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Antarctic Ice Bridge Finally Breaks Off

Posted by timothy on Mon Apr 06, 2009 12:50 AM
from the invest-in-arizona-beaches dept.
Earth
GreennMann writes "An ice bridge linking a shelf of ice the size of Jamaica to two islands in Antarctica has snapped. Scientists say the collapse could mean the Wilkins Ice Shelf is on the brink of breaking away, and provides further evidence of rapid change in the region. Sited on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, the Wilkins shelf has been retreating since the 1990s. Researchers regarded the ice bridge as an important barrier, holding the remnant shelf structure in place. Its removal will allow ice to move more freely between Charcot and Latady islands, into the open ocean."
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[+] Large Ice Shelf Expected To Break From Antarctica 278 comments
MollyB sends this excerpt from CNN: "A large ice shelf is 'imminently' close to breaking away from part of the Antarctic Peninsula, scientists said Friday. Satellite images released by the European Space Agency on Friday show new cracks in the Wilkins Ice Shelf where it connects to Charcot Island, a piece of land considered part of the peninsula. The cracks are quickly expanding, the ESA said. ... The Wilkins Ice Shelf — a large mass of floating ice — would still be connected to Latady Island, which is also part of the peninsula, and Alexander Island, which is not, said professor David Vaughan, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey. ... If the ice shelf breaks away from the peninsula, it will not cause a rise in sea level because it is already floating, scientists say. Some plants and animals may have to adapt to the collapse."
Submission: The Antarctica ice bridge finally breaks off. by GreennMann (1525279)
[+] Antarctic Ice Is Growing, Not Melting Away, At Davis Station 633 comments
schwit1 writes "A report from The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research says that Antarctic ice is growing, not melting away. Ice core drilling in the fast ice off Australia's Davis Station in East Antarctica by the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-Operative Research Centre shows that last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m, its densest in 10 years. The average thickness of the ice at Davis since the 1950s is 1.67m. A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded."
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  • that's certainly one way to break the ice in a tense situation like this.

  • Blame me (Score:5, Funny)

    by DaHat (247651) on Monday April 06 2009, @12:53AM (#27472359) Homepage

    Given my SUV driving has yet to save me in a crash (I've not had one since buying it)... I'm glad to see it has contributed to something productive at least.

    • Re:Blame me (Score:5, Funny)

      by Thanshin (1188877) on Monday April 06 2009, @02:51AM (#27472977)

      Given my SUV driving has yet to save me in a crash (I've not had one since buying it)...

      Don't feel bad; maybe you've crashed multiple times against bikes and pedestrians and simply didn't notice.

    • SUVs are not safe. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2009, @02:56AM (#27472991)

      http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_01_12_a_suv.html

  • This isn't the tip of the iceberg... (Score:5, Funny)

    by creimer (824291) on Monday April 06 2009, @12:55AM (#27472369) Homepage
    Once the ice bridge falls away, scientists will find one pissed off ice troll.

  • Whew, no problem then (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ryanov (193048) on Monday April 06 2009, @01:18AM (#27472491)

    Thank god we have the average mook on Slashdot or I might have thought this were cause for concern. I guess all of the scientists who have agreed that there are man-made effects on climate are completely incorrect, but this website is the last bastion of sanity?

      • Re:Whew, no problem then (Score:5, Interesting)

        by TapeCutter (624760) * on Monday April 06 2009, @01:59AM (#27472715) Journal
        The intellectual coward has it the wrong way around. The "It's natural" red-herring is stage two of the standard psudeo-skeptical denial that comes when they can no longer deny the globe is warming to a particular audience. The next stages include, "it's good for us", "economic armageden" and "god wouldn't allow it to happen".

          • And I would say (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Sycraft-fu (314770) on Monday April 06 2009, @03:47AM (#27473223)

            That if global warming really will be a very bad thing, then our energy should be spent trying to deal with it when it happens, not prevent it. Why? Well because we are pretty sure that the Earth has been much hotter (and cooler) in the past than it is now. We are about as certain as we can be that there has been a long history of climate fluctuations. Thus it doesn't matter if the current one is natural or man made, because we are going to have to deal with one like it at some point. So that means the real focus should be how to deal with the eventuality, not how to prevent this particular one, if it is in fact preventable.

            Unless we can get the ability to control the climate such that fluctuations like that won't happen again (and I seriously doubt that) then preparation is what we need. If we spend a great deal of effort preventing this shift, only to get screwed over by another one, then no good is done. Likewise if it turns out this shift is natural and nothing we can do will prevent it, again no good is done.

            Now this all assume you accept the idea that a slightly warmer average temperature will lead to disastrous conditions. However that does seem to be what is claimed in general. Well, if that is in fact what you believe, then you really should be advocating focusing on how to deal with it, not how to prevent it unless you believe you can prevent it when it isn't a human caused phenomena.

      • Re:Whew, no problem then (Score:5, Informative)

        by khayman80 (824400) on Monday April 06 2009, @03:45AM (#27473211) Homepage

        Most scientists agree that humans have contributed a small change to the climate, but all agree that the majority of the change is due to natural cycles (solar, long term atmospheric fluctuations etc). The only people claiming that humans are the sole or majority cause of climate warming/change are involved in politics, vote gathering, and selling 'technology' concepts to 'save the planet' in order to bilk the public out of money.

        I am a climate scientist. I've never been in politics and I've never sold anything (professional student here). I also think you're completely wrong. My experiences at the 2008 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union are that most (9/10) of the scientists I met agree with the IPCC [www.ipcc.ch] report on abrupt climate change.

        But you've made an even more fundamental mistake. Science isn't democratic-- it's about evidence. Open up the IPCC reports yourself and focus on what's really important, instead of trying to count how many people are on each side.

        For example, Vostok ice core [climateactionnetwork.ca] data confirms that for nearly half a million years, the climate has changed cyclically. But in all that time, the maximum CO2 concentration never went above 300 ppm. (It's hit higher levels millions of years ago, but that was a slow and gradual change. Plus the Earth was essentially a different planet back then, with a different solar luminosity and biosphere so comparisons across that much time are tricky.)

        You're right to say that natural variations are evident in the data, but the most prominent cycles over geological time are governed by (among other effects) Milankovitch cycles [wikipedia.org] which are caused by periodic variations in the earth's orbit.

        But, CO2 concentrations are at 380 ppm today. That's a level it hasn't hit in the last half million years. If we're seeing natural variability alone, it's quite a coincidence that it occurs right when we started excavating fossil fuels to fuel a billion cars.

        Plus, the Vostok data is a little difficult to analyze in this manner, but it seems like at Vostok the CO2 always increased 600 years AFTER the temperature started to increase. At least, that's the way it used to work. Right now, the CO2 concentration is at an unprecedented level but the temperature is barely above normal. Again, that suggests that we're not facing natural climate change, we're dealing with anthropogenic abrupt climate change.

        • Re:Whew, no problem then (Score:5, Insightful)

          by m4cph1sto (1110711) on Monday April 06 2009, @08:50AM (#27475201)

          I'm a scientist too, and I judge theories based on merit, not popular opinion.

          As a rule, scientific theories are not accepted by the scientific community until they have done two things: (1) explained known observations in a more simple or fundamental way than alternative theories, and (2) made a prediction about something that is currently unknown and that other theories don't predict, which is then confirmed by observation.

          Global Warming theory has met neither of those requirements. The main statement of Global Warming is something like this: "small changes in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere cause large changes in global temperature". Despite this theory, there is absolutely no evidence that a change in CO2 has ever caused the temperature to change, over the entire billions-years history of the planet. So GW theory doesn't explain past observations.

          It doesn't explain current observations either: CO2 concentration has steadily increased over the past 100 years, while temperatures have gone up, then down, then up again, then down again (as they are currently). There is no dramatic warming trend as predicted by GW theory.

          Finally, GW has not made any unique predictions that have later been confirmed as true. It predicted more and bigger hurricanes; that hasn't happened. It predicted significant temperature increases; that hasn't happened. In fact, the theory seems totally based on computer models that have failed to make a single correct prediction about the climate ever since I first started following the issue, in 1998.

          To summarize, GW theory does not meet the standards of scientific acceptance, not by a long shot.

          • Re:Whew, no problem then (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Red Flayer (890720) on Monday April 06 2009, @09:42AM (#27475879) Journal

            I'm a scientist too, and I judge theories based on merit, not popular opinion.

            This is contradicted by:

            It doesn't explain current observations either: CO2 concentration has steadily increased over the past 100 years, while temperatures have gone up, then down, then up again, then down again (as they are currently). There is no dramatic warming trend as predicted by GW theory.

            Look at the data again. There is most assuredly a dramatic warming trend, despite the slight decrease in global mean temperature over the past few years. Run a regression on the data, it's quite clear.

            Furthermore, once periodic solar activity is factored in as an ameliorating effect due to lower output over the past few years, it becomes quite clear that the warming trend continues.

            If you're such a logic scientist, how could you have missed the bare facts of the data of the past 100 years? And how could you have dismissed the impact of solar activity on temperature?

            Seems to me like you don't WANT to believe in GCC, and so you don't bother reading all the evidence and theory.

        • Re:Whew, no problem then (Score:5, Insightful)

          by hey! (33014) on Monday April 06 2009, @02:11PM (#27479735) Homepage Journal

          I'm not a scientist myself, but my wife is an Earth scientist. We've been following the climate change story now for twenty five years or more in Eos and other journals.

          As an interested outsider, I think one of the reasons that scientists took so long to get off the dime when it came to sounding the alarm was that most of them were waiting for the other shoe to drop. There has not been another scientific story like climate change in generations. Not since evolution.

          One of the things my wife often said over the years was, "the evidence is too good." And I'm sure she's not the only one. It goes against scientific training to get behind a theory until it's been given a serious beating, and nobody has been able to lay a glove on this one.

          What people who don't have a real live Earth scientist available for observation need to understand is that even proponents of the theory would love to see the skeptical position put up a decent fight. Data this unambiguous doesn't seem scientific. It's spooky. They'd rather see the theory knocked down onto the mat, then get up to fight another round and win by decision.

          People waited around for the skeptics to give this theory a solid hit, and in over twenty five years the skeptics have failed, over and over and over. First they argued that climate wasn't changing, and although they did manage to discredit some data sets, that position failed. Next they tried to explain the data in terms of non-anthropogenic causes; at best they've forced some changes in models and in the predicted ranges of change. So far as I know, no attempt to explain the changes in climate data over the last fifty years in terms of natural cycles or statistical artifacts has held up to scrutiny.

          I understand that science is not a democracy; but it's not driven by individual data sets either. You have to look at how robust an hypothesis is, how it stands up under stress. Thus far, nobody has been able to seriously set the theory back. Who wouldn't want to do this, if they could? Discrediting anthropogenic climate change would be Nobel caliber work. It would be an immense service to humanity, comparable in importance if not greater than the discovery of the vaccine for polio, or penicillin was in medicine.

          • Re:Whew, no problem then (Score:5, Insightful)

            by khayman80 (824400) on Monday April 06 2009, @04:51AM (#27473611) Homepage

            Yes, I've seen those bizarre claims as well. I don't think any physicist seriously doubts the warming properties of CO2. The spectrum of the sun, absorption lines of CO2 and their relevant thermodynamic relationships are simply too well established. They're freshman-level homework problems, not cutting edge research areas.

            I brought that up because I'm concerned about the fact that current warming is highly atypical in that regard. What happens when the natural positive feedback of CO2 adds to what we've already dumped into the atmosphere?

      • Re:Whew, no problem then (Score:5, Insightful)

        by biscuitlover (1306893) on Monday April 06 2009, @02:54AM (#27472985)

        All those scientists that disagree? Sure, there's some disagreement, but we're talking about a very small percentage of scientists here.

        The fact that a lot of people are happy to selectively discount a clear majority of scientific opinion worldwide because it doesn't fit in with their world view or political standpoint never ceases to amaze me.

        • Re:Whew, no problem then (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Mark Hood (1630) on Monday April 06 2009, @03:41AM (#27473185) Homepage

          Someone once brought this home to me quite nicely - he said if 9 out of 10 doctors said your child had appendicitis, and only 1 said it was trapped gas, would you go home and 'wait and see'?
          Even if you were nervous about the risks of an operation, the risks of ignoring it are much worse - if it turns out to be appendicitis.

          Sure, it might be nothing, just like global warming might not be our fault, but would you take the chance?

          Mark

      • Re:Whew, no problem then (Score:5, Informative)

        by alexibu (1071218) on Monday April 06 2009, @04:37AM (#27473529)

        The Antarctic as a whole is not cooling, but warming with the rest of the world, some data from some places showed it was cooling and of course this was expounded by denialists as proof that warming wasn't global.

        see : http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/state-of-antarctica-red-or-blue [realclimate.org]

        The Antarctic's ice is melting much less than the arctic because the antarctic gets a lot of it's coldness from it's altitude (mountains etc), whereas the arctic is just floating ice, and is also adjacent to more land and less water - water stabilises temperature - so this makes the arctic more sensitive to temperature changes. But the edge bits are melting.

        I think the ice shelves breaking is more likely to be caused by sea level rise though. Where the sea level cracks the ice off from the land. Which shows the non linear nature of ice melting. We don't just get ice melting linearly with temperature increases, we can get whole chunks breaking off and floating away

  • The Article Makes a good point (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lifyre (960576) on Monday April 06 2009, @03:48AM (#27473225)

    It mentions that a lot of the dynamics of this situation are poorly understood. Whether or not you believe in global warming or what you think is causing it we don't know what the results are going to be.

    There are so many possibilities with some scientific basis and the whole environment as a system is so complex that we can't predict details. We can paint broad strokes of the future but saying the sea level is going to raise 2.37 feet and believing that the sea will raise exactly 2.37 feet put blinders on you just like believing that a Divine Being created the universe in 6 days.

    We have an idea of what MAY happen but there is so much complexity that we don't know what WILL happen. Right now it looks like shit is going to get warmer, ice is going to melt, sea levels will get higher and who knows the Gulf Stream may stop flowing causing Europe to get cold.

    Some of you seriously need to stop beating the Global Warming Manifesto like it is a Bible.

      • Re:Somewhere in the USA... (Score:5, Funny)

        by One Louder (595430) on Monday April 06 2009, @01:20AM (#27472495)

        I'm waiting to see the live video footage of that scene where the poor sweet little baby polar bear is trapped on an ice floe which shrinks until he falls off to be eaten by sharks or some garbage like that *splash*

        It would be quite remarkable to have video footage of polar bears in the Antarctic.

              • Re:C'mon Mods.... (Score:4, Informative)

                by TapeCutter (624760) * on Monday April 06 2009, @07:59AM (#27474725) Journal
                Ice extent starts to grow/recede around the time of the equinox. March is always the low point for sea ice in the south, September is always the low point in the north. The high points are also marked by the equinox so that September is the high point in the south, March in the north.

    • Tabacoo science. (Score:5, Informative)

      by TapeCutter (624760) * on Monday April 06 2009, @03:54AM (#27473249) Journal
      Con job and spin are the correct terms for that particular web site.

      This is the second time this site has popped up in the last few days. It's run by one J. D'Aleo who is paid to do so by the "Science and Public Policy Institute", they are in turn backed by "Frontiers of Freedom" which is the lobbying brain child of this guy [wikipedia.org]. They have a donate button on their site but their funding is otherwise obscured.

      Older readers may recall the "Frontiers of Freedom" also backed the tabacoo industry in their anti-science campaign.

      Disclaimer: I don't have anything against lobbyists or politicians until they pretend to be something they are not.

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