Greenland's Ice Melting Faster Than At Any Time In Past 12,000 Years (theguardian.com) 98
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Greenland's ice is starting to melt faster than at any time in the past 12,000 years, research has shown, which will raise sea levels and could have a marked impact on ocean currents. New measurements show the rate of melting matches any in the geological record for the Holocene period -- defined as the period since the last ice age -- and is likely to accelerate, according to a paper published in the journal Nature. The increased loss of ice is likely to lead to sea level rises of between 2cm and 10cm by the end of the century from Greenland alone, according to the study.
These changes, over the relatively short period of less than a century, appear to be unprecedented. Greenland's ice sheet shrank between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago, and has been slowly cumulating over the past 4,000 years. The current melting will reverse that pattern and within the next 1,000 years, if global heating continues, the vast ice sheet is likely to vanish altogether. If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise strongly, the rate of melting could accelerate further to be four times greater than anything found in the past 12,000 years.
The team behind the latest Greenland study made their estimates by producing a computer model of a section of the south-western region of the ice sheet over the past 12,000 years and then projecting forward to the end of this century. They checked their findings against what we can tell actually occurred with the ice, through satellite measurements and other instruments, and also by mapping the position of boulders containing beryllium-10. These are deposited by glaciers as they move, and measurements of beryllium-10 can reveal how long the boulders have been in position, and therefore where the edge of the ice sheet was when the boulder was deposited.
These changes, over the relatively short period of less than a century, appear to be unprecedented. Greenland's ice sheet shrank between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago, and has been slowly cumulating over the past 4,000 years. The current melting will reverse that pattern and within the next 1,000 years, if global heating continues, the vast ice sheet is likely to vanish altogether. If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise strongly, the rate of melting could accelerate further to be four times greater than anything found in the past 12,000 years.
The team behind the latest Greenland study made their estimates by producing a computer model of a section of the south-western region of the ice sheet over the past 12,000 years and then projecting forward to the end of this century. They checked their findings against what we can tell actually occurred with the ice, through satellite measurements and other instruments, and also by mapping the position of boulders containing beryllium-10. These are deposited by glaciers as they move, and measurements of beryllium-10 can reveal how long the boulders have been in position, and therefore where the edge of the ice sheet was when the boulder was deposited.
Wrong name? (Score:2)
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greenland melts about every 150 years.
Bullcrap.
in 2012 it melted 97% of it's max melt.
The 2020 melt exceeded the 2012 melt by 65 billion tonnes.
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1889... Lots of coal burning in those days.
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Oh, almost forgot. Obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com]
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You just watch...
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Well, were also exiting an ice age... have been for most of those 12,000 years... so...
We had been cooling for the last 6000 years (prior to the industrial revolution), mostly due to orbital cycles: Obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com]
The /. summary confirms that while "Greenland's ice sheet shrank between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago," it had been "slowly cumulating over the past 4,000 years."
Re:Wrong name? (Score:5, Informative)
Bullcrap? Educate your ignorant self. Look up "greenland ice sheet" in Wikipedia or other reference of your choice, it melts about every 150 years like I said. Big melt in 1889, for instance, maybe biggest one ever.
You seem a bit confused on what the 65 billion tons means. In 2019 there was 560 gigaton of runoff, but 610 in 2012. 2020 runoff doesn't rank with those.
Like I said, don't lose your shit.
For one thing 'may be' does not equal hard data. We can quantify melting events of the last half century pretty exactly thanks to satellites and aircraft surveys, we can only estimate how big the 1889 event was. The news here is that the nature of the ice loss is changing, or as the wikipedia page you referenced states:
and...
So your attempt to make this event look like a nothingburger is contradicted by your own reference since in 1889 when this hypothesised last cycle took place we weren't heading into a record 2-3 degree global warming cycle at the same time. The news here is that this cyclic melt event is happening in conjunction with a major global warming event. All of this melting ice has an effect on ocean currents which in turn can affect agricultural production world wide so this development is certainly something to keep an eye on.
Like I said, don't lose your shit.
Being rude does not add to your case.
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2 to 3 degree warming cycle? Global average temperature hasn't raised that much. You make up alarmist nonsense.
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So a once in 150 years event happens twice in less than a decade...and you say "don't lose your shit".
Yeah. OK.
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Tell that to the millions of Bangladeshis. They'll be very happy for you.
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To be fair, the world ended in 2012 just as the Maya predicted* it would.
* yes I know, it was a simple "calendar change" type of thing.
Re:Wrong name? (Score:5, Informative)
That's surface melt. it's the percentage of the _surface_ of the ice that melted during the summer.
Every single year (quite possibly even during the coldest part of the ice ages) greenland's icesheet has undergone surface melt during the summer months. And the ponds that form refreeze during the winter.
What scientists are measuring here is ice loss.
Re:Wrong name? (Score:4, Interesting)
Norwegian-born Icelander Erik the Red was said to be exiled from Iceland for manslaughter. Along with his extended family and his thralls (i.e. slaves or serfs), he set out in ships to explore an icy land known to lie to the northwest. After finding a habitable area and settling there, he named it Grnland (translated as "Greenland"), supposedly in the hope that the pleasant name would attract settlers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Wrong name? (Score:4, Interesting)
it was green when it was named too
No it wasn't. It was named as propaganda to encourage colonisation.
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Over 80 percent of Greenland is covered in ice, but its grass was probably greener back in the summer of A.D. 982, when Erik the Red first landed in the southwest of the island. Sheep and potato farms still flourish in that same southwestern corner of Greenland, which sits at a more southerly latitude than neighboring Iceland
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"“In the summer, Erik left to settle in the country he had found, which he called Greenland, as he said people would be attracted there if it had a favorable name.”
Thus, Iceland was named by a sad Viking and Greenland is the slogan of a medieval marketing scheme."
I would say that the article you linked to was a bit conflicted in itself. What exactly does "but its grass was probably greener back in the summer of A.D. 982" even mean? And it seem just to be talking about the bit of Greenland which
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Actually: nope ...
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The milder climate means summers are intensely green throughout Iceland [only summer], even though 11 percent of that country is still covered with permanent ice cap. Vatnajökull is Europe’s largest glacier—a piece of ice the size of Puerto Rico.
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Actually rather no, as you just proved with your link and your copy paste summery.
Do you have problems with numbers?
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Do you have problems with understanding?
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No, you have problems in understanding: only 11% are covered permanently in ice.
So: it is definitely not majouribyle: ice/snow. Oops.
Oh: and Germany also only "green in summer", oops.
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ObXKCD: https://xkcd.com/2278/ [xkcd.com]
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Greenland was named by a Viking real estate developer. Just like Vinland, but Greenland was closer.
Opportunity knocks! (Score:3)
Need to capture that fresh water. There are a ton of places it can be sold!
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Need to capture that fresh water. There are a ton of places it can be sold!
I live in drought-plagued California. Water here costs $1 per HCF or about 30 cents per ton.
Good luck shipping a product thousands of miles, pumping it a thousand feet uphill, and still making a profit at 30 cents per ton.
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Need to capture that fresh water. There are a ton of places it can be sold!
I live in drought-plagued California. Water here costs $1 per HCF or about 30 cents per ton.
Good luck shipping a product thousands of miles, pumping it a thousand feet uphill, and still making a profit at 30 cents per ton.
I live in California. Believe me, I don't like to admit this, but people here just might buy Greenland water in bottles, because marketing.
But no, that would not be an opportunity. That would be deck-chair designers pitching new flotation-friendly concepts to the Titanic decorators as the ship was sinking.
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What we really need right now is water to fall out of the sky over the whole state over a few days and put out all this toxic-air-creating fire.
And let the mudslides begin.
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Put out fires [Re:Opportunity knocks!] (Score:1)
Maybe nuking Greenland will create rain. Of course give the population time to evacuate.
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That's the beauty of it. You can dump it in an ocean on the other side of the planet and pick it back up anywhere else in the world on a coastline, because it's water.
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So long as you're willing to remove all the substances that are dissolved into it, such as salt...
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... and harmful chemicals, harmful bacteria, harmful viruses, etc. So yes, it's that easy!
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Historically, we used to do just that. Before refrigeration became a thing, but after shipping of frozen food and flash freezing of food was invented, there used to be massive ships transporting huge blocks of ice across oceans to be used in food industry.
Another Opportunity knocks! (Score:2)
ancient secrets (Score:2)
"Greenland ice sheet is 1 million years old, each layer of that sheet is full of ancient secrets"
Better send Daniel Jackson there then...
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Unfortunately, a lot of the melt *is* from the bottom. Less than half, but a lot. The melt water from the top leaks down to the base to lubricate the flow of the ice, and when it does so it causes the lowest levels of ice to also melt.
Data (Score:3, Informative)
This is before even looking at the quality of their computer model.
Re:Data (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not sure I would trust the paper either. I heard it was written by Brent Spiner, and we all know how good he is at manipulating Data.
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The paper describes a computer model...
There's also some good ice data coming out from the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) and GRACE–Follow On [nasa.gov] satellites.
https://gracefo.jpl.nasa.gov/n... [nasa.gov]
https://gracefo.jpl.nasa.gov/d... [nasa.gov]
Most recent GRACE-FO paper on Greenland ice is here, FWIW: https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
Why so skeptical? (Score:1)
I'm sure that model builds on the data from the satellites launched by Og and Zog's aerospace company back in 7000BC...
People keep forgetting that our first satellites that could see ANYTHING related to climate were only capable of returning low-res grayscale images and that was only about 50 years ago. Before that, all the data was from ground observations, or observations by sailors at sea, with the exception of data from aviation from this most-recent century. EVERYTHING else is indirect observation of t
oh well (Score:2)
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Re: oh well (Score:2)
This is why we need to stop building coal plants (Score:2)
We need to move to all sorts of AE (wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, etc), as well as nukes.
We need to stop nations like Germany, China, India, Japan, S. Korea, etc from building new coal plants while getting nearly ALL NATIONS to drop their emissions. It does not matter how high they are. It matter that nearly all nations emit way too much and a number of them continue to increase yearly, as opposed to dropping. [europa.eu]
Even if you look at per capita data, we need to get all nations bel [europa.eu]
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We need to stop nations like Germany, China, India, Japan, S. Korea, etc
All those countries are cleaner than the US [ourworldindata.org]
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13k years ago (Score:3)
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It's because your mom's mom took a vacation there.
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Re: 13k years ago (Score:1)
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And supposedly 2 mega volcano eruptions below the American ice shield, around the area of the big lakes.
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Too bad there isn't a stupid mod. Your statement is true, but nearly irrelevant. That are multiple reasons that climate changes, and humans are only one of them. (The first human driven global warming was probably rice paddies, though that was minor, but it significantly raised the methane levels.)
Various modifiers of climate include volcanoes, meteors, comets?, continental drift, etc. The speed, however, is not constant across these. Volcanoes have faster effects than human driven changes, and meteors
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Further back than 12k years it was melting faster? Is it because of the other industrial revolution that happened 13k years ago?
Might have been the end of an ice age, maybe. (That's due to orbital wobbles, by the way). The current state of orbital wobbles should have us getting cooler at the moment, as was the case for the last 8000 years.
Really. (Score:2, Funny)
"An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian".
Not an encouraging start.
Fake ice (Score:1)
Fake news, fake glaciers, fake water, don't listen to the sciencey nonsense, trust the high quality info on Facebook for the real truth. MAGA, vote Trump. ~
Kiss UR ass goodbye (Score:2)
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Probably not. It's just a little (12,000 year) added context to that rate.
The solution is clear (Score:3)
"Greenland's ice sheet shrank between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago, and has been slowly cumulating over the past 4,000 years"
Well, then, we just need to take whatever drastic steps our ancestors took 4,000 - 7,000 years ago to get the ice re-accumulating. Problem solved. You are welcome.
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"Greenland's ice sheet shrank between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago, and has been slowly cumulating over the past 4,000 years"
7000-4000 years ago it was static. It had been increasing 4000 years ago to present.
Well, then, we just need to take whatever drastic steps our ancestors took 4,000 - 7,000 years ago to get the ice re-accumulating. Problem solved. You are welcome.
It's due to orbital effects.
Poor glacier management (Score:4, Funny)
This is due to poor glacier management. If Greenland had managed their glaciers better, this wouldn't be a problem!
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This is due to poor glacier management. If Greenland had managed their glaciers better, this wouldn't be a problem!
If only they'd rake them like Finland does to their forests. All this could be avoided.
12,000 years is not a long time (Score:1)
Geologically speaking. The current ice age, not interglacial period, that we are still exiting from, is 3 million years old.
Wanna be what happens in December/January? (Score:1)
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They will talk about how much ice is "growing" in the Greenland area, and then how fast it is melting in Antarctica. Duh! The tilt of the Earth in relation to the sun causes ice to melt in the northern hemisphere from around May to October and melt in the southern hemisphere from around October to May. "worst in 120,000 years" More climate change BS!
Please get some science education.
We are still in an Ice Age! (Score:2)
How Can that Be? I use Paper Straw! (Score:2, Funny)
This is an interglacial period (Score:2)
Melting is what normally happens in an interglacial period. Not coincidentally, the last glacial period ended around 12,000 years ago.
Go figure.
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Our local glacier has a sign about climate change lamenting that the glacier is shrinking and that this could mean one day there will be no water downstream of it for people to drink. What they don't mention is that if it weren't shrinking, there ALSO would be no water downstream of it, as that is the source of the river!
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If that were the case, then the river would still flow with no glacier at all, as the amount of accumulation would be the same with or without it. What they are pointing out is that without the glacier actively shrinking, there wouldn't be as much water downstream, but then getting upset that it's actively shrinking. You can't have it both ways!
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If that were the case, then the river would still flow with no glacier at all, as the amount of accumulation would be the same with or without it. What they are pointing out is that without the glacier actively shrinking, there wouldn't be as much water downstream, but then getting upset that it's actively shrinking. You can't have it both ways!
Seriously stupid as can be demonstrated from ice cores going back a century [realclimate.org]
Want to see people legitimately freakout? (Score:2)
Just wait until the day we pass peak-warming in this current interglacial period.
When the dive into the next ice age begins and people realize that the planet is getting inexorably cooler decade-by decade, and that humans cannot stop it no matter how much they burn, and they then consider the problem of feeding billions of people on a world largely covered in ice where most current farmland is going to be under a mile of the stuff and blocked from sunlight...
and maybe THAT is the point when people will reme
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There isn't going to be a next Ice Age until we're gone
If we are lucky. Keep the good thought.
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Just wait until the day we pass peak-warming in this current interglacial period.
When the dive into the next ice age begins and people realize that the planet is getting inexorably cooler decade-by decade, and that humans cannot stop it no matter how much they burn
This is the period we have been in for the last 4000 years. Human activity has reversed it entirely.
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Melting is what normally happens in an interglacial period. Not coincidentally, the last glacial period ended around 12,000 years ago.
Go figure.
The warming period of this interglacial period ended 8000 years ago. Ice increased in Greenland over the last 4000 years because of this. It is tied to orbital effects. The last 200 years has reversed this trend despite the orbital effects indicating we should be getting continued cooling.
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Some "scientists" find the MWO and LIA highly inconvenient and try to downplay or erase them. Good on you for at least knowing they exist.
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Some "scientists" find the MWO and LIA highly inconvenient and try to downplay or erase them. Good on you for at least knowing they exist.
I know some climate scientists and they aren't biased like you seem to imagine. In fact they would much rather find that climate change wasn't happening, although in some ways if it turned out it was not caused by humans that's more worrying as it would mean we have no control over it.
Cue the denialism in 3....2....1 (Score:1)