[First paragraph abridged -cr:
A new model… suggests that… may be… could eventually… sea level rise.]
CREDIT: COURTESY OF ANDY THOMPSON
A new model developed by Caltech and JPL researchers suggests that Antarctica’s ice shelves may be melting at an accelerated rate, which could eventually contribute to more rapid sea level rise. The model accounts for an often-overlooked narrow ocean current along the Antarctic coast and simulates how rapidly flowing freshwater, melted from the ice shelves, can trap dense warm ocean water at the base of the ice, causing it to warm and melt even more.
The study was conducted in the laboratory of Andy Thompson, professor of environmental science and engineering, and appears in the journal Science Advances on August 12.
Ice shelves are outcroppings of the Antarctic ice sheet, found where the ice juts out from land and floats on top of the ocean. The shelves, which are each several hundred meters thick, act as a protective buffer for the mainland ice, keeping the whole ice sheet from flowing into the ocean (which would dramatically raise global sea levels). However, a warming atmosphere and warming oceans caused by climate change are increasing the speed at which these ice shelves are melting, threatening their ability to hold back the flow of the ice sheet into the ocean.
“If this mechanism that we’ve been studying is active in the real world, it may mean that ice shelf melt rates are 20 to 40 percent higher than the predictions in global climate models, which typically cannot simulate these strong currents near the Antarctic coast,” Thompson says.
In this study, led by senior research scientist Mar Flexas, the researchers focused on one area of Antarctica: the West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP). Antarctica is roughly shaped like a disk, except where the WAP protrudes out of the high polar latitudes and into lower, warmer latitudes. It is here that Antarctica sees the most dramatic changes due to climate change. The team has previously deployed autonomous vehicles in this region, and scientists have used data from instrumented elephant seals to measure temperature and salinity in the water and ice.
The team’s model takes into account the narrow Antarctic Coastal Current that runs counterclockwise around the entire Antarctic continent, a current which many climate models do not include because it is so small.
“Large global climate models don’t include this coastal current, because it’s very narrow—only about 20 kilometers wide, while most climate models only capture currents that are 100 kilometers across or larger,” Flexas explains. “So, there is a potential for those models to not represent future melt rates very accurately.”
The model illustrates how freshwater that melts from ice at the WAP is carried by the coastal current and transported around the continent. The less-dense freshwater moves along quickly near the surface of the ocean and traps relatively warm ocean saltwater against the underside of the ice shelves. This then causes the ice shelves to melt from below. In this way, increased meltwater at the WAP can propagate climate warming via the Coastal Current, which in turn can also escalate melting even at West Antarctic ice shelves thousands of kilometers away from the peninsula. This remote warming mechanism may be part of the reason that the loss of volume from West Antarctic ice shelves has accelerated in recent decades.
“There are aspects of the climate system that we are still discovering,” Thompson says. “As we’ve made progress in our ability to model interactions between the ocean, ice shelves, and atmosphere, we’re able to make more accurate predictions with better constraints on uncertainty. We may need to revisit some of the predictions of sea level rise in the next decades or century—that’s work that we’ll do going forward.”
The paper is titled “Antarctic Peninsula warming triggers enhanced basal melt rates throughout West Antarctica.” In addition to Flexas and Thompson, additional coauthors are Michael Schodlok and Hong Zhang of JPL, and Kevin Speer of Florida State University. Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation, the NASA Physical Oceanography program and Cryospheric Sciences program, NASA’s Internal Research and Technology Development program (Earth 2050 project), JPL, and Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
JOURNAL
Science Advances
DOI
ARTICLE TITLE
Antarctic Peninsula warming triggers enhanced basal melt rates throughout West Antarctica
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
12-Aug-2022
It’s the attack of the “could be” and “we thought” again. The less informed are the target-again.
At least they are using “computer models” of the “real world”. (According to the link)
“If this mechanism that we’ve been studying is active in the real world…” Does that actually sound like they’ve been studying real world conditions?
G Mawer: “ At least they are using “computer models” of the “real world”. “
–
–
And it’s a darn good thing they do because the models of Legoland they were using weren’t all that great.
No it does not…..hence my sarcasm
“it may mean that ice shelf melt rates are 20 to 40 percent higher than the predictions in global climate models,”
And 20 to 40 percent of crap is still crap.
“Real world”, in this case means Antarctica, about which they know almost nothing real.
Not a mention of geothermal heat.
Nope they went with “rapidly flowing freshwater, melted from the ice shelves, can trap dense warm ocean water”. Even with models, it’s tough to make that assumption.
It is the will of the program designer and programmer…
It’s the will of whoever pays for the model.
Auto – not even very slightly cynical.
Realistic, perhaps ….
Actual Temperature change = natural change + man made change + error in measurements.
Errors in measurement are zero I’m told.
So where’s the graph of natural change?
For some reason the believers won’t tell me.
“I’m told… won’t tell me”
Get off your lazy, dogmatic arse and find out for yourself instead gulping down the deceptive bullshit served up to you on this website.
Here is something you can continue to ignore because you can’t be bothered attempting to refute it.
You are too stupid to realize that your unlinked unlabeled chart doesn’t show temperature values for Antarctica which means you made a fool of yourself without knowing it.
The more unhinged the comment, the more their doubt about their faith begins to surface.
Ultimately, they will turn their disenchantment, anger and violence on the ones who misled and betrayed them.
“Animal Farm” comes to mind.
Sure, as I suggest to Aden, if you’re too lazy to refute it, just ignore it.
Your chart does not show any sub surface ocean temperature data at all, which the article references. So your chart offered as substantiating evidence for the article is refuted.
Apparently, laziness is not just endemic in refutations.
Read Aden’s question.
I did. So again, where is the natural change of sub surface ocean temperature that the article mentioned and Arden was commenting on shown in your chart?
Do you often ignore the topic during conversation as a habit?
I see you can’t refute Doonman’s point.
where is the chart from?
There are other valid, legitimate reasons to ignore an argument or a statement: when it is plain stupid, for instance: in this case, the word is not “lazyness”, it is “productivity” (not wasting time reading and addressing BS).
You didn’t present anything to refute.
Just more models trying to pretend they aren’t completely broken.
You are as thick as two short planks lloydo and these fellows who call them selves researchers are not far ahead of you .
It is a well known fact that sea ice will not raise the sea level when it melts as it is floating in the water .
It is also well recorded that snow and ice is stable in the Antarctic and is not adding to sea level rise .
These people spend a lot of time and money keeping the general public worried about climate change .
There are so many predictions that have not come to pass that most logical people can see this is a scam but you lloydo are completely hooked by these con men .
I guess that makes you even more stupid for not even reading the question he asked.
I read the question, but you didn’t answer it since you posted a GLOBAL temperature chart without source, which means your claim isn’t supportable and the topic is about Antarctica which his question was referring to.
Go read the modeling construct paper before you get snotty with people like Aden who was asking a simple question.
Meanwhile that paper which you didn’t read amazingly completely ignored the ACTIVE volcanoes under or near the two prominent glaciers warmist/alarmists screams about over and over.
LOL
No, his was a general question, not specifically about Antactica, so neither was my answer.
“go read…”
Yes, he should have.
The difference between him and you is that he reads everything, while you only read what your handlers approve.
Poor Loydo, he can’t dispute the refutation so he pretends he doesn’t have to.
You posted a global chart. I guess you along with a ton of scientists think everywhere is warming the same. How stupid. Almost as bad as those who think they are warming faster then anywhere else!
Oh yeah, Jim. I’d just love to see the graph that shows everywhere warming twice as fast as everywhere else.
Now that would be an interesting graph, although probably not safe for seizure-prone people to look at. 😉
Also, the above chart is based on computer models in which they adjust it to show nothing, no warming, until they enter CO2.
The Observed line is based on temperature stations that are increasingly urban (UHI) and a huge loss of rural stations with the fall of the USSR. We warmed a bit until 1989, did nothing until 2002 and have been cooling gently every since.
The Observed line has nothing to do with reality, particularly as they have also adjusted temperature data upward, instead of correcting it downward due to UHI effects. Thus, nothing in this chart is close to real.
Ahh. A Wikipedia chart where the “observed” temperature in the 1970s is higher than the “observed” temperature in the 1930s and it somehow divines that “natural” drivers are pretty much zero over the last two centuries, except when needed in the recent past to cover what otherwise would require an uncomfortable discussion about computer models.
Maybe it’s you that needs to get off your peer-reviewed dogmatic arse. No one needs to address random charts on Wikipedia – their editors would fit in quite well with the religion editors on CNN or the BBC.
Wikipedia… sheesh. Next time it’ll be lost scrolls from the Vatican library.
“observed” temperature in the 1970s is higher than the “observed” temperature in the 1930s”
Indeed, indeed, why who needs any sources when you have pre-masticated opinions supported by vigorous arm-waving.
”Indeed, indeed, why who needs any sources when you have pre-masticated opinions supported by vigorous arm-waving.”
Just about sums you up alright.
The best you’ve got is: “no, you are”?
Is this an echo-chamber full of pre-schoolers?
Were you born a jerk or is it learned behavior? Asking for a friend.
Loydo qualifies on both counts!
Loydo, like the rest of the trolls don’t go away when refuted, they just get nastier.
echo-chamber full of pre-schoolers
Yet another example of projection.
The most severe heat waves in the U.S. in the last century occurred in the 1930s with the highest in 1936 as documented by EPA shown below with the1936 heat wave 3 to 9 times higher than all other periods during the last century. This is displayed in the diagram below with both the EPA heat wave index and absolute measured temperature during the last century provided for comparison.
Additionally NOAA U.S. temperature measurements using its accurate USCRN systems versus flawed USHCN corrupt temperature measurement system shows no increasing trend in maximum U.S. temperatures over the complete USCRN measurement utilization time period as shown below.
I intended this diagram to be in my last response.
Where did I mention the US?
If you can respond to a question about Antarctica with model output showing the entire world.
Surely he can respond to you with a chart of the US.
So the phony global temperature graph you hype applies to the entire world but is absent to temperature behavior in the U.S. How clueless can you be?
pre-masticated opinion
Now that’s projection if I ever saw it.
No serious climate scientist or even climate observer argues that the 1970s were warmer than the 1930s. This is so well accepted by all (except you apparently) that it shouldn’t even need to be discussed.
If human emissions helped drive that you ought to be thankful, the Little Ice Age was next to the coldest period in the past eight thousand years.
So your “proof” is a made up fake graph using made up fake “data” … try again
Try again? So lazy. If you didn’t like the evidence I provided, refute it by providing some yourself. And don’t make up fake quotes and attribute them to me.
It’s not evidence, it’s the result of a simulation where the models are “tuned” to give the desired result.
Nope. Observations. Stop arm-waving.
How can you graph natural warming using observations only if there is a human influence?
You can’t, you can only use a model unless you are saying the human influence is natural
Lloydo doesn’t do logical thinking so won’t get your point.
Thweeet!!
“Personal foul. Intentionally targeting the opponents head with logic.
15-yard penalty and automatic 1st down.”
😉
Are you really as stupid as your comments make you sound.
How exactly do “observations” seperate the man-made vs. natural sources of warming?
A real man would apologize, Loydo will just continue to get nastier.
If it’s based on averages, then it is no longer observations. No one can observe an average.
When are you going to read the paper?
or you are too lazy…..
Models are not data.
Poor Loydo, he gets so upset when asked to show his work.
Oops! Someone’s getting all sweary and using naughty words!
Have you been drinking too much again Lloydo?
BTW you’re graph gave me a good giggle. It’s weapons-grade twaddle.
I think that Loydo is just an angry they/them.
“weapons-grade twaddle”
Can be bothered to write garden variety twaddle but can’t be bothered to refute it. Weapons-grade echo chamber.
How old are you,please? I’m sorry to say this, but you appear to be twelve years old and badly educated at that. Where are your manners , what ever age you are.? This is actually a serious blog for those who have a scientific background not a schoolyard brawl.
I’m old enough to be your grandparent or great grandparent . so I’ve heard all your insults before.
Calm down dear!
If it’s such an echo chamber, why are you here?
You’re just in a bad mood because none of the nutty predictions you thermageddonists have made have come true. Absolutely none of them.
To a leftist, an echo-chamber is any place where the locals refuse to acknowledge the brilliance of said leftist.
Your claims that model output is superior to real world data has been refuted.
You just refuse to change your mind until your handlers give you permission.
“The Antarctic continent has not warmed in the last seven decades” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-020-00143-w
The Southern Ocean is cooling due to reducing sunlight over the region. Downward trend for 55S to 65S is 0.66C/century.
Easily verified by actual data rather than the made up stuff you are looking at.
All climate models are wrong- some worse than others but none incorporate real physics. They are utter rubbish, bearing no relationship to the physics of Earth’s climate.
I am not cherry-picking data. I know what is actually occurring with sunlight due to orbital changes and that is all anyone needs to know to understand the long term trends.
Cyclones in the Mediterranean are going to get a lot more frequent over the coming decades, centuries and millennia. The northern Sahara will begin to green again.
All northern land masses will experience warmer summers until the ice begins to accumulate again. Once the ice mountains reform, the average temperature will reduce – even in summer.
The fantasy of near zero natural climate warming since 1850 is laughable.
The fantasy of +2°C observed climate warming since 1970 is laughable.
Yeah that fairy tale graph is long since debunked. The called everything they didn’t fully understand anthropogenic.
The Antarctic peninsula is not representative of the rest of the Antarctic. It is too far north and is subject to somewhat anomalous sea currents. I prefer to study isolated met stations well removed from human interferences. Here (attached) is the temperature record for Campbell Island compiled by NIWA, one of New Zealand’s government-funded met services. Campbell Island is a remote and uninhabited Sub-Antarctic island.
The same temperature pattern is shown by other stations free from human effects.
Heu me miserum. Ubi est calefactio
Why don’t you run that chart back to 9000 years BP and then we might have something to discuss. The last 150 years is the blink of an eye and is meaningless for climate changes.
Your chief problem is that you think models that don’t represent the physics of Earth can somehow give you a controlled experiment. Your second problem is models that hold everything but CO2 constant, ignoring known and unknown natural variability, are used to say “see it’s CO2” in an exercise of circular reasoning evident to a middle schooler. Your third problem is that nobody knows what the global average temperature was in 1850, because the measurements didn’t exist for most of the planet, nor did measurements on cloud and ice albedo, and the measurements of things like temperature have an uncertainty that’s 2x the alleged trend in your graph. You can’t infill your way to certainty and without knowing what cloud and ice albedo was in 1850, you can’t even initialize your model or claim that CO2 is the driving factor in anything. The climate zealots really would be more comfortable in a monastery debating the number of angels you can fit on the head of a pin rather than pretending to do science.
The graph appears to be similar to the UCLA graph and appears to show the error bars with a difference between natural and human + natural anything between -0.4 to +1.4 C or +0.2 to +0.4C
Do you really think the climate is so stable that natural drivers only contribute +/- 0.5C (ish)?
Do you really think we know enough about our planet that we’ve captured every single variable that may or may not influence the temperature, and if so, what about the unknown unknowns?
GST graph looks quite different according to JMA:
https://www.data.jma.go.jp/gmd/kaiyou/english/long_term_sst_global/glb_warm_e.html
The equivalent panel from AR6’s Figure 3.41 (on page 507 of the WG-I report).
Your case, for Antarctica at least, isn’t as “obvious” as you are attempting to make it out to be.
Speaking of lazy and dogmatic, here comes Loydo.
The claim that we know what the natural drivers are is so stupid that only someone totally wedded to his dogma could repeat it without breaking into laughter.
What caused the last 5 warm periods since the end of the Holocene Optimum.
For that matter, what caused the Holocene Optimum and what caused it to end?
This cannot be true as the IPCC says that no more than half the current temperature rise can be linked to Man and the other half is due to natural drivers, this would mean that this chart is false without even needing to dig into it.
Had the ‘Natural Drivers’ been at close to 1.0 then you would have at least had my attention.
I have just checked the Antarctic sea ice page on this site .
The Sea ice is exactly the same today as when the graph begins in 1979.
Some one here with computer skills could post it here for lloydo and all to see .
Go have a look lloydo and then apologize for all the crap you have posted here .
This so called study that Antartic sea ice is melting is not worth the paper it is written on.
Just a comment about your fraudulent temperature graph that you posted above .
1850 was in the end of the Little Ice Age so of course the world has warmed up since then .
Also this graph does not show the heat in the 1930s which has been proven to be as warm if not warmer than at present .
This graph is a fraud and it shows that the people touting it are also frauds .
Wow, Loydo really got a burr up his backside with the threadjacking attempt. He must’ve eaten his Wheaties today.
maybe someone shit in them before he got to them
Another schoolboy? I’ll get off this site !
Bye
One more in the never ending stream of “it’s worse than we thought” claims. Meanwhile nobody is writing about the end of what was declared to be a “perm-drought” in the SW US or the increasing SMB of the Greenland ice sheet or the fact that Global ACE has been running below average for several years running, etc, etc, etc.
Oh they have – now it is “Extreme flooding events are twice as likely now due to ‘Climate Change'”
Antarctica’s Ice Shelves Could be Melting Faster Than We thought
___________________________________________________________
Antarctica is well below freezing nearly everywhere, nearly all of the time. It can’t melt. Surface melting during the few short weeks during the summer doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Any measurable loss or gain of ice is a function of how much snow fell years, decades, centuries or millennia ago, and how much of that is now calving as icebergs into the sea. Temperature and carbon dioxide don’t have anything to do with it.
Ther not talking about surface melt of ice sheets, but ice shelves melting from below.
The ice shelves are sacrificing themselves for the viability of the Great Barrier Reef.
Why, just last week we learned that the GBR’s coral cover had increased by 33% in no time at all.
I’ll cobble up a quick graph to prove the correlation. Watch this space.
Ther not talking about surface melt of ice sheets, but ice shelves melting from below
______________________________________________
Your implication is that warm water melting the glaciers at the grounding line, is a new phenomenon caused by CO2. Yes I know you didn’t say that, but that explanation can be easily found in the internet, and it doesn’t hold water, because there isn’t any supporting evidence.
“five times the average rate of retreat since the end of the last ice age”
That IS the explanation unless you can provide “supporting evidence” for something even more compelling.
Eight of the frozen continent’s 65 major ice streams had retreated by more than 410 feet per year—five times the average rate of retreat since the end of the last ice age. The grounding line of some of the glaciers emptying into the Amundsen Sea had retreated by up to 600 feet per year.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02042018/antarctica-ice-sheet-shelf-glaciers-grounding-line-receding-worst-case-sea-level-rise-risk/
“This has resulted in rapid grounding-line recession at Pine Island Glacier[8] – up to 31 km from 1992 to 2011.”
https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glacier-processes/grounding-lines/
“retreated”, “resulted”, no wretched model to be seen.
Loydo, you do realize you’re a committed natural history denier.
Help is available though for separation from cults.
Ask your local government Council about who to contact.
(Make sure it’s not one of those proclaiming a “climate emergency” though. That would be like asking for help from the inmates of the local asylum).
The advance or retreat of glaciers has everything to do with how much snow fell to form the glacier and nothing to do with variation in below freezing temperatures. Frozen is frozen.
True, but this evidence relates to ocean currents melting the floating ice shelves from below. Coincidentally shrinking the bit you’re talking about via the receding grounding line.
” …this evidence relates to ocean currents melting the floating ice shelves from below.”
_____________________________
You are claiming that ocean currents aren’t the same as they were decades or centuries ago, and that the difference is caused by an increase in atmospheric CO2. If that’s your claim then you need to show how that works.
_____________________________
“you’re talking about via the receding grounding line.”
_____________________________
No, the issue is the gain or loss of ice in Antarctica.
The claim is that the oceans have warmed by 0.003C.
Just how much extra melting is that supposed to create?
Floating ice melts contribute exactly zero to sea level rise.
“A new model developed by Caltech and JPL researchers suggests that Antarctica’s ice shelves may be melting at an accelerated rate, which could eventually contribute to more rapid sea level rise. The model accounts for an often-overlooked narrow ocean current along the Antarctic coast and simulates how rapidly flowing freshwater, melted from the ice shelves, can trap dense warm ocean water at the base of the ice, causing it to warm and melt even more.”
If we have global warming, there will higher water vapor, and will rain more, and cause lower sea level.
It doesn’t appear we are having any global warming at the moment.
We are living in Ice Age which has been going on for 33.9 million years and last
couple million year has been the coldest time of this Ice Age.
A proof {though there endless other evidence] that we in coldest time is the large amount
of desert areas on Earth.
Or the warmest time in the Holocene was when the Sahara Desert, wasn’t a desert, but instead was mostly grasslands. Which would require a lot rainfall and would add so much water to this vast region, it would lower sea levels.
Once again – the models are worse than we thought and the science is non-existent!
If you came here looking for it, thats true. Plenty of science elsewhere though, unless you’re assiduously ignoring it of course.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0179-y
Prove that change isn’t just natural. Oh yeah, you can’t.
Of course science, and climate change, is all around us.
Science without proof of the theory – actual cause as opposed to beliefs – is just a theory, or in climatology terms a (bad) model.
Loydo believes that it’s only science when it supports the Party’s current position.
“Get off your lazy, dogmatic arse and find out for yourself
instead gulping down the deceptive bullshit served up to you
on this website.”
“Plenty of science elsewhere though, unless you’re
assiduously ignoring it of course.”
Deceptive Bullshit? Assiduously ignored?
Methinks thou dost protest too much!
Real research vs models!
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/11/15/new-map-of-antarctic-geothermal-heat-suggests-steig-mann-2009-werent-measuring-global-warming/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/07/10/study-finds-surprisingly-high-geothermal-heating-beneath-west-antarctic-ice-sheet/
WUWT-
Volcanic heat source discovered under Pine Island Glacier, the poster child for Antarctic melting 6/26/18
Uh oh: Study says ‘collapsing’ Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica melting from geothermal heat, not ‘climate change’ effects
6/9/14
You might want to expand your sources outside the eco-chamber.
Antactic glacial ice shelves (including Thwaites) float, they are being melted by the ocean not the ocean floor.
You mean that volcanoes do not heat the water above them? Strange how that would work. It must be a new kind of non-convective water and downward heating volcanoes.
I suppose it could be volcanoes, if someone could show some evidence the ocean is being heated from below, rather from the surface. Like y’know, a temperature gradient with it warmer at the bottom than at the top.
That would be convincing. Somewhere in the Antarctic would probably seal the deal.
The fact that the volcanoes are there has been proven.
In addition, someone above showed a map of temperature change in and around Antarctica which showed a substantial increase in temperature in the ocean to the NE of the Antarctic Peninsula. This increase is higher than the water north or the Antarctic south of that location. It must be a localized source.
In addition, we know that Volcanoes do not heat just their direct environs, but that the magma chamber radiates heat in all directions into the surrounding rock and therefore the heat is slowly transferred into the general area, heading the bedrock and surface above.
The geothermal heat gradient has been measured. That is how the volcanic activity is inferred. How could the water not be warmed?
This is simple: where is the ocean warmer at bottom than at the top? Because that is what you’ll need if geothermal energy is melting floating ice. I’ll tell you: nowhere.
I’m guessing that Loydo was never taught about that warm water rises.
And, conversely, cold, dense surface water sinks when it is displaced by warmer water.
What something like the “Pine Island Glacier” it even survived repeated attempts to preform an exorcism on the data at Wikipedia and has it’s own little section “Subglacial volcano”.
Nah you greentards would never accept it so why waste time with real world data.
For the record there are close to 100 known volcanoes under Antarctica.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/12/scientists-discover-91-volcanos-antarctica
By George, you’ve got it! Electric kettle manufacturers have been getting it wrong for decades, the heating element should be in the lid for maximum efficiency. You draw up the patent, I’ll alert the media.
Here ya go … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raR5YgFcIQQ
The claim is that temperature sensors that are only accurate to about 0.2C have measured a temperature change of 0.003C.
That warming ocean exists only in your mind.
Lolly just admitted it is describing sea ice, not glaciers.
I’ve asked you on any number of occasions how long your record is, Griff also. You won’t answer. However, it looks from your graphs that your record goes back to 1990. Perhaps you don’t know that Earth history goes back further than that.
They can’t find any data to support the belief that ice melt is accelerating, so they write a model that proves it is happening. Who needs data, models are now how science is done.
Warming atmosphere and warming ocean, who needs empirical data they have their infallible models?
“Worse than we thought” – the essential message, no matter how expressed, that boosts a climate science paper’s odds of publication.
By now, everybody beginning a career in climate science understands this – and accepts it as a rule of his-her-its new career. It is the Great Filter.
“IF this mechanism we are studying is active in the real world…”
But there is a very simple way to find out IF—which should have already done but wasn’t. Measure the observational rate of ice shelf/ocean dissolution compared to your new model. Then apply Feynman’s dictum, paraphrased: “It doesn’t matter how pretty your theory is. If it disagrees with observation, it’s wrong!”
There were already several easy ways to have done so with respect to this theoretical narrow coastal Antarctic melting current theory and model, and several places at which observations have already been made and published: Thwaites and PIG WAIS glaciers along Amundsen Embayment, both covered in essay ‘Tipping Points’ in ebook Blowing Smoke, EAIS Totten glacier (post over at Judiths), Ross Ice shelf Andrill project (covered in ‘Tipping Points’).
These people didn’t even have to go to Antarctica to observe anything. Just read the observational literature and compare to their model before posting speculative nonsense about a ‘narrow current improving on climate model resolution’.
Bigger logical picture. Sea level rise is NOT accelerating (buts it’s gonna due to a newly discovered phenomenon?) that (unfortunately for them) must have ALREADY been failing to cause acceleration. WAP is already mostly ice shelf/ice sheet free. WAP just lost a big remaining part of Larsen B as the worlds biggest iceberg, eventually smashing up against South Georgia Island just a couple of years ago—way outside the ‘newly discovered’ narrow coastal relatively fresh current.
Ridicule is now the best response. This new paper is ridiculous on its face.
Is it normal for scientists (in any field) to come up with a model, study it, and then think about doing real world observations to see if they fit the model?
I’m no scientist, but I would have thought the first step would be to take some measurements and _then_ come up with a model that tries to fit the observations.
That is one of the few practical applications of any model, be it mental, digital, or analog.
In Climate “Science” computer models ARE considered to be evidence.
Only by modern-day alchemists who think that CO2 is the magical ‘touch stone’ that can do anything.
They are guilty of the same old ignorance of how ice flows from a Continental land mass to the oceans. They unmask their ignorance when they claim that the ice sheets could dump themselves entirely into the oceans.
What drives ice sheets is not melting underneath … gravity is the sole motive force. When land bound ice gets thicker (due to greater snowfall accumulation) it adds pressure, or “head” and thus adds motive force to the ice stream. Ice is much like liquid water – a river with a higher upstream surface elevation flows faster – on a volumetric flow rate basis – than a river with lower upstream surface elevation. That difference in head, measured in one dimensional linear distance units (meters or feet), is the motive force for all glaciers – which are simply rivers of ice.
So in the real world, a glacier that calves into the ocean more rapidly can only occur when there is MORE ice upstream in the glacier. If the glacier were actually melting away and has a shrinking mass of ice, then its rate of calving into the ocean must necessarily be slowing.
They have it exactly bass ackwards.
AH ,model , and as with all models , garbage in garbage out
So let me understand this climate models show that the earth should be far hotter than it is in reality. These jokers are telling us we need to add new input to the models guaranteed to show the problem is even worse than we thought. Now the models are going to be even further off from reality. These people are a joke.
A bunch of hot air. They have no data. But … if they would mention the 138+ volcanoes underneath western Antarctica — then their report could have some validity.
The shelves, which are each several hundred meters thick, act as a protective buffer for the mainland ice, keeping the whole ice sheet from flowing into the ocean (which would dramatically raise global sea levels).
This study disputes the so-called runaway ice cliff collapse and suggests ice cliffs will flow ductile and mitigate runaway cliff failure.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GL084183
Once again, a claim is made for which the facts are not in evidence. The article acknowledges that the continental glacier ice tongues are grounded, and are higher than the shelf ice. As I read it, wind and waves can attack the leading edge of the ice river, and doing so results in brittle failure resulting in cliffs ~90m high. When the leading edge is protected from waves by the shelf ice, cliffs of up to ~540m can be maintained.
“Antarctica’s Ice Shelves Could be Melting Faster Than We thought”
I could laugh louder as you thought 😀
“If this mechanism that we’ve been studying is active in the real world…
That is a mighty big if.
They also, might not be melting at all if the temperature is above freezing.
Love the pic but … when ice crashes into water, it’s because it is being pushed by ice flowing down hill. Melting ice doesn’t do that. As an experiment, put an ice block on a warm surface and watch it for an hour or so.
The average sunlight over the Southern Ocean is declining. The Southern Ocean is cooling; trending down at 0.66C/century.
Difficult to imagine ice melting faster when the water and air over it is cooling.
Green house gases warming is virtually non existent at the poles because of the lack of sunlight, long winters where the sun doesn’t shine.
Also infrared radiation can’t penetrate the thermal skin layer of the oceans where energy only moves out of the ocean. Sunlight only is warming the oceans.
The oceans are responsible for absorption of 90% of the top of the atmosphere imbalance. CO2 is doing nothing.
Your first sentence could only be true if the poles go to absolute zero when the sun goes down.
Nobody claims that radiation from CO2 directly warms water. CO2 warms the air. in response to that warming, the oceans have to warm in order to keep the heat transfer to the atmosphere the same.
So, how much has the mass balance been off?
https://phys.org/news/2018-01-discrepancies-satellite-global-storage.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep20716
“model” says it all. Pure unadulterated BS. Like all the rest of the climate religion’s rantings.
I’ve seen an analysis that shows what it would take to melt the Antarctic ice sheet.
It clearly demonstrates that if all the known global reserves of all fossil fuels (coal,gas, oil etc.) were extracted and burned with all that energy focussed on the Antactic ice sheet it would melt less than 3% of the sheet.
Seems like it is likely to stay put for a while yet.
Once again, an atmospheric phenomena causes warming to occur deep under water with no explanation on how this can possibly happen.
Uses the words and logic of a flimflam.
“model accounts for an often-overlooked narrow ocean current along the Antarctic coast“
Overlooked?
“and simulates how rapidly flowing freshwater“
Now, magical mysterious freshwater sources flow “rapidly”? Their model’s algorithms sounds predisposed to give you that data. Confirmation bias is an understatement here.
Yawn.
Another model showing that it’s worse than we thought. Again.
Why bother to read it?
In the fable, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”, the wolf was real, it had come before, and it eventually came again.
But everyone should have noticed by now that the climate wolf is late.
Ice floating in water will not raise the level of the water by melting.
New Computer model = new Video game.
So what?
No actual ice was melted in producing that paper.
One frequently reads such claims. However, for it to be true, there would have to be negligible friction at the ice-bedrock boundary upslope from the shoreline. In reality, the controls on all glacier movement, in all environments, are a function of the ice thickness, the micro-level rock friction (modified by water films), the macro-level friction which incorporates the sub-ice topography and the average slope of the bedrock. When the bedrock topography is quite irregular, ice either has to be pushed uphill, or if there is insufficient force, the ice has to shear over the obstructions. All this can be modeled as different kinds of friction.
Newton’s First Law states that an object in motion tends to continue in a straight line unless acted upon by another force. This is sometimes referred to as inertia. If a glacier with forward motion enters the ocean, and new ice freezes onto the leading edge, the new ice inherits the forward velocity of the glacial ice. Thus, some force will be required to slow or stop the ice glacial ice. The floating sea ice isn’t it because it has the same velocity as the glacier. Once again, the alarmists have got cause and effect backwards.
If the glacier enters water shallow enough that it is still grounded, the buoyancy reduces the bottom friction; when the ice (whatever its origin) is floating there is little ‘friction.’ (Consider the effort necessary to push a 100-lb block of ice across the rough concrete deck of a swimming pool, versus what it takes to move that block once it falls into the pool.) Then, in addition to upslope friction with the bedrock, there will be a lesser amount of friction added to that land friction controlling the overall speed. If the shelf ice, whether riding on the bottom or not, encounters a transverse bedrock ridge, or former terminal moraine, then there will be a compressive or shearing force resisting the forward motion. However, one would expect to see ice piling up and thickening, as in the ridges in the Arctic pack ice. Instead, the more obvious Antarctic features are tension cracks.
The quoted assertion at the top is over-simplified. While it provides a mental image that one can relate to, it leaves too much out to be considered to be much more than hand waving.
In the end it all comes down to this. Where is the water? We have been promised catastrophic sea level rise for decades. We have been pummeled with supposed “science” that says that the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland are melting away for decades.
And yet no catastrophic SLR! The rise continues at the moderate rate of the pre-industrial age. Manhattan is still above water. The west side hwy is still above water. The tunnels of the big dig in Boston are still dry. Venice is still there. New Orleans is still there.
SLR talks and the rest of the bull shit walks! Put up or shut up you liars.
If we take Professor Andy Thompson’s definition at its face value sic Ice shelves are outcroppings of the Antarctic ice sheet, found where the ice juts out from land and floats on top of the ocean. The shelves, which are each several hundred meters thick, act as a protective buffer for the mainland ice, keeping the whole ice sheet from flowing into the ocean (which would dramatically raise global sea levels) – it is clear that the ice shelves have already displaced their own weight in water. Therefore, melting of the ice shelf will have no result in sea level changes.
I would suggest that the researchers including Thompson get an age approximation profile of the shelf ice and the land-bound ice. Of course, the shelf ice as described by Thompson is unrelated time-wise to the permanent and continuously accreting ice cap such the area intersected by such core holes as Vostok 3 etc. Drilling to 3,200 metres (Vostok 3) is not possible unless the ice is absolutely and perfectly stable and not moving. That the permanent ice has been accumulating for close to 1 million years without a break signifies a stable climate. That is despite the 6 or so glacial periods and accompanying sea level changes that have occurred over that interval of time.
sounds like that might be what some fools used today at the adelaide advertiser to claim SA coastal waters are rising faster than other places?
pay to read;-(
Just filed this one in the climate cabinet marked, ‘It’s worse than we thought’
Fed up with this kind of demagoguery:
” Antarctica’s Ice Shelves Could be Melting Faster Than We thought ”
“Could be” OR “are“???
At each “could be” that I stumble upon, I stop reading: this is a BS signal)
What is the probability of a “could be” event? 50%? Or lower? Things are bad enough that climatology measurements often have uncertainties that are +/-50% or more of the nominal measurement. It is much worse when the sign of the value isn’t even known with any reliability and the proponent has to resort to vague probabilities such as the sun ‘could’ supernovae at any time.
“The model illustrates how freshwater that melts from ice at the WAP is carried by the coastal current and transported around the continent. The less-dense freshwater moves along quickly near the surface of the ocean and traps relatively warm ocean saltwater against the underside of the ice shelves.”
Models do not match observations so are garbage and wrong.
Since when has trapping relatively warm ocean seawater from the WAP been -2c?
Can they explain how -2c water melts the underside of the ice shelves?
This is an example from Summer back in 1998 with relatively warm ocean water between -0.6c and -2c.
I forgot to add that this coastal current will also be below the surface where the Ice shelf can go 50m+ below sea level. The temperature does get slightly warmer the further down the depth with the peak being 2c at 400m depth.
The link below using Argo-data shows selected depths of the circum-antarctic ocean. The Argo-data shows either no warming or very little warming (<0.2c) at different depths for the duration.
It never ceases to amaze me that people persist in calling these computer modelling exercises ‘studies’. They are not studies, studies use the available data to make determinations. These computer modelling exercises make guesses about what the data will look like in the future, then make guesses about what that may cause. That is not a study.
““If this mechanism that we’ve been studying is active in the real world, it may mean that ice shelf melt rates are 20 to 40 percent higher than the predictions in global climate models,”
Antarctic Sea Ice is unchanging for 50 years or so….see: https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-antarctic-sea-ice
Area of Antarctic Ice Shelves does not seem to be a metric that is recorded.
Anyone have a source for that? Antarctic Ice shelf area?
Try the following FTP site, linked to from some NSIDC webpages, which they say measure “sea ice” rather than “ice shelves” :
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/north/monthly/data/
Although the files are titled “*_extent_v3.0.csv” each header line is :
“year, mo, data-type, region, extent, area”
Note that the “./north/daily/data/” directory only contains an “Extent” column of data though.
Mark ==> Thanks — Antarctic Sea Ice Extent is fairly well documented….I am looking for actual data to back-up or refute the idea that Antarctic Ice Shelves are losing ice/getting smaller. .
This is an unclear target to aim at.
My plot of the data from the “./G02135/south/monthly/data/” files (up to the March minima, the last time I updated that particular spreadsheet).
NB : “Extent” is the solid line, “Area” is the dashed one.
Could you extract the “idea” you have in mind from the (monthly) data used to generate that graphic ?
PS : MattG’s coloured “ice shelf area” data sum to around 1 million square kilometres, while the minimum in the graph below is 1.3 (in February 1993).
I don’t think those (limited) “ice shelves” have ever melted (since 1979). They have always been seen (by satellites) as “100% ice covered”.
Mark ==> Yes, it is the area of ” those (limited) “ice shelves” have [n]ever melted (since 1979). They have always been seen (by satellites) as “100% ice covered”.” that I am looking for. Some measurement…..
The ice shelves do change area when a piece breaks off at the sea edge (calving).
There is a hypothetical that the ice shelves are “losing ice”….
An idea I had just after the “Edit” time on my previous post had expired …
If you assume the “annual minimum” value for “sea-ice extent/area” comes each year just as 100% of the “ocean” sea-ice has melted … that would mean the “extent/area” number that’s left is equal to the (coastal ?) “ice shelf extent/area” …
Tenuous I know, but the “appropriate” (???) graphic then becomes the one below :
Mark ==> I appreciate your help — that might be possible. But the Ice Shelves themselves are 100s of feet thick and sea ice is confined to a few meters — I think that minimum Antarctic sea ice is changes each year … if it were th same each year, then we could assumed that the remainder of ice over water was ice shelf.
I know this is from wikipedia but it does have the size in area of all ice shelves.
The link doesn’t seem to show the values so I have added them below.
Antarctica’s major ice shelves: Ross (472,960 km2) Filchner-Ronne (422,420 km2) Amery (62,620 km2) Larsen (48,600 km2) Riiser-Larsen (48,180 km2) Fimbul (41,060 km2) Shackleton (33,820 km2) George VI (23,880 km2) West (16,370 km2) Wilkins (13,680 km2)
Matt ==> Thank you for the effort. Getting closer. Maybe we could measure extent of ice shelves with Google Earth?
Actually, I am looking for some physically measured metric of Ice Shelves area — increasing decreasing, etc.
Appreciate the help.
Came across this paper while looking, but it’s paywalled (for me, et least).
Greene et al (2021), “Antarctic calving loss rivals ice-shelf thinning” : Link
The “Supplementary Table 1” Excel spreadsheet, in the (freely available !) “Supplementary information” section, has “per ice-shelf” (area and mass) data from 1997/2000 up to 2021.
If you can access the full paper maybe you can check whether their “Methodology” section is compatible with what your looking for …
No warming of any kind is happening in and around Antarctica as a whole. It’s slowly cooling. Downwelling of cold deep water from the continent’s margins is accelerating.
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2020/09/12/widespread-signals-of-southern-hemisphere-ocean-cooling-as-well-as-the-amoc/
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2022/01/13/cooling-in-the-deep-south/
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2022/05/27/elephant-seals-in-the-ross-sea-what-more-proof-needed-that-mwp-was-real-and-global/
It’s doom again. And not before time. We need a good dose of doom to keep us going.
“If this mechanism that we’ve been studying is active in the real world, …”
But what if it isn’t? Any evidence that the mechanism is real?
“… As of this report, Antarctic sea ice extent persists at record low levels …” (NSIDC, Aug 2022).