Lake Disappears into Andes 307
steveb3210 writes "It seems that what was once a 5-acre glacial lake in the Andes has mysteriously disappeared. 'In March we patrolled the area and everything was normal,' Juan Jose Romero from Chile's National Forestry Corporation, Conaf, said. 'We went again in May and to our surprise we found that the lake had completely disappeared. All that was left were chunks of ice and an enormous fissure.'" The current theory is that an earthquake opened the ground and allowed the lake to drain. Looks like global warming is off the hook this time around.
eye rolling speculation (Score:5, Informative)
"A glacier specialist, Andres Rivera, told Chilean newspaper La Tercera that the lake's disappearance seemed to be part of the continual reforming of the landscape.
The Magallanes area "has seen interesting changes in the last few decades," he said, noting that the lake itself had not been there 30 years ago."
How long does a lake have to exist before its concidered an actual lake? Sounds like this was more of a big puddle that came and went. Since it was only 30 years ago that it formed, I guess we can feel free to blame global warming for its creation as well.
Flashback: Vanishing lake baffles Russians (Score:5, Informative)
BBC News
Fri, 20 May 2005 00:50 EDT
Residents of a village in central Russia are trying to solve the mystery of a lake that disappeared overnight.
Russia's NTV channel showed a huge, muddy basin where the lake once was, in the village of Bolotnikovo.
"It looks like somebody has pulled the plug out of a gigantic bath," said the TV's correspondent, next to a deep debris-filled hole.
Local officials in Nizhny Novgorod region say the lake was probably sucked into an underground cave.
The name of the village - which lies about 250 km (155 miles) east of Moscow - roughly translates as "boggy".
No Water
The discovery was made by local fishermen when they arrived at the lake early in the morning.
"I looked and there was no water. I thought: Oh my God, what's going on?" one of them told the TV.
Rescuers were called out to search the uncovered lake bed to see if anybody could have been sucked under, but it is thought no-one was on the lake when the waters vanished.
"It's very dangerous. If somebody is caught by such a calamity, the chances of survival are practically nil," fireman Dmitry Zaitsev said, pointing out that lakeside trees appeared to have been dragged down with the water.
The lake's disappearance may have been caused by subsidence allowing the water to drain into a cave system or underground river, local official Dmitry Klyuev said.
According to Mr Klyuev, several houses were swallowed up in similar circumstances 70 years ago.
'Dark mystery'
But more supernatural explanations were circulating among the villagers, including the influence of dark forces.
Village youngsters said the lake had appeared during the reign of the feared Tsar Ivan the Terrible and had been "shrouded in dark mystery" ever since.
"We used to go swimming there, but we were rather afraid of its depth, and there were various rumours. For instance people said there used to be a church there underwater," one girl told the TV.
But one elderly villager sitting outside her house had another kind of force in mind.
"I thought the Americans had got here," she said, laughing.
Re:...and now we know... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"Looks like global warming is off the hook" (Score:4, Informative)
The Mars warming is thought to have been caused by winds removing surface dust and exposing more of the dark underlying rock. The extra sunlight absorbed by the rock then heated up the planet. See here:http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/20
Significant changes in the albedo of Mars have been observed. On the other hand, the monitoring of the Sun's output does not show the increase that would be necessary for it to be the cause of the warming on Mars.
Re:"Looks like global warming is off the hook" (Score:3, Informative)
Given that there may be 800,000 years covered by the samples, that does not prove that the earlies sample is 800,000 years old. how are we to know if it is not in fact 8,000,000 years old, but due to natural climate variations, a large proportion of the sample has melted in this time.
There are numerous methods for dating ice cores [talkorigins.org]. Besdies, many of these cores are taken from the deep Antarctic where there just isn't substantial melting: you may get slow accumulation from little precipitation, but very little melting.
Strangely enough, there aren't all that many accurate temperature readings for the globe over 1,000 year old, and so all that can conceivably be claimed is that the current temperature fluctuations are the fastest in recorded history.
That's true; they may not be the fastest "ever". But they likely to be the fastest in tens of thousands of years at least; we see no evidence of changes that abrupt in the paleological record.
So from this we should be able to deduce that you believe that the sun is having no affect on temperature change here. however to claim thus would be to ignore evidence from at least 2 planets, where the temperature there has continued to rise.
As noted by the earlier poster, this evidence does not support the Sun's influence on temperature change. Indeed, Martian temperatures also rose during a decrease in solar irradiance. This is evidence that the warming on both planets is not solar.
In fact, looking at our nearest neighbour, it seems that other than the sun, there has been no other possible cause for this temperature rise.
Elsewhere in this thread [slashdot.org] a poster gave a cause which is more consistent with the evidence than "the Sun" (namely, Martian albedo changes).
Besides which, I seem to recall that temperatures peaked around 1998, and have been stable/dropping since then.
Not true [metoffice.gov.uk]. (Incidentally, 1998 is a disingenous choice of reference year by global warming deniers, as it had an anomalously strong El Nino.)
However, no such claim of bias is levelled at those whose funding comes from organisations with a vested interest in keeping the AGW myth going,
You mean, like the National Science Foundation?
or those who would lose funding were it to be known that the change in the Earth's climate WAS natural.
Really? Who do you think would lose funding? Do you think climate science would disappear if not for anthropogenic global warming?
Additionally, ALL the research being done that shows CO2 is the cause of global warming is started under the premise that this is what is the cause,
That is ridiculously false. Nothing is assumed a priori about the cause. Rather, the strengths of various natural and anthropogenic forcings are estimated from observational data. You plug in the amount of heating due to the Sun, the greenhouse effect, the cooling due to volcanism and air pollution, etc., and run your models from that.
relies entirely on almost identical computer models,
The models are not "almost identical". Some operate on spatial grids, some use spectral methods; they have competing models of biosphere feedbacks, ice dynamics, etc.
Besides which, what is wrong with "almost identical" models? The Earth runs on the same laws of physics, you know. Do you complain that aerospace codes all run on the same Navier-Stokes equations? As long as they are coded independently so they don't share the same bugs, what is the problem?
includes large "fudge factors"...
Such as?
and has yet to provide accurate results based on known information, even f