentified scientist was even quoted attributing it to “climate change”
It was fascinating to watch the Weather Channel interview (I believe just yesterday) with a scientist presented as an expert on Antartica. I heard not one word from him that this was anything other than a natural, recurring event, though the interviewer seemed to want to press him to say that this was unusual.
That was a first for the Weather Channel.
Progress, maybe…..
Here’s a whopper back in 1956.
https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/science/cold-science/1956-big-berg.htm
Tony Heller points this out on his recent posted video.
https://realclimatescience.com/2017/07/new-video-fake-news-about-antarctic-icebergs/
A link to the 31000 square km iceberg that the navy icebreaker Glacier observed in 1956. https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/weather/resources/coldscience/2005-01-20-1956-antarctic-iceberg_x.htm
This was probably a “natural event”:-)
When I heard about this the first thing I thought was, “I wonder how many times this happened before 1900 and we knew nothing about it.”
Wintertime in Antarctica. Not exactly Springtime in Paris.
This most interesting aspect of this story is I learned that Delaware is twice the size of Luxembourg.
Wondering how many Monacos would it be.
The Swansea press release said, “The Larsen C Ice Shelf, which has a thickness of between 200 and 600 metres, floats on the ocean at the edge of The Antarctic Peninsula, HOLDING BACK THE FLOW OF GLACIERS THAT FEED INTO IT.”
NASA similarly claimed, “When floating ice shelves disintegrate, THEY REDUCE THE RESISTANCE TO GLACIAL FLOW and thus allow the grounded glaciers they were buttressing to significantly dump more ice into the ocean, raising sea levels.”
I question the idea that the floating shelf ice provides any significant buttressing effect. The major impediment to forward motion of a glacier is the friction with the bedrock under it. In fact, the ice moves more rapidly some distance above the ground because it takes less energy to shear or plastically deform the ice than to scrape across the bedrock, particularly if the bedrock surface is irregular, in which case upward shearing can take place as the ice moves over ridges. Once the ice leaves land, and starts floating, there is a significant decrease in experienced friction for the floating portion.
Newton’s First Law says that an object in motion (even slow motion!) tends to remain in motion unless acted upon by some outside force. The water-drag experienced by the floating ice is negligible compared to what it experienced when grounded. Therefore, I would expect that there is negligible buttressing exerted by the floating ice. An object that size would require a tremendous force acting on it to accelerate it (F=MA). However, no force would be required to maintain the speed of the glacier from which it was ‘born.’ The fact that a large tension crack was present, and not forced closed by the moving glacier behind it, strongly suggests that there is no significant resistance offered to the glacier as a result of the inertia of the ice shelf.
I think that the forecasts for acceleration of the glaciers on land is, as typical, quite exaggerated.
Yet the rather smaller Deception Island, in the South Shetland archipelago, is responsible for the largest known eruption in the Antarctic area.
This horseshoe-shaped cauldron-like structure, or caldera, was produced more than 10,000 years ago by an explosive eruption that scattered more than 30km³ of molten rock. The result is an enclosed welcoming bay called Port Foster.
Deception was officially discovered by the British sealing captain William Smith in 1820 and was subsequently used for purposes such as seal hunting and whaling before finding its modern calling as a site for science and tourism. Maybe because you cannot see most of the volcano above the sea, tourists rarely appreciate its hidden destructive potential.
The big blunder
Claimed in the past by the UK, Chile and Argentina, it provides a unique enclosed environment in which to monitor a “volcano under the ice”. All three of those aforementioned countries financed observatories there in the 1960s (Spain added its own in 2000).
Yet two consecutive volcanic eruptions in 1967 and 1969 went unpredicted – remarkable failures in the history of volcano monitoring. Only the Argentinian and the Spanish observatories still exist.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2015-04-antarctic-volcano-doesnt.html#jCp
Larsen C has a bunch of cracks. All ice shelves do. This particular crack has been around since at least the 1960s. The unusual part is that in 2014, this crack — and only this crack — started growing in spurts. Why?
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/16/509565462/an-ice-shelf-is-cracking-in-antarctica-but-not-for-the-reason-you-think
Does Al Gore reside on Deception Island?
Hummm, wonder why they did not compare it to B-15 from 2000 which was nearly twice the size of this one?
Are these ice shelfs a result of the snow compaction pushing off land as glaciers?
Wrote about this in essay Tipping Points. Snow compacts to ice forming ice sheets. Where portions move downhill they can form traditional glaciers as along the Antarctic peninsula or the Amundesen Embayment, which hosts Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers. If those slide into the sea they can either be grounded (closer to shore) or ungrounded (further out). The ungrounded portion is an ice shelf. Larsen C (small), Ronn/Fitchner (large) and Ross (very large) are both.
Converting the stated mass to volume gives about 1000 cubic kilometers.
The volume of Earth’s ocean is about 1.33E9 cubic kilometers within about 1 percent.
The new berg is less than one ppm of the Earth’s ocean, and melting will result in zero volume change.
Also, the process of melting will absorb energy from the surroundings by about 334 kilojoules per kilogram.
1E12 tonnes is 1E15 kilograms, so 334E15 kilojoules will be removed from the ocean.
Mass of ocean is 1.4E21 kilograms with a specific heat of 4000 kilojoules per kilogram per degree.
So oceanic specific heat is 5600E21 kilojoules per degree.
Now, 334E15 divided by 5600E21 is 5.9E-8
So if the LarsenC berg completely melts it will cause the Earth’s ocean to cool by 0.00000006 degrees
Run that through a model and stoke some real alarm.
bw,
You said, “The new berg is less than one ppm of the Earth’s ocean, and melting will result in zero volume change.” You could have saved yourself some calculating time. Archimedes’ Principle implies that a floating object displaces a volume of water whose weight is equal to the weight of the object. That is, when the ice is converted to water, the water’s volume will be EXACTLY equal to the volume of water the ice is currently displacing.
http://www.physics.weber.edu/carroll/Archimedes/principle.htm
Regarding the cooling effect, it would be greater than what you stated by virtue of the fact that, being freshwater, it is a bit lighter, so tends to stay more at the surface, and in terms of climate, it is more the SST’s we are concerned with.
Meh…..
Earthquake 3D Live Seismic Stream 48 hours global activity
https://youtu.be/o9_7zAyT1gM
“The Grauniad: Iceberg twice size of Luxembourg ….”. I interpret this as implying that the iceberg isn’t even as big as Wales.
Yes, I thought that Wales was the standard unit for calved icebergs. . .
How many centiWales is Luxembourg?
“The iceberg … was already floating before it calved away so has no immediate impact on sea level.”
The inclusion of the word “immediate” here is fraud pure and simple, holding out to the ignorant the possibility that the iceberg might eventually cause sea levels to rise (as it melts perhaps?) where no such possibility exists.