The Icelandic Families Tracking Climate Change With Measuring Tape (undark.org) 88
Gloria Dickie, writing for Undark Magazine: A 30-meter Komelon-branded measuring tape, a pencil, and a yellow paper form are all Hallsteinn Haraldsson carries with him when he travels to the Snaefellsnes Peninsula in western Iceland. But unfurling the measuring tape before me at his home in Mosfellsbaer, a town just outside of Reykjavik, he says it is a significant upgrade from the piece of marked rope he used to bring along. With 11 percent of the landmass covered in ice, rapidly ebbing glaciers are threatening to reshape Iceland's landscape, and Haraldsson, 74, is part of a contingent of volunteer glacier monitors who are at the frontlines of tracking the retreat. Every autumn, Haraldsson, often accompanied by his wife and son, sets off on foot to measure the changes in his assigned glacier.
Their rudimentary tools are a far cry from the satellites and time-lapse photography deployed around the world in recent decades to track ice loss, and lately, there's been talk of disbanding this nearly century-old, low-tech network of monitors. But this sort of ground-truthing work has more than one purpose: With Iceland's glaciers at their melting point, these men and women -- farmers, schoolchildren, a plastic surgeon, even a Supreme Court judge -- serve not only as the glaciers' guardians, but also their messengers. Today, some 35 volunteers monitor 64 measurement sites around the country. The numbers they collect are published in the Icelandic scientific journal Jokull, and submitted to the World Glacier Monitoring Service database. Vacancies for glacier monitors are rare and highly sought-after, and many glaciers have been in the same family for generations, passed down to sons and daughters, like Haraldsson, when the journey becomes too arduous for their aging watchmen. It's very likely one of the longest-running examples of citizen climate science in the world. But in an age when precision glacier tracking can be conducted from afar, it remains unclear whether, or for how long, this sort of heirloom monitoring will continue into the future. It's a question even some of the network's own members have been asking.
Their rudimentary tools are a far cry from the satellites and time-lapse photography deployed around the world in recent decades to track ice loss, and lately, there's been talk of disbanding this nearly century-old, low-tech network of monitors. But this sort of ground-truthing work has more than one purpose: With Iceland's glaciers at their melting point, these men and women -- farmers, schoolchildren, a plastic surgeon, even a Supreme Court judge -- serve not only as the glaciers' guardians, but also their messengers. Today, some 35 volunteers monitor 64 measurement sites around the country. The numbers they collect are published in the Icelandic scientific journal Jokull, and submitted to the World Glacier Monitoring Service database. Vacancies for glacier monitors are rare and highly sought-after, and many glaciers have been in the same family for generations, passed down to sons and daughters, like Haraldsson, when the journey becomes too arduous for their aging watchmen. It's very likely one of the longest-running examples of citizen climate science in the world. But in an age when precision glacier tracking can be conducted from afar, it remains unclear whether, or for how long, this sort of heirloom monitoring will continue into the future. It's a question even some of the network's own members have been asking.
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True enough, it is the oceans that rise to swallow the islands, islands rarely sink into the oceans.
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Iceland has actually risen out of the Atlantic ocean with the retreat of the ice since the end of the last ice age.
The sheer weight of the ice sitting on top of it during the ice age caused the island to sink down.
This can be seen around the coastal areas where the coast is flat and then rises dramatically to a plateau.
The change is pretty visible here. (Score:5, Interesting)
We even got a new highest waterfall several years back. The highest used to be Glymur, at the bottom of Hvalfjörður (very pretty waterfall, BTW, strongly recommend the hike out to it). But Morsárjökull (a terminal glacier of Vatnajökull, the giant glacier in the southeast) receded up a cliff, leaving a series of waterfalls - Morsárfossar - which are taller than Glymur (but not as pretty).
Re:The change is pretty visible here. (Score:5, Interesting)
Pictures: Glymur [google.com], Morsárfossar [google.com].
Glymur falls down into a slot canyon. Most people go along the top route, along a trail called Leggjabrjótur (literally "Broken Leg" - let's just say that you don't want to fall ;) ). The bottom route is spectacular but not really recommended. You have to wade through a freezing cold river, and there's a serious risk of falling rocks, which would be pretty much instant death given how far they're falling. Lots of dead birds usually floating around down there (they nest in the cliffs around the falls).
The story behind how it's created also relates to why so many things in the area begin with "Hval-" ("whale"). According to legend, a man met an elf woman, and ended up sleeping with her, with the promise that if a child resulted, he'd raise the child in the world of humans and have it baptized. Nine months later, he was at church, and a child was abandoned at the doorstep, with a note stating that the father of the child will have it baptized. The priest three times asked if anyone knew whose child it was, but he refused to speak up, despite knowing the truth. Enraged, the elf woman cast a curse on him, causing him to go mad and run off into the fjörd where he changed into a monstrous-sized red-headed whale (Rauðhöfði, "Redhead"), where he lived, destroying ships in his fury.
One day he destroyed a boat containing a sorcerer's son. To get revenge, the sorcerer himself sat out, and when the whale emerged, he enchanged him into going a mindless blind rage. The sorceror sailed to the bottom of the fjörd, pursued by the whale, and ran inland; the enraged whale chased after him, flopping across the surface and digging out what would become the river channel of Botnsá. The sorceror climbed up the nearby mountain (Hvalfell, Whale Mountain), and the whale slowly thrashed its way up the side, gouging out the canyon in which Glymur flows; Glymur means clanging, due to the noise of the whale's thrashing, and the ridge there is Skjálfandahæðir or the Shaking Heights. Exhausted and bashed up, the whale managed only to reach the lake Hvalvatn (Whale Lake) before dying in its centre.
This is of course a totally true story supported by modern science.
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When my group hiked the Skaftafell, we took the standard route from Svinajokull through Svartifoss and then down into the vast pebble plain of the Morsá, which we could tell must be a seriously huge river when the icecap is melting. Your new waterfall must be another day's hike up the Morsá from the point where we intersected it.
The views even on this stretch are incomparable. It should be on everyone's bucket list.
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Did you go up Kristínartindar? That's an amazing hike. :)
It's a shame all of the people who come just to see the (pretty, but IMHO overcrowded) Svartifoss. The really pretty stuff comes into view once you get some altitude :)
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Did you go up Kristínartindar? That's an amazing hike. :)
Yes we did, getting great views of Svinajökull on one side and the Morsá on the other. That was also where I saw my first ptarmigan.
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You mean during a jÃkullhlaup? When a volcano under an ice cap melts a lot of water, which then melts out the side of the ice cap. Regular jÃkullhlaups often match the flow of the amazon, and large ones match the rest of the freshwater flow on the planet. Briefly.
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Hvalfjörður, Morsárjökull, Vatnajökull, Morsárfossar?
I think people would take Iceland seriously if you guys stopped naming things after what you find in your Alphabet Soup. ;)
Re: The change is pretty visible here. (Score:4, Informative)
Anyword looks scary if you don't know the roots. Picture how, say, "Yellowstone" would look if you didn't know the words "Yellow" and "stone" - or worse, how English words tend to be structured. Yell-Ows-Tone? Yel-Lows-To-Ne? Ye-Llowston-E? Not knowing how to break something up makes it look alien.
Hval = Whale
FjÃrÃur = Fjord
Mor = Sediment
à = River
Vatn = Water
JÃkull = Glacier
Foss = Falls
For some of those, you can see the English analogue, can't you? Icelandic is a Germanic language too.
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Thank you, cell phone, for mangling my post...
Or was it Slashdot this time?
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It was slashdot -- still unable to deal with unicode in 2018.
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What's worse is that I didn't even notice the mangling. It all just fit straight into the language.
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I've been having a binge on Scandi-Noir while also continuing to work on my German, and even *I* can start to hear and understand the German roots in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.
I found a "Student Edition" crib/ guide book for Beowulf in a second-hand bookshop last week, and thought three times before putting it back on the shelf. I'm regretting that. Russian practice this afternoon.
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If you want to follow the money, who has more to gain: scientists looking for research money or the fossil fuel industries?
Even most FF companies accept AGW. Exxon was one of the few (along with Koch) that funded denialists, but they stopped when they were caught with their pants down: Using one set of projections to lie to the public, while using very different projections for their own internal financial forecasting.
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The government outspends any company hundreds to one in this area. So I think it's pretty easy to see which side of this you need to be on if you actually want your research to get any funding.
That's a lie. (Score:3)
That's 100% false.
https://www.statista.com/topic... [statista.com]:
Oil (and gas) companies are among the largest corporations worldwide. Among the top ten companies worldwide based on revenue, six are in the oil industry. In 2016, Anglo-Dutch giant Royal Dutch Shell reported almost 234 billion U.S. dollars of revenue. Thus, Shell was the third-largest company worldwide based on revenue in 2015. ExxonMobil from Irving, Texas generated a revenue reportin
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The government outspends any company hundreds to one in this area
That's 100% false.
https://www.statista.com/topic... [statista.com]:
Oil (and gas) companies are among the largest corporations worldwide. Among the top ten companies worldwide based on revenue, six are in the oil industry. In 2016, Anglo-Dutch giant Royal Dutch Shell reported almost 234 billion U.S. dollars of revenue. Thus, Shell was the third-largest company worldwide based on revenue in 2015. ExxonMobil from Irving, Texas generated a revenue reporting some 219 billion U.S. dollars in 2016. However, ExxonMobil claims the highest market value within this industry, as well as having the second-highest market value of all companies worldwide in 2015.
https://www.nationalpriorities... [nationalpriorities.org]:
In fiscal year 2015, the federal budget is $3.8 trillion.
So, no, the fossil fuel industry is probably larger than the entire US budget, making your statement 100% false.
Your statistics did not address the expenditures for climate change research in any way. They are a meaningless comparison between the gross revenue of oil companies and the total US federal budget.
Try reading the income statement for Exxon Mobile and learn the difference between gross revenue and net income. https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/... [nasdaq.com]
In 2015 Exxon Mobile gave about 8 million dollars to public policy and policy research groups of all kinds
http://cdn.exxonmobil.com/~/me... [exxonmobil.com]
The US government 2014 budge
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So, basically the Fossil Fuel companies are smaller than the U.S. deficit. I think that makes it pretty clear that the money in climate change is in getting grants from the government.
I think that makes it pretty clear you don't have a fucking clue what government spends its money on.
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Now go back to Infowars and have a nice day.
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The government outspends any company hundreds to one in this area. So I think it's pretty easy to see which side of this you need to be on if you actually want your research to get any funding.
You don't think if fossil fuel companies actually thought they could seriously put a dent in what climate scientists have found that they wouldn't be throwing money at research to do so? The Koch brothers gave $150,000 to the Berkeley Earth group because they thought they would show that the other government funded temperature records were biased but in the end their result confirmed that they were all correct within the margins of uncertainty.
Science is what it is and in the long run is immune distorting
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I didn't say there was a conspiracy. That's 100% in your camp. You think the oil companies are colluding to hide AGW. I'm pointing out that almost all the funding comes from government, not oil companies, so that seems entirely implausible.
Science doesn't care who funds it. But researchers do. And you need to know who pays the bills if you want to keep funded.
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Science also doesn't care what you think the results should be. Regardless of who's paying the bills the science is what it is. The vast majority of climate science research is payed for by governments and other public sources because that's how basic scientific research gets funded in today's world. Private enterprise scientific research is mostly aimed at producing profitable results over the short term so they don't fund a lot of science that doesn't have a clear short term payoff. If fossil fuel com
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In Iceland the motivation for citizen volunteer measurement of ice changes predates climate change alarmism by a millennium, and is an immediate practical need in a nation that centers on a series of icecaps that have volcanoes festering underneath them. When one of them erupts and the icecap around it melts, it can create a sudden jökulhlaup (their term for lahar) that dwarfs anything this side of the ice dam flood that formed the Channeled Scablands in Washington. Several of these have occurred in re
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No, sorry, jokullhlaups (hey, how'd you get Slashdot to swallow an o-umlaut - it doesn't like mine!) are not lahars. Lahars are rainfall loosened landslides of soil and/ or fresh ash coming down the slopes of a volcano. Jokullhlaups are caused by the rapid emptying of a sub-glacial lake formed by an eruption under the icecap (could also be steam venting from a fumarole field). As the water breaks out of t
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Perspective (Score:3)
”But in an age when precision glacier tracking can be conducted from afar, it remains unclear whether, or for how long, this sort of heirloom monitoring will continue into the future. It's a question even some of the network's own members have been asking.”
If nothing else, it’s still a good excuse for an outing.
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Pretty much ;)
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Are they tracking climate change? let's RTFA (Score:3)
"Such findings werenâ(TM)t uncommon during that period: In the 1930s, many of the countryâ(TM)s glaciers had retreated significantly due to an unusually warm climate, but beginning in 1970, they advanced once more until human-caused climate change beat them back again."
So in the 1930s it was natural, but now oh noes it's the evil mankind making them retreat.
I smell B.S.
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I was at a glacier recently, and there was a sign talking about how if the glacier kept melting due to global warming, it would vanish and no longer be able to be a source for water for the rivers it fed, and all the problems people downstream would have due to lack of water.
What they seemed to miss was the idea that if the glacier was NOT melting, there would also be no water downstream....
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I get the idea. I'm afraid you do not. Snow doesn't melt instantly. And in fact in the vast majority of the world, snow and water do not land on glaciers and the land downstream does not flood every spring.
Even if you think landing on the glacier somehow changes this. Remember, every bit of snow that lands on the glacier melts every year (or at least the same amount of water) PLUS MORE. As such, someone living downstream from a glacier already gets more water every year than someone who does not. In fact th
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I get the idea. I'm afraid you do not.
Your following text suggests you don't get the idea.
The snow pack gaining snow and then melting ensures that the water from the snow is released at a slow rate, notably in summer when it is needed the most. If it falls just as snow directly then it melts in its entirety over a few days in spring, and comes as a rush, then it stops. Where I used to live if there was a heavy snowfall that then melted you could be pretty sure the local river would flood two days later. It didn't stop it running very low in the
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As though it ever stops bloody raining in Iceland..
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What they seemed to miss was the idea that if the glacier was NOT melting, there would also be no water downstream....
What you seem to miss is: glaciers are supposed to regrow in winter. So the average size is constant
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If it "regrow in winter" its not constant.
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Because due to global warming the glaciers are shrinking, that means the average size over the course of a year gets less from year to year or decade to decade. As you surely know that: what kind of nonsense do you ask here?
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Because over the last 40 or so years, the average size of glaciers has not been constant.
At best, instead of being stored, the water runs off quickly in the winter and isn't stored to smooth out the water curve for the rest of the year.
At worst, climate change has also altered where the rain is falling so enough water no longer falls on the glacier and at some point, the area will become arid after the stored up water is gone.
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I was at a glacier recently, and there was a sign talking about how if the glacier kept melting due to global warming, it would vanish and no longer be able to be a source for water for the rivers it fed, and all the problems people downstream would have due to lack of water.
What they seemed to miss was the idea that if the glacier was NOT melting, there would also be no water downstream....
The size of a glacier is dependent on the balance between the snow it receives each year and the amount of melt over the year. If the glacier is growing it's receiving more snow than is melting. If the glacier is shrinking it's receiving less snow than is melting. If it shrinks to the point of disappearing then melt that keeps rivers going late in the summer/fall will also disappear changing the pattern of water flow often to the detriment of those who depend on the river.
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The results go back decades and show many changes. But now its all about the "climate change"...
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So in the 1930s it was natural, but now oh noes it's the evil mankind making them retreat.
I smell B.S.
No, in the 1930s it was human too.
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I'll agree that has more possible merit than the article's statement.
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Arguing your incredulity is not a very wise thing. Something can be true even if you don't think it is.
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I am rationally pointing out a recurring or cyclical phenomenon might not have a new and different cause for the most recent instance. It is unwise for you to assume the article is correct merely because it's something you want to believe.
Correlation is not causation (Score:3)
How can they conclude that these glacier measurements are changing because of rising temperatures, when it's just as likely that it's due to natural periodic fluctuations in the melting point temperature of ice, or else due to natural expansion and contraction of all the rocks forming the island?
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How about the fact that the last ice age ended a while ago, so it's somewhat expected that the ice may not remain frozen forever?
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Not quite - the last glacial period ended a several thousand years ago, a bit before agriculture was invented, but we're still very much in an ice age that has gripped the planet for 2.6 million years (you can tell it's an ice age by the year-round polar ice-caps)
Leaving the ice age is what has climate scientists worried about global warming - our planet is a bistable system, toggling back and forth between ice age/ icehouse state and a greenhouse/hothouse state. Our species entire existence has been durin
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How about the fact that the last ice age ended a while ago, so it's somewhat expected that the ice may not remain frozen forever?
As Immerman pointed out by the definition that geologists use we are still in an ice age and will be until there are no longer substantial ice caps in the polar regions.
But you're talking about the end of the last glacial period around 10,000 years ago. The fact is that the peak of the Milankovitch cycles that apparently drive the glacial cycles occurred around 8,000 years ago and since about 6,000 years ago there has been a slight cooling trend that would have eventually dropped us into the next glacial p
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How about the fact that the last ice age ended a while ago, so it's somewhat expected that the ice may not remain frozen forever?
The ice age ended a long time ago, and after the initial rise in temperature, the trend for 8000 years has been a decline in temperature. The last 150 years has broken that trend. So, no, what you believe is expected goes against the trend.
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I'm not sure Iceland's economy is based on growing much of anything. Have you been there? Nutrient rich soil isn't a key terrain feature.
What may be more interesting is whether warmer weather attracts even more tourists. The whole island felt overrun when I went there and it's apparently getting worse by the year.
(Yeah, I was part of the problem)
consistent (Score:2)
By using the same method passed down across generations, consistent data is collected.
Future high tech methods could be employed, but compared to age old methods.
Which part of "ground truthing" is unclear? (Score:2)
The entire point of ground truthing a measurement is to check that the remote instruments are actually working correctly.