National Ice Center Photos Confirm Large Cracks In E. Ross Ice Shelf

[hatrack]

"The National Ice Center's (NIC) featured product is an image (Figure 1) of the Ross Ice Shelf, North and West of Roosevelt Island (Figure 2). Significant feature in this image are the large fractures (indicated by the blue arrows) in the Ross Ice Shelf. The NIC is closely monitoring these fractures in the Ross Ice Shelf in the event of future iceberg calvings. Ms. Judy Shaffier, a NIC Senior Ice Analyst/Forecaster, analyzed and annotated the image using visible Defense Meteorological Satellite Program's (DMSP) Operational Line Scan (OLS) infra-red image of the Ross Ice Shelf from 11 January 2004."

EDIT

http://www.natice.noaa.gov/products/featured_product/index.htm

I posted on this back in December, but haven't seen much in general on the topic.

[On the Road]

1. Hey -- Something in "The Day After Tommorow" Actually Happened!

[phantom power]

9. been happening for a few years now

very very large chunks of the ice shelf have been calving off over the last few years. A chunk the size of New Jersey broke off a couple years ago.

[Dogmudgeon]

18. Actually, a lot of things

Some of them were not shown in the movie, but all of them are happening:

Ice shelf cracks

"Cryometeors" (huge chunks of ice falling out of the sky)

Polar cyclonic storms with hundred-degree temperature drops (though not as large or as extreme as in the movie)

North Atlantic current failures (this summer was the worst in history for Gulf Stream velocity drop and current cessation)

Polar heat wave well into its 3rd year; average temperature anomaly now at +8C.

Winter weather in Northern Europe during the summer; cool summer in eastern North America with persistent high pressure over the Canadian Laurentide (Quebec/NF/Maritimes)

Asian monsoon problems, possible failure this year

Unusually active Atlantic hurricane season with a large proportion of major hurricanes

Significant increase in dust storms (in news this week)

Significant increase in floods (in news last week)

Significant increase in tornadoes (including a winter tornado in New Zealand recently)

Verification that atmospheric CO₂ has hit 393 ppm and is now increasing at 3 ppm per year

Thousands of forest fires in Indonesia, SE Asia, and China

Die-off of honeybees, butterflies, several species of songbirds

Die-off of several species of ocean fish

Reduced capacity (~50%) of oceans to "sink" atmospheric CO₂

Methane emerging as a major greenhouse gas

Severe millennial drought in the North American West

Temperature of upper troposphere and stratosphere unusually low and falling (in progress since the middle 1990s)

Kyoto won't even start to undo the damage.

--bkl

[brokensymmetry]

19. I've been reading "The end of oil"

and it discusses how China is building large numbers of old-style coal fired electrical generation facilities. So is India. They're building lots of them....

I suspect we'll see 450ppm CO2 way faster than we anticipate. The future will, I suspect, be quite a bumpy ride.

[DeadHead67]

2. Enlighten Me . . . . .

Where is the Ross Ice Shelf? Duh!

[hatrack]

4. Antarctica

It's the part of the ice front that fronts (roughly) onto the central and western Pacific Ocean.

[Occulus]

3. DAY-ammm!

That's half the shelf!!

CRAP!!!

[hatrack]

5. Not quite that big - the shelf extends all the way West to McMurdo

Certainly a big crack, though.

[MaryH]

6. There Goes LA

I don't understand why the oceans don't seem to be rising as the northern ice melts. Why isn't Malibu under water?

[jshafted]

7. It's simple

The Ice in the north is floating in the ocean, thus as it melts the water takes up the same amount of space as it displaces in solid form

[MajorFlaw]

8. This is just the tip of the iceberg. 30% of the world's water is frozen

on the continent of Antarctica. It's not the current situation which is disastrous, it is what will follow if we don't take this very seriously.

[Oggy]

10. Greenland Ice melt

will have a quicker impact from what i've read.

[MajorFlaw]

13. The frozen water which covers Antarctica is, at places,

miles thick. The Erebus Glacier Tongue, a common measure of whether ice is accumulating or melting, has taken a real hit over the last few years. It's almost gone. I'd be interested in reading a link (if you have it) which compares the relative risks of a meltdown of Greenland vs. Antarctica. To me, the only "global warming" argument worth discussing is what we are going to do to prevent it from killing us. Human existence on this planet is taken for granted by us, yet we may be the fossils the surviving species of the next disaster place in a museum.

[Oggy]

14. No real comparative study has been done

but Greenland is thought by experts to be more sensitive to Global Warming/Climate Change due its more temperate location. So basically it will melt first.

"What we see happening in Greenland may be an indication of the bigger picture," said Waleed Abdalati, another NASA scientist and a co-author of the study. The Greenland ice sheet, he said, is more sensitive to climate change than the ice in Antarctica because Greenland has a more temperate climate.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/07/21/archive/main217436.shtml

[Kool Kitty]

16. There was a good article in yesterday's NYTimes

about the melting of the Greenland Ice Cap.

Geez, there's a big Emperor penguin colony on the Ross Ice Shelf. Hope they move.

[kestrel91316]

17. Nope, LA is safe..............

even Santa Monica sits on some high bluffs right at the beach. BUT...............there goes Miami, Charleston, New Orleans, Galveston, Biloxi, DC, NYC, and Cape Cod.

[meow mix]

11. its gonna be winter there soon yes?

but this will be.. what, the 5th "delaware-sized" shelf breakoff in the past few years?

[hatrack]

12. Midwinter's Day a week from next Monday down there

Major calvings usually happen in February or March, at the end of the austral summer.

In the same way, minimum ice extent in the Arctic is usually around the beginning of fall, after the region's had time to soak up a full spring & summer's worth of sun.

[meow mix]

15. heres good article dealing with ice shelves. other events..

it mentions occured very suddenly!
a fracture appeared (much like the one shown here) and the breaking happened within weeks/months.

anyways..
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2004/585/585p10.htm

The Larsen and Wilkins shelves are relatively insignificant in Antarctic terms. A much greater concern is if the massive ROSS and the Filchner-Ronne ice shelves begin to collapse. The Ross and the Filchner-Ronne ice shelves prevent the gigantic land-based Western Antarctic Ice Sheet from rapidly entering the ocean, where it would melt rapidly.

The Western Antarctic Ice Sheet is the smaller of Antarctica's two vast sheets, but it is the most active (the vastly larger Eastern Antarctic Ice Sheet is cradled in a bowl of mountains). It alone contains a mind-boggling 3.2 million cubic kilometres of ice, about 10% of the world’s ice — enough to raise the sea level six metres. (If the eastern sheet melted, the sea level would rise more than 60 metres!)

Within the western sheet are five ice streams — enormous rivers of ice more than 50 kilometres wide and one kilometre thick — which move towards the ocean at speeds of up to one metre a day. The Ross Ice Shelf — floating ice nearly the size of New South Wales — and similarly sized Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf prevent these ice rivers from sliding into the sea where they would rapidly melt.

http://nsidc.org/iceshelves/larsenb2002/animation.html