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Earth Science

Scientists Confirm Dramatic Melting of Greenland Ice Sheet (theguardian.com) 163

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: There was a dramatic melting of Greenland's ice sheet in the summer of 2019, researchers have confirmed, in a study that reveals the loss was largely down to a persistent zone of high pressure over the region. The ice sheet melted at a near record rate in 2019, and much faster than the average of previous decades. Figures have suggested that in July alone surface ice declined by 197 gigatons -- equivalent to about 80 million Olympic swimming pools. Now experts have examined the level of melting in more detail, revealing what drove it. Crucially, the team note, the high pressure conditions lasted for 63 of the 92 summer days in 2019, compared with an average of just 28 days between 1981 and 2010. A similar situation was seen in 2012, a record bad year for melting of the ice sheet.

Writing in the journal the Cryosphere, [researchers] report how they used satellite data, climate models and global weather patterns to explore the melting of the surface of the ice sheet last year. Among their findings the team report that almost 96% of the ice sheet underwent melting at some time in 2019, compared with an average of just over 64% between 1981 and 2010. Using models, the pair also found that about 560Gt of meltwater runoff was generated in the summer of 2019. The surface mass balance, the amount of ice the sheet gained from rain and snowfall minus the amount lost through meltwater run off and evaporation, was just 54Gt a year -- about 320Gt a year lower than the average across the earlier decades, and the greatest such drop on record. Further analysis showed the level and distribution of melting to be closely tied to a number of factors, including levels of snowfall and reflection of sunlight -- known as albedo -- as well as cloudiness and absorption of sunlight. All of these, they note, were influenced by the persistent high pressure zone over the ice sheet last summer.

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Scientists Confirm Dramatic Melting of Greenland Ice Sheet

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  • Not long now ...
    • Learn to drill. There must be billions of barrels of oil underneath.
      • Greenland? Reasonable prospectivity on the East coast - say a North Sea worth. Decent prospectivity in the Davis Strait, but Cairn's 2009 campaign was, how to put this, insufficiently compelling to continue with exploration.

        North coast, Interesting, but really challenging on a technical front.

  • Connection? (Score:1, Troll)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 )

    It disappears right after Trump tried to buy it.

    • by shanen ( 462549 )

      It disappears right after Trump tried to buy it.

      Quoting because the trolls apparently want to censor you. But why? I don't even get the joke. I think it was a joke, right?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by AleRunner ( 4556245 )

        It disappears right after Trump tried to buy it.

        Quoting because the trolls apparently want to censor you. But why? I don't even get the joke. I think it was a joke, right?

        A while ago Trump suggested that he'd like to buy Greenland (with USA money of course). I'm not sure it's entirely a joke. If Trump was threatening to buy you, you'd want to disappear wouldn't you?

        I'm assuming that the Trumpkins would like to forget this stupidity and try to pretend he's been a serious leader who could never do something silly like wait around for 6 weeks to act on news where they claim a 6 day delay can be seen as causing a disaster (and have a small point - 6 days delay probably cause

        • by shanen ( 462549 )

          I do remember the Greenland fiasco or joke or brain fart. It would be interesting to see (though I won't live that long) how historians will cover it, but I think it should get a mention of some sort. Evidence of Trump's deranged mental state? But I'm still having trouble figuring out the freshly attempted joke.

          On the 6-day delay, the significance depends on the doubling times. The most interesting graph I've seen compares many countries using the 100-case date as a zero point to make the lines more compara

          • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

            My concern is that going from 10% more cases per day to 5% more cases per day because of measures implemented looks like we're flattening the curve but if we get stuck at 5% more cases per day then we're still on an exponential upcurve but we've simply slowed it down by 50%. My hunch is this is happening in a lot of places that have implemented some good measures but are still not strict enough to stop growth of the virus. Growth needs to be under 1% (per day) or we still end up with the whole population ge

            • by shanen ( 462549 )

              Basically concurrence, but that mostly helps make it clear why testing is so crucial. If Trump had any understanding of or interest in anything beyond the coming election, then February would have been focused on ramping up our testing capacity in a really gigantic way.

              This graph https://www.visualcapitalist.c... [visualcapitalist.com] makes your point quite clearly. The calibration lines show the various doubling times. You can see that America was near the 2-day line, as bad as it gets, while Japan was much closer to the 10-day

  • well (Score:5, Insightful)

    by n3r0.m4dski11z ( 447312 ) on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @11:49PM (#59953298) Homepage Journal

    we are in the middle of a real life disaster with the pandemic and depression. And you can see how many people don't take that seriously. And you want people to take seriously an abstract risk thing like climate change?

    Man there will be people denying it when all the coastal cities are underwater. If the pandemic has taught me anything its that a lot of people are simply clueless and think reality does not apply to them if they simply believe the problem is not happening. That works for a short while. Then of course, its someone elses fault and they still have an excuse not to participate. Some dense people out there only seem to get shit retrospectively, no matter how upfront you are with them.

    • I feel your frustration on this one. This situation has only made me more concerned about the general public's ability to deal with climate change appropriately. If this is any indicator, we're screwed.
    • Cities are easily modified and replaced over time. They aren't static and exist for purely economic reasons. Cities are are mere collections of buildings and infrastructure most of which needs modernization. The idea rising sea levels threaten anything not easily replaced is absurd. Demolish and move inland, problem solved as it's been solved for thousands of years. It's not as if they'll be flooded fast enough to interfere with function, a few tourist traps excepted.

    • by cusco ( 717999 )

      These are by and large the same people who belong to conservative evangelistic religions, so their thought processes are already suspect.

  • 80 millions swimming pools is such a useless measurement; tell me what percentage melted or how many thousands years you need to melt everything at the current pace.
    • So,:

      Olympic-size swimming pool are approximately 50 m or 164 feet in length, 25 m or 82 feet in width, and 2 m or 6 feet in depth. These measurements create a surface area of 13,454.72 square feet and a volume of 88,263 cubic feet. The pool has 660,253.09 gallons of water ...

      A typical high school competition pool is half that length, so that's be about 160 million high school pools.

      The Dinosaurous Fill 'N Fun Pool holds 426 gallons, or 1212 L, so this loss is about 124 billion Dinosaurous kiddie pools!!!!

  • Isn't "high pressure" cold air? Because it has a highest density. Could have sworn the weather guy on the news always called it that.
    • by jbengt ( 874751 )

      Isn't "high pressure" cold air?

      Which is why the temperature goes up as you climb in altitude into lower-pressure air? (Hint: the temperature actually goes down at lower pressure higher altitudes.)
      High pressure weather patterns are much more complicated, and involve winds, waves of air, moisture content of the atmosphere, and rising and falling air currents.

  • There was a lot of melting, but if you read the article carefully it was more than offset by the new ice accumulated by precipitation. The ice sheet still grew in 2019, just not as quickly as in other years.
    • by jbengt ( 874751 )

      There was a lot of melting, but if you read the article carefully it was more than offset by the new ice accumulated by precipitation. The ice sheet still grew in 2019, just not as quickly as in other years.

      And if you read the article even more carefully, the positive balance of precipitation, melting, and evaporation does not include the loss of mass from the glaciers sliding into the sea. (Which means the ice sheet actually grew smaller in mass.)

  • Comments on stories like this are usually the most entertaining. There's a few I would deem informative but the rest, well, they are pure entertainment. First it's the deniers or folks that try to make an argument about something in the article they feel is wrong. Next we have the folks who are 100% sure climate change is man made who instantly belittle the denier and then attempt to associate them with the president which they feel makes someone dumber.

    I don't care about either "side". I try to do my best

    • Comments on stories like this are usually the most entertaining. There's a few I would deem informative but the rest, well, they are pure entertainment. First it's the deniers or folks that try to make an argument about something in the article they feel is wrong. Next we have the folks who are 100% sure climate change is man made who instantly belittle the denier and then attempt to associate them with the president which they feel makes someone dumber.

      looking through the commentary, the main mention of Trump here has been a discussion of how he wanted to buy Greenland.

      Marginally off-topic, I'd say, but hardly "belittling the denier and then attempting to associate them with the president".

  • Shut down all our industry! Oh wait...
  • 80 million Olympic swimming pools

    This doesn't mean anything to me or anyone really. Wow 80 million swimming pool! WTF. It's a number beyond what people can put into real world comparisons. How about telling us how many inch rise in sea level it represents? Maybe combined with what percent decrease in the glacier/ice mass on the island. Something concrete. Last I heard, swimming pools were not an official S.I. unit.

Solutions are obvious if one only has the optical power to observe them over the horizon. -- K.A. Arsdall

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