Starship Asterisk*

The "Astronomy Picture of the Day" is falsely labeled, "Earth's Shrinking Antarctic Ice Sheet." In reality, the Antarctic ice sheet -- taken as a WHOLE -- is not "shrinking," but is increasing in size. One portion is shrinking, but another (much larger) portion of the sheet is growing so much that it more than offsets the loss of ice from the first portion.

The writer of the APoD story appears to have been fooled by some incompetent people -- possibly even by liars who are pushing a "global warming" theory.

If anyone wants to learn the truth, he/she should read this page and the experts linked there:
http://www.jimmyakin.org/2006/03/the_cold_truth_.html

John

" Being fooled by incompetent people " is surely a problem scintific study has to deal with as well as we mere mortals have to deal with our elected officials being fooled by special agenda groups. That being said, the description of the APOD
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060308.html
relays a scientific fact detected by a satelite that cannot be denied, although the interpretation must be scrutinized by common sense

I just joined the 20th century and acquired a laptop, with very sensitive keys

Yes, it's not shrinking, it's Melting !!! (morons of the world unite, you have nothing to loose [sic] but your own IQ's)

And you'll be bubbling in your own stool sample soon, once the oceans rise and the sewers backup.

One nice consistancy in all of this global activity is change.

It's the ice that is not_floating in the water that is going to make the sea level rise once it gets to the ocean.

http://amrc.ssec.wise.edu/ice_images/ic ... N06055.JPG ,, satellite visible photo

http://amrc.ssec.wisc.edu/iceberg.html ,, main page

{and they say breaking up is hard to do}

So it's melting/So it's swapping ends
Wouldn't the amount of water melting off be offset by displacement of the ice? Take a glass of ice water...does the level rise after the ice has melted?

Greenland ice sheet melting at escalated rate
February 16th, 2006

NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen in the Independent on new data showing the Greenland ice sheet is melting far more rapidly than believed possible.

A satellite study of the Greenland ice cap shows that it is melting far faster than scientists had feared - twice as much ice is going into the sea as it was five years ago. The implications for rising sea levels - and climate change - could be dramatic.

Yet, a few weeks ago, when I - a Nasa climate scientist - tried to talk to the media about these issues following a lecture I had given calling for prompt reductions in the emission of greenhouse gases, the Nasa public affairs team - staffed by political appointees from the Bush administration - tried to stop me doing so. I was not happy with that, and I ignored the restrictions. The first line of Nasa’s mission is to understand and protect the planet.

This new satellite data is a remarkable advance. We are seeing for the first time the detailed behaviour of the ice streams that are draining the Greenland ice sheet. They show that Greenland seems to be losing at least 200 cubic kilometres of ice a year. It is different from even two years ago, when people still said the ice sheet was in balance.

Hundreds of cubic kilometres sounds like a lot of ice. But this is just the beginning. Once a sheet starts to disintegrate, it can reach a tipping point beyond which break-up is explosively rapid. The issue is how close we are getting to that tipping point. The summer of 2005 broke all records for melting in Greenland. So we may be on the edge.

Our understanding of what is going on is very new. Today’s forecasts of sea-level rise use climate models of the ice sheets that say they can only disintegrate over a thousand years or more. But we can now see that the models are almost worthless. They treat the ice sheets like a single block of ice that will slowly melt. But what is happening is much more dynamic.

Once the ice starts to melt at the surface, it forms lakes that empty down crevasses to the bottom of the ice. You get rivers of water underneath the ice. And the ice slides towards the ocean.

Our Nasa scientists have measured this in Greenland. And once these ice streams start moving, their influence stretches right to the interior of the ice sheet. Building an ice sheet takes a long time, because it is limited by snowfall. But destroying it can be explosively rapid.

How fast can this go? Right now, I think our best measure is what happened in the past. We know that, for instance, 14,000 years ago sea levels rose by 20m in 400 years - that is five metres in a century. This was towards the end of the last ice age, so there was more ice around. But, on the other hand, temperatures were not warming as fast as today.

How far can it go? The last time the world was three degrees warmer than today - which is what we expect later this century - sea levels were 25m higher. So that is what we can look forward to if we don’t act soon. None of the current climate and ice models predict this. But I prefer the evidence from the Earth’s history and my own eyes. I think sea-level rise is going to be the big issue soon, more even than warming itself.

It’s hard to say what the world will be like if this happens. It would be another planet. You could imagine great armadas of icebergs breaking off Greenland and melting as they float south. And, of course, huge areas being flooded.

How long have we got? We have to stabilise emissions of carbon dioxide within a decade, or temperatures will warm by more than one degree. That will be warmer than it has been for half a million years, and many things could become unstoppable. If we are to stop that, we cannot wait for new technologies like capturing emissions from burning coal. We have to act with what we have. This decade, that means focusing on energy efficiency and renewable sources of energy that do not burn carbon. We don’t have much time left.

Jim Hansen, the director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, is President George Bush’s top climate modeller. He was speaking to Fred Pearce

====

So right Sherlock; floating ice weighs the same as the water it is displacing, so as it melts the sea surface remains the same.
Land based ice is the bugaboo, once in the water the water level is raised., so if the entire Greenland ice sheet slid off cause of a volcanic eruption or something; the sea level would rise right then, forget about the time it would take for the ice to melt. Just like droping ice cubes in a tall drink, the level rises right then.

sherlock wrote:So it's melting/So it's swapping ends
Wouldn't the amount of water melting off be offset by displacement of the ice? Take a glass of ice water...does the level rise after the ice has melted?

That would depend on the temperature of the water. Water contracts with falling temperature (like most other things), until it hits 4 degrees (C) when it starts expanding again. So ice has a greater volume than cold water. I can't believe you don't know that - don't they teach anything in schools these days?

Well, I must say, my first day at trying my hand at posting here was both humbling and educational. I suppose I tend to spout off my first thoughts without thinking it completely through.
Of course, surface ice meltdown didn't occur to me.
And, oh yeah, that thermal expansion thing slipped by me too.
I will do my level best to not bore everyone with any more laymen postings. Thanks for the spanking.

Actually, floating ice, when it melts, really should raise the sea level, albeit only slightly compared to non-floating ice melt. Sea water is more dense than fresh water, and ice is (primarily) composed of fresh water. As it melts, it dilutes the sea water, lowering its density. No?

Or another way of looking at it, one tonne of floating freshwater ice will displace one tonne of seawater. The density of liquid fresh water is 1 tonne per cubic meter, while the density of liquid salt water is somewhat higher (by roughly 3% or so). This floating tonne of ice, then is displacing less than a cubic meter of seawater. However, when the ice melts, it will become a cubic meter of freshwater, which is a higher volume of water than it was originally displacing as floating ice. Thus, an increase of sea level.

Someone tell me if that makes sense.

Another thought not found here is how much of the melting ice becomes water vapour being added to the atmosphere and carried and deposited on land masses, not directly affecting ocean water levels ?

[quote="Qev"]Actually, floating ice, when it melts, really should raise the sea level, albeit only slightly compared to non-floating ice melt. Sea water is more dense than fresh water, and ice is (primarily) composed of fresh water. As it melts, it dilutes the sea water, lowering its density. No?

Or another way of looking at it, one tonne of floating freshwater ice will displace one tonne of seawater. The density of liquid fresh water is 1 tonne per cubic meter, while the density of liquid salt water is somewhat higher (by roughly 3% or so). This floating tonne of ice, then is displacing less than a cubic meter of seawater. However, when the ice melts, it will become a cubic meter of freshwater, which is a higher volume of water than it was originally displacing as floating ice. Thus, an increase of sea level.

Someone tell me if that makes sense. :)[/quote]


Kinda not really. Water always has the same displacement in respect of other water around it, whether it's liquid or ice. If a piece of ice is floating, the part that is above the surface will represent its excesss volume as a result of it being frozen. When floating ice melts, the water level will stay the same.

When pack ice melts, ie. ice resting on land, then you will get a rise in water level. This is why a complet meltdown of the *Arctic* polar ice cap would have no effect on sea levels. The pack ice resting on top of Greenland and Antarctica, on the other hand, would.

Sherlock olde chap, it was a grumpy morning; the new GRB is agitating the high pressured quarks in the sun and jupiter and everyone is overly dogmatic today as a result, so please don't feel reprimanded too harshly, it's just the life and times of the poster children, of which I am one too.

I've never worked in a bureaucracy, but if things get done and figured out as fast as they do on this board, ?

In the 1960's somebody had an idea to tow an iceberg to Los Angeles to help solve the drinking water shortage. Only 1/2 of it would melt in the two year trip from the antarctic. I wonder what would tow B15a? That would make a boat load of snow cones !
On a second thought about it this morning, it seemed like a more feasible idea these days than it did then. At least we would get some nice water out of the deal of the icebergs falling off.

I wonder how much it would cool off the prevailing breeze on a hot day in Santa Monica to have 3400 cubic kilometers of ice anchored to Catalina Island ! or jammed inbetween LA and Catalina in the channel ! hahaha
Wouldn't it be a hoot if Cristo or somebody did it for a lark !
He could carve it to look like a big surfboard !
It's long enough you could land the space shuttle on it in a pinch.
And cool enough to take off from too.

One thing about icebergs when they melt the freshwater melt stays on the seasurface, if the temperature doesn't carry it lower and make it mix and dilute the sea. I can see it going both ways here, either floating on top of the denser sea water, or sinking and mixing as it is much colder.
I vote for it to mix a little due to cold sinking, but 70% of it to remain near the surface, top 200 ' of sea surface over medium term.
Ships will ride lower in the water, 2% lowriders near the bergs.

I wonder how long it would take to mostly disappear by melting.
A heat flow diagram makes me feel it could be over a decade, and no where near 1/2 would be lost in the tow. Maybe that was to include chunks breaking off, and if they actually got 1/2 of it there, that would be a big success.

It could have an affect on the temperature of the warmer ocean water causing a slight cooling along the equator as it passes. Probably no net effect though. But???

[quote="

In the 1960's somebody had an idea to tow an iceberg to Los Angeles to help solve the drinking water shortage. Only 1/2 of it would melt in the two year trip from the antarctic.


Yeah, I remember now. it was an article in Popular Mechanics so long ago.

I see that my opening post for this thread was not refuted [thank you!], though it was countered by some extraneous material -- a typical tactic of ultra-liberal hand-wringers who want to "cover" for the embarrassed writer of the faulty APoD description (by changing the subject). This thread is not about Greenland, global warming, and the other irrelevant matters that were mentioned. It is about the Antarctic ice sheet growing, as a whole.

At least one of you geniuses should have realized that the Antartic mass is taking on some of the water that is melting elsewhere. But no, that would have been too optimistic an idea to even occur to you prophets of gloom and doom.

Well, you worry-wart liberals tend not to live as long as the average person (being more likely to be done in by AIDS, illegal drugs, drunk driving, etc.), so I'm afraid that you probably won't be around enough years to realize that this whole business (melting, warming, etc.) was never anything to worry and whine about.

God bless you.

<One portion is shrinking, but another (much larger) portion of the sheet is growing so much that it more than offsets the loss of ice from the first portion. >

If you mean by this statement that the higher elevation central portion of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is receiving more precipitation than the peripheral areas are losing in calving and melt; then I disagree with you.

There is a presumptive theory that as global warming occurs the moisture content of the atmosphere rises and precipitation amounts will increase in Antarctica, partially ballancing any peripheral losses. The peripheral losses will still outweigh any precipitational gains tho. It is merely a mitigating event.

Planetary overall ice formations are in an accellerating melting phase,
they are certainly not in an accumulating or growing phase. All studies show glaciers thinning, receeding, and diminishing; from Alaska, the Andes, Africa, Tibet, Europe, Australia/New Zealand, Canada.

Do you drive an SUV? Or are you just in denial?

Could increased percip. levals at Antarctica increase the weight at the pole to an extent such that it might then pull the earth out of its current 23deg tilt?

Antarctic precipitation is thinner than; compared to an egg, easter egg dye. I never saw a spinning easter egg out of ballance from being painted. (although when my glasses are out of adjustment everything looks like spinning easter eggs)

There is some concern however that 16 suitcase bombs under the Greenland Ice Sheet would make ice tea of the North Atlantic and Europe.

But then some folks think that http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060122.html ; D.rad Bacteria: can live and have a selfdeterministic fate on Jupiter, and during impact season escape and wander the solar system. Heck they are even here on Earth now. Altered by an acute case of the Jovian Flu.

Easter Egg Suitcase Flu asides; my preferred perspective is;


Thru A Glass Onion Darkly . . .

As simple hydrogen coagulates by gravitational
attraction, random atomic motion collisions transform
into heat. Around 11 million degrees Celcius music
begins, Adagio for the Interior of the Sun, a waltz in
2/4 time, where two protons and two neutrons join
hands and helium is agreed upon.

The requisite two electrons, who ballance the protons
charge, are singing in the choir nearby, but not in
close attendance as when in a much cooler state of
repose.

The stronger the Principle of Undividedness becomes,
the higher the degrees Celcius rise. Like music, where
octaves return to the same letter note, protons and
neutrons have their preferred organization patterns at
certain numbers.
A Music of the Spheres if you will.

Some numbers are quite stable and beautiful in their
symmetry. Neon, argon, krypton, radon, xenon, helium.

Other numbers are quite fearful in thy symmetry.
Radium, uranium, plutonium.

Amongst the multitude of permutations and combinations
of adding one more proton, one more neutron; there
arise the mitigating buffers of stability and reason,
to this otherwise madness in the 'density of energy',
where matter is simply "a special state that energy
has the ability to assume" .

Cadmium welcomes neutrons without getting overheated.
Likewise, uranium hydride with zirconium hydride fuel
rods, mitigates the problem of cold neutrons
overheating the fuel if some idiot pulls the control
rods. Just ask Iranian metallurgist/physicist Massoud
Simnad, who pioneered this elegant solution to the
problem of making a safe nuclear power plant reactor
in 1957 at the Little Red Schoolhouse research design
group.

Music is energy, wavelengths combining to make
harmonies and melodies and when it sings it's
beautiful.
The flipside is like the progressive jazz of the '60's
or so, where a progression of dissonant frequencies
accumulates to produce a cachophany of competing
leading tones.

Perhaps our ultimate desire is to turn the spiggot and
regulate a flow of free energy from just a handful of
dirt.

Our sun converts 4 million tons per second into
radiant energy.
I think that should suffice for our needs!
Let us look in that direction.


jtk

(Geopolitics can be such a dismal subject)

Here's the Bright Side of the Road.

As we step into a conversation in progress about evolution and the nature of consciousness in Freeman Dyson's book 'Disturbing the Universe': p247

" The penguins flipper, the nest building instinct of the swallow, the eye of the hawk, all declare, like the stars and the planets in Addison's eighteenth-century hymn, "The hand that made us is divine." Then came Darwin and Huxley, claiming that the penguin and the swallow and the hawk could be explained by the process of natural selection operating on random hereditary variations over long periods of time."

==

My reaction to that was swift;
It is not random - if I want a better eye, my consciousness strives for that, and my DNA will induce a better eye in a subsequent generation. Consciousness alters DNA.

(now of course Dyson was summarizing Darwin's point of view. He soon adds his own point of view)

==

p.249 " But I, as a physicist cannot help suspecting that there is a logical connection between the two ways in which mind appears in my universe. I cannot help thinking that our awareness of our own brains has something to do with the process which we call "observation" in atomic physics. That is to say, I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical event in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make the choices between one quantum state and another. In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call "chance" when they are made by electrons."


p.250-51 " There are some striking examples in the laws of nuclear physics of numerical accidents that seem to conspire to make the universe habitable. The strength of the attractive nuclear forces is just sufficient to overcome the electrical repulsion between the positive charges in the nuclei of ordinary atoms such as oxygen or iron. But the nuclear forces are not quite strong enough to bind together two protons (hydrogen nuclei) into a bound system, which would be called a diproton if it existed.
If the nuclear forces had been slightly stronger than they are, the diproton would exist and almost all the hydrogen in the universe would have been combined into diprotons and heavier nuclei. Hydrogen would have been a rare element, and stars like the sun, which live for a long time by the slow burning of hydrogen in their cores, could not exist. On the other hand, if the nuclear forces had been substantially weaker than they are, hydrogen could not burn at all and there would be no heavy elements. If, as seems likely, the evolution of life requires a star like the sun, supplying energy at a constant rate for billions of years, then the strength of nuclear forces had to lie within a rather narrow range to make life possible."

==

Here we are in danger of constructing a circular arguement, where the result implies the previous conditions. Benny Hill comes to mind in one of my favorite of his skits; where he is proclaiming
" How did God know man was going to invent glasses? But look where He put our ears !" As he dons his reading glasses and smiles.

to continue; " A similar but independent numerical accident appears in connection with the weak interaction by which hydrogen actually burns in the sun. The weak interaction is millions of times weaker than the nuclear force (often called the strong nuclear force). If the weak interaction were much stronger or much weaker, any forms of life dependent on sunlike stars would again be in difficulties."

" The facts of astronomy include some other numerical accidents that work to our advantage. For example, the universe is built on such a scale that the average distance between stars in an average galaxy like ours is about twenty million million miles, an extravagantly large distance by human standards. If a scientist asserts that the stars at these immense distances have a decisive effect on the possibility of human existance, he will be suspected of being a believer in astrology. But it happens to be true that we could not have survived if the average distance between stars were only two million million miles instead of twenty. If the distance had been smaller by a factor of ten, there would have been a high probability that another star, at some time during the four billion years that the earth has existed, would have passed by the sun close enough to disrupt with its gravitational field the orbits of the planets. To destroy life on earth, it would not be necessary to pull the earth out of the solar system. It would be sufficient merely to pull the earth into a moderately eccentric elliptical orbit."

" All the rich diversity of organic chemistry depends on a delicate ballance between electrical and quantum-mechanical forces. The ballance exists only because the laws of physics include an "exclusion principle" which forbids two electrons to occupy the same state.
If the laws were changed so that electrons no longer excluded each other, none of our essential chemistry would survive. There are many other lucky accidents in atomic physics. Without such accidents, water could not exist as a liquid, chains of carbon atoms could not form complex organic molecules, and hydrogen atoms could not form breakable bridges between molecules."

" I conclude from the existence of these accidents of physics and astronomy that the universe is an unexpectedly hospitable place for living creatures to make their home in. Being a scientist, trained in the habits of thought and language of the twentieth century rather than the eighteenth, I do not claim that the architecture of the universe proves the existance of God, I claim only that the architecture of the universe is consistent with the hypothesis that mind plays an essential role in its functioning."

I had been loosely contemplating all of this earlier this morning, after reading Dyson's chapter last night, and when clicking into the Astronomy Picture of the Day, for today, what should be today's;

[ http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060122.html]
(photo with explanation)

D. rad Bacteria: Candidate Astronauts
Credit: Michael Daly (Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences), DOE

Explanation: These bacteria could survive on another planet. In an Earth lab, Deinococcus radiodurans (D. rad) survive extreme levels of radiation, extreme temperatures, dehydration, and exposure to genotoxic chemicals. Amazingly, they even have the ability to repair their own DNA, usually within 48 hours. Known as an extremophile, bacteria such as D. rad are of interest to NASA partly because they might be adaptable to help human astronauts survive on other worlds. A recent map of D. rad's DNA might allow biologists to augment their survival skills with the ability to produce medicine, clean water, and oxygen. Already they have been genetically engineered to help clean up spills of toxic mercury. Likely one of the oldest surviving life forms, D. rad was discovered by accident in the 1950s when scientists investigating food preservation techniques could not easily kill it. Pictured above, Deinococcus radiodurans grow quietly in a dish.

The evidence of global warming is overwhelming. Anyone with proof [photos or measurements] to the contrary
is highly encouraged to post such images and citations.

But it is not the conversion of ice into seawater and the subsequent rise in sealevel which concerns me the most
[though that alone will be disasterous for the majority of us]

Rather it is the loss of the oceans' temperature buffers. Warming at the equator and cooling at the poles is what
drives our ocean currents. Those movements and temperatures are what drive our weather.

As explained 10 or so years ago; global warming is not just a matter of everything getting a uniform few degrees warmer
but more violent. The differences in our high and low pressures becomes greater and we have wider swings
in surface temperatures and much more destructive storms.

I'm alarmed at the rapid increase in the ice sheet meltings and the lack of our current mathematical modeling to grasp
let alone project the effects.

In man's defense it is still common belief that this global warming is a very long period cycle with man's input being
negligible - but again this premise is based upon modeling projections from observations of earth's past behavior.

Dinosaurs never burned millions of gallons of hydrocarbons daily injecting ALL their gases and byproducts directly
into the lower stratosphere as we do with our inceasant air travel. So we have no prior record upon which to build
a model even if we understood all of the chemical and thermal transformations which take place.

It took quite awhile to model the continuing ozone destructive reactions which chlorine molecules initiate at
higher altitudes. And that was driven by the increased size of the ozone holes which continue to increase in size
and number though the world has put severe restrictions on the manufacture and use of hydrochloroflorocarbons.

Have we already gone too far? Have we passed the point of no return such that there is no corrective
remedy before many species and millions of our own must perish from sudden loss of habitat and/or food?

This latest study published in the BBC news indicates that it is shrinking overall
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4767296.stm

jfgecik, what are your REAL reasons for not believing that global warming is actually happening due to human activities? Are you afraid that if it is true, you would be forced to cut back your wasteful lifestyle of driving gas guzzlers, living in a big house burning incandescent lamps and setting your thermostat at 75 degree F year round? Do you also own shares of big oil companies like ExxonMobil that would be affected by a mandated reduction of fossil fuels?

Please get your head out of the sand! Or keep it there and don't bother the rest of us who care!

@ starnut: try this one: http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/CO2_Science_rel/

I'm sure however that we all would be better off with a more sober lifestyle.

I do not claim to know to what extent human activity contributes to global warming, but global warming and rising sea levels are well documented, along with melting of Greenland and Antartic ice (the only big sources of rising sea levels) and more extreme weather.

A nice general interest summary appeared in Time magazine recently:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/03/26/coverstory/index.html

The bottom line is, regardless of the cause, we need to both look for ways to slow the process (cutting man-made greenhouse emissions being the obvious one we can control -- and this includes not just combustion, but also domestic livestock emissions), and to adapt to changes in sea level and weather patterns. Severe typhoons threaten the life and livelihood of hundreds of millions in the coastal areas of South and Southeast Asia, and the Gulf of Mexico. Rising sea levels threaten entire countries such as the Maldives, Denmark and the Netherlands, as well as places like New Orleans. And long-term climate change will disrupt and alter agricultural production and food supply across the world.

Rising sea level is pretty hard to explain unless Antartic ice is in fact melting and falling into the ocean...

Hello all


I know man adds to his problems. But! how much is man compared to the earth cycles and sun cycles.


The earth through the past has done all this an much more without man's help and has gone through all these cycles,,,,,,,,, ice ages and global warming.

The earth will one day go through a nebulae as it has done in the past and most probably go through another ice age. So enjoy your global warming while it lasts.

Has anybody seen Ice Age 2,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,