More global alarming

(originally posted July 10, 2008)

Antarctic ice shelf 'hanging by thread': European scientists

AFP Thu Jul 10, 1:57 PM ET
PARIS (AFP) - New evidence has emerged that a large plate of floating ice shelf attached to Antarctica is breaking up, in a troubling sign of global warming, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Thursday.

Images taken by its Envisat remote-sensing satellite show that Wilkins Ice Shelf is "hanging by its last thread" to Charcot Island, one of the plate's key anchors to the Antarctic peninsula, ESA said in a press release.

"Since the connection to the island... helps stabilise the ice shelf, it is likely the breakup of the bridge will put the remainder of the ice shelf at risk," it said.
Wilkins Ice Shelf had been stable for most of the last century, covering around 16,000 square kilometres (6,000 square miles), or about the size of Northern Ireland, before it began to retreat in the 1990s.

Since then several large areas have broken away, and two big breakoffs this year left only a narrow ice bridge about 2.7 kilometres (1.7 miles) wide to connect the shelf to Charcot and nearby Latady Island.

The latest images, taken by Envisat's radar, say fractures have now opened up in this bridge and adjacent areas of the plate are disintegrating, creating large icebergs.

Scientists are puzzled and concerned by the event, ESA added.

The Antarctic peninsula -- the tongue of land that juts northward from the white continent towards South America -- has had one of the highest rates of warming anywhere in the world in recent decades.

But this latest stage of the breakup occurred during the Southern Hemisphere's winter, when atmospheric temperatures are at their lowest.

One idea is that warmer water from the Southern Ocean is reaching the underside of the ice shelf and thinning it rapidly from underneath.

"Wilkins Ice Shelf is the most recent in a long, and growing, list of ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula that are responding to the rapid warming that has occurred in this area over the last fifty years," researcher David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said.

"Current events are showing that we were being too conservative, when we made the prediction in the early 1990s that Wilkins Ice Shelf would be lost within 30 years. The truth is, it is going more quickly than we guessed."

In the past three decades, six Antarctic ice shelves have collapsed completely -- Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and the Jones Ice Shelf.

This is what makes Global Warming so great... maybe I am so ardent about pointing out how it is all made up fantasies because I'm not the one getting rich off of it. I love science fiction, Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, but when it comes to the real world, I like sustainable proof. In this case the story obviously misconstrues the facts or they interviewed people who know nothing about the earth, weather, geology, physics, oceanography...

Now anyone who has a basic understanding of any of the sciences mentioned above probably understands why the ice shelves are breaking off, and they most equally understand those pushing the fictional Global Warming rely on bad science such as explained in the article being fed to the masses. And it dovetails nicely with last years record melting of the Arctic ice cap which received tons of media play about the north pole melting. Except it is a false conclusion.

The south pole has accumulated record amounts of ice and snow in the past decades. The current station at the south pole sits at about 9300 feet above sea level, the original station at the south pole sits at about 9100 feet above sea level, about 200 feet of now has accumulated in 50 years.

The weight of the fresh snow compacts the snow below it into hardpack ice, it also forces it outward and off the continent and over the ocean. The hardpack ice has a slight positive buoyancy, so it just barely floats, but eventually it grows out so far off the land that the buoyancy causes a fissure somewhere between the outer most edge and land. These giant shelves have not been observed to float away, they usually get caught on an island or underwater feature such as a sand bar, where the warmer water of the convection current hammers away at it until it starts to calve ice bergs and it eventually disappears. During this stage the fissure between the main glacier and the shelf may freeze, melt, and refreeze, but eventually it will succumb to the sea.

You see, these shelves calving are signs of a healthy environment, not one being ravaged by global warming.