Antarctic ice shelf set to collapse due to warming

It is melting because it is SUMMER in south hemisphere.

Just Wondering why its spamming when a heretic posts a few times. After all he doesn't have the greatest number of post on this thread does he?

650? Do people actually think that's a large number of international scientists? I have more than 650 'Scientists' in one department of one school of my Alma Mater. I actually thought it would be more, I assumed oil companies, car manufacturers, and republican representatives had more money to throw around to get their 'scientific data' heard.

Now you're spamming. Upset?

Good to know that the information I posted here is such a threat to your propaganda that you have to keep coming back. Keep pumping this thread up. More people will actually see the informed view that way.

lol

Damn the "Alien Overlords", damn them all to hell!

This isn't something that can be fixed in a day, week, month, year, or decade. The sad fact is that chances are, it can never be fixed. The industrial revolution has killed us all. The most we can hope for is that the halting of the north atlantic and gulf streams will balance out the melting glaciers and we can live long enough to see the zombie apocalypse brought on by nanotechnology.

Frimer, your ignorance is terrifying. There are few things agreed on by a vast majority of scientists, but Global Warming is one of those. So is Evolution. I can find a scientist that says we evolved from penguins and that space is just a holographic projection on the sky from our alien overlords (if I paid him enough), but that doesn't make it a fact.

OK, so one winter is not a climate maker. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.

But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.

Global Warming doesn't just mean "warming of the earth," it knocks our whole ecosystem out of whack. Whether or not we're the cause or not, we, as humans need to reevaluate our consuming and discarding of trash.

"when you throw something away, it's never really away."
I heard that on current tv. i heard that!

Hey, just a thought, but what if at one time, say Venus was a habitable planet. Then because the universe changes like, the Earth and human beings change, Venus started to become a harsh planet to live on. Maybe the Earth is going through the same thing. Look at Mars. There are more and more signs that Mars may be a habitable planet in the future. As it gets more habitable, Earth becomes more harsh, environmentally.

Maybe it's just a natural cycle, afterall, we're just human beings, it's not like we can survive anything like cockroaches.

But, this is all theory. Or to really piss people off: it's fact!

Up to 59cm! Tabasco and New Orleans are f ckd :(

this is serious... when are we going to start paying more attention to the environment and less to meaningless pastimes...

The leveling of mountaintops in W. VA for coal is horrible!
Keeping my fingers crossed and still writing letters, urging elected officials to do some research before they vote on decisions.
I even send them parts of articles and links to said articles.
Haven't received much response.

cool, more fresh drinking water

This story is really sad. Get ready for higher ocean levels and God only knows what other consequences.

Hopefully this transition will happen before all the mountains are blasted away in W. Virginia.

Even Antarctic bases are turning to renewables.

Couldn't agree with you more. Solar energy is coming into grid parity and will be cheaper very soon. We have to push that. Once solar is seen as more economical it will take off and coal will be left in the dust.

Hey Jan, so how do you reconcile your love for Gore with the fact that his family is one of the single largest polluter in the US?

Clean coal is a total waste of money and nothing more than wishful thinking. Although CO2 capture might be possible from a technical standpoint, it doesn't make it clean. From a financial standpoint, it will never be affordable on a widescale basis. It will never happen, everyone knows it, and I wish they would push back on the coal industry and be done with it. So tired about hearing about clean coal.

I agree, as long as pushing clean coal as renewable energy is not part of their agenda. Steven Chu backtracked at his confirmation hearing stating that clean coal was part of their energy mix. It can't be if emissions are going to be reduced adequately and in time. Especially since there is no such thing as clean coal.

I am hopefully optimistic. I think this is going to be key to rebuilding the economy. At least it is an opportunity -- what we do with it is another issue. And as of noon, we have an administration that is miles ahead of the last one on this issue.

Hi jeff. Well, let's just say I remain cautiously optimistic. I along with so many others have been waiting to see our environment be a first priority because so much more hinges on it, especially now. However, I read an article the other day wherein Nancy Pelosi indicated that this may not even be voted on this year. It then surely is the American people who are way out in front of politicians regarding the urgency of this and who will have to continue ro demand action. To continue to push the 80% reductions by 2050 line in my view is just not going to hack it at this point.

Hi Jan. Hopefully this will be high up on the priority list. If this administration doesn't do it, it isn't going to happen. But we as individuals have to keep demanding action from our leaders, as well as doing things in our daily life that can make a difference.

cont.

Vaughan stuck a GPS monitoring station on a long metal pole into the Wilkins ice on behalf of Dutch scientists. It will track ice movements via satellite.

The shelf is named after Australian George Hubert Wilkins, an early Antarctic aviator who is set to join an exclusive club of people who have a part of the globe named after them that later vanishes.

Loss of ice shelves does not raise sea levels significantly because the ice is floating and already mostly submerged by the ocean. But the big worry is that their loss will allow ice sheets on land to move faster, adding extra water to the seas.

Wilkins has almost no pent-up glaciers behind it. But ice shelves further south hold back vast volumes of ice. "When those are removed the glaciers will flow faster," Vaughan said.

Temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula have warmed by about 3 Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) since 1950, the fastest rise in the southern hemisphere. There is little sign of warming elsewhere in Antarctica.

BAS scientists and two Reuters reporters stayed about an hour on the shelf at a point about 2 km wide.

"It's very unlikely that our presence here is enough to initiate any cracks," Vaughan said. "But it is likely to happen fairly soon, weeks to months, and I don't want to be here when it does."

The U.N. Climate Panel, of which Vaughan is a senior member, projected in 2007 that world sea levels were likely to rise by between 18 and 59 cm (7 and 23 inches) this century.

But it did not factor in any possible acceleration of ice loss from Antarctica. Even a small change in the rate could affect sea levels, and Antarctica's ice sheets contain enough water in total to raise world sea levels by 57 meters.

About 190 nations have agreed to work out a new U.N. treaty by the end of 2009 to slow global warming, reining in emissions from burning fossil fuels in power plants, cars and factories.

From the article:

Antarctica (Reuters) - A huge Antarctic ice shelf is on the brink of collapse with just a sliver of ice holding it in place, the latest victim of global warming that is altering maps of the frozen continent.

"We've come to the Wilkins Ice Shelf to see its final death throes," David Vaughan, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), told Reuters after the first -- and probably last -- plane landed near the narrowest part of the ice.

The flat-topped shelf has an area of thousands of square kilometers, jutting 20 meters (65 ft) out of the sea off the Antarctic Peninsula.

But it is held together only by an ever-thinning 40-km (25-mile) strip of ice that has eroded to an hour-glass shape just 500 meters wide at its narrowest.

In 1950, the strip was almost 100 km wide.

"It really could go at any minute," Vaughan said on slushy snow in bright sunshine beside a red Twin Otter plane that landed on skis. He added that the ice bridge could linger weeks or months.

The Wilkins once covered 16,000 sq km (6,000 sq miles). It has lost a third of its area but is still about the size of Jamaica or the U.S. state of Connecticut. Once the strip breaks up, the sea is likely to sweep away much of the remaining ice.

Icebergs the shape and size of shopping malls already dot the sea around the shelf as it disintegrates. Seals bask in the southern hemisphere summer sunshine on icebergs by expanses of open water.

A year ago, BAS said the Wilkins was "hanging by a thread" after an aerial survey. "Miraculously we've come back a summer later and it's still here. If it was hanging by a thread last year, it's hanging by a filament this year," Vaughan said.

Nine other shelves have receded or collapsed around the Antarctic peninsula in the past 50 years, often abruptly like the Larsen A in 1995 or the Larsen B in 2002. The trend is widely blamed on climate change caused by heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels.

WARMING TO BLAME

"This ice shelf and the nine other shelves that we have seen with a similar trajectory are a consequence of warming," Vaughan said.

In total, about 25,000 sq km of ice shelves have been lost, changing maps of Antarctica. Ocean sediments indicate that some shelves had been in place for at least 10,000 years.