Chain Reaction Shattered Antarctica's Larson B Ice Shelf 232
New submitter Jim McNicholas writes "At the end of the summer of 2002, all 3000 lakes on the Larsen B ice shelf drained away in the space of a week. And then the 2,700-square-kilometre ice shelf, which was some 220 metres thick and might have existed for some 12,000 years, rapidly disintegrated into small icebergs. The draining of one lake on an ice shelf changes the stress field in nearby areas, causing a fracture circle to form around the lake."
Re:Reporting on events in 2002? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, eleven years ago we knew that it had collapsed, but we didn't know why it had collapsed. This new model might both explain why, and perhaps predict future ice shelf collapse.
Incidentally (Score:5, Interesting)
SCIENCE! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yea science, seems slashdot comments are far too concerned with opinions and politics instead of science, facts, and, well evidence. Which, btw, this is actually big chunk of.
Earlier (Score:5, Interesting)
Wait, science... (Score:4, Interesting)
OK, somebody fill me in, here...
3,000 "lakes" on an ice shelf that they state was 2700km^2?
That's a little over a thousand square miles. That's about the land area of Cook County, Illinois, where Chicago is.
3,000 "lakes?" Lolwut? You mean "ponds?" Perhaps "puddles?"
Somebody convince me that I should be runnin' to the hills, because I'm just not feelin' it, here...
A neat maths trick. (Score:4, Interesting)
Also did you know the best estimates for sea level rise come with rather large error bars which IIRC range from about 20cm to 800cm by the year 2100. The reason for the large error bars is that people who have spent their lives studying this have much less certainty about the shape of the curve than you do. That cautious approach by the "experts" is genuine skeptcisim, fought out in the journals as it should be. Picking a figure at either end of the range and representing it as the "most likely scenario" is simply dishonest.
Re: on a volcano spewing CO2 (Score:2, Interesting)
Whilst I'm at it:
Fascinating [nasa.gov]. I'm sure you'll explain that away as some kind of warming induced cooling, or other moronic hypothesis to keep your failing thesis alive. Please note that the last paper I read about Antarctic temperatures was by Steig et al [nature.com]. It got pole position in Nature (front cover too) but was shown to be complete and utter bollocks soon afterwards [climateaudit.org] by O'Donnell et al. Of course as is normal in Climate Science, it wasn't retracted despite being shown to be rubbish. And you probably won't read about it on the euphemistically named Skeptical Science website.
Re:It would be great (Score:4, Interesting)
Having said that scientists will tell you (with some excitement) that the mechanics of melting ice sheets/shelves is "poorly understood", modelling the behaviour of various slabs of ice is an active research topic but they are a long way from claiming that all ginormous ice blocks melt in a predictable manner, I'd dare say we know even less about modelling small chip pans of melting fat.
Of course they didn't vote for their own requests. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's because Republicans are just like Lucy with her football. Don't know why Democrats keep playing that game. They keep expecting a different outcome, just like Charlie Brown.