Arctic Updates

[brainpanhandler]

BenD.....you are the man...

pshaw

[wintler2]

Arctic & temperate lakes changing

Unparalleled warming over the last few decades has triggered widespread ecosystem changes in many temperate North American and Western European lakes, say researchers at Queen’s University and the Ontario Ministry of the Environment. ..

Striking ecosystem changes were recorded from a large suite of lakes from Arctic, alpine and temperate ecozones in North America and western Europe. Aquatic ecosystem changes across the circumpolar Arctic were found to occur in the late-19th and early 20th centuries. These were similar to shifts in algal communities, indicating decreased ice cover and related changes, over the last few decades in the temperate lakes.

“As expected, these changes occurred earlier – by about 100 years – in highly sensitive Arctic lakes, compared with temperate regions,” says Dr. Smol, recipient of the 2004 Herzberg Gold Medal as Canada’s top scientist.
http://www.exduco.net/news.php?id=3270

[Cosmic Cowbell]

Great polar melt-off feared

Global warming, human activity speed Antarctic thaw, experts say

By William Mullen | Tribune reporter
March 19, 2009

For the last 5 million years, the frozen polar ends of the Earth have melted on a regular basis, raising sea levels dramatically to heights that, if achieved today, would inundate most of the world's major cities and coastal areas where billions of people live. Scientists studying those polar freeze/thaw cycles reported in two papers in Thursday's edition of the research journal Nature that it appears Earth is headed toward another thaw—and this time, it's being hurried along by carbon dioxide pollution in the atmosphere.

The research dealt specifically with the ice sheets that sit atop West Antarctica, which contain enough water that world sea levels would rise 16 feet if it all melted. Such a thaw would take a thousand years at least, a long time in human terms but a blink in geological time. The new papers both drew on core samples extracted from the Antarctic Ocean floor in 2006 as part of the ANDRILL project, one of the largest scientific undertakings ever for the continent. The project involved 53 scientists and was co-directed by Northern Illinois University geologist Ross Powell.

By examining millions of years' worth of sediments, researchers found that the ice in West Antarctica collapsed and melted about every 40,000 years during the Pliocene epoch 3 to 5 million years ago—a time when there were warm spells "similar to those projected to occur over the next century," Powell said. When the polar ice began melting on a massive scale, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were up to around 400 parts per million, Powell said. "We are now at 386 parts per million and rising," he said, and it grows by one part per million every year. The concern, he said, is that the current rise in carbon dioxide levels—driven by human activity over the last 200 years, mostly the burning of fossil fuels—is causing unprecedented global warming and putting West Antarctica on the fast track to melting.

The Earth's average annual temperature has risen 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 100 years, but over Antarctica, which holds 70 percent of the world's fresh water as ice, it has risen 4.5 degrees. "Even if it might take a thousand years or more for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to disappear, the melting before then could be significant enough that humans should really be taking note ... as we worry about our future generations," Powell said. Natural polar freeze/thaw cycles occur because of a periodic shift in the tilt of the Earth's axis, known as the Milankovitch Cycle.

"The tilting changes the amount of radiation absorbed into each hemisphere of the Earth, depending on which hemisphere is tilted closest to the sun," said Powell. With the change comes a gradual buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide that ANDRILL records show eventually caused drastic loss of ice in West Antarctica. But now, human activity appears to be having its own effect on the world's climate by driving temperatures higher than they otherwise would be, said Northern Illinois University geologist Reed Scherer, also on the ANDRILL research team. Some climatologists believe global temperatures should even be slightly cooling at this time.

"If something is an external cycle, it should be predictable," Scherer said. "But it is much more complicated than that, and we seem to be throwing the pattern off balance now."

Also in Nature was a report from David Pollard of Pennsylvania State University and Robert DeConto of the University of Massachusetts, who used ANDRILL data to simulate Antarctic ice sheet variations over the past 5 million years. The two climate modelers found that the ice sheet atop West Antarctica could move between full, intermediate and collapsed states over only a few thousand years. Today, even a partial melt-off raising sea levels by 4 feet would put at risk an estimated half a billion people who live along shorelines. DeConto said warming ocean temperatures play a key role in how fast polar ice melts, both the ice sheets and the floating ice shelves to which they are attached. The shelves extend for miles into the ocean around Antarctica.

"The next big step," said DeConto, "is to determine what is happening to the ocean temperatures under the ice shelves and around the ice sheet. We really need that information."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/loca ... 1508.story

[smiths]

Antarctic ice shelf near final collapse

A thin ice bridge between two islands that has held the giant Wilkins ice shelf in place on the Antarctic peninsula for centuries appears to be near final collapse.

In a development that has shocked climate scientists, the 40 kilometre-long bridge is showing new rifts along its length and its imminent break-up could release thousands of square kilometres of ice behind it.

This would mark a new milestone for one of the most rapidly warming regions on Earth.

European Space Agency scientists have been closely watching the ice shelf, named after Australian aviator Hubert Wilkins, since March last year when it suddenly lost 570 square kilometres of ice in what US glaciologists called a "runaway disintegration".

Ted Scambos, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, said the Southern Ocean was warming in the region and melting the floating ice sheet from below.

Until now the narrow ice bridge between Charcot and Latady islands has held in place. But ESA images, the latest from April 2, clearly show the rifts lengthening.

Behind the ice bridge, the Wilkins has already begun to break up into thousands of icebergs. Dr Scambos believes the collapse may not halt until the ice shelf, once 13,680 square kilometres in size, is at least halved.

The Wilkins is the latest of seven great ice shelves on the Antarctic peninsula to let go - and the furthest south towards the main polar ice sheets. Melting of floating ice does not raise sea level, but its loss releases land-bound ice behind it.

Scientists have been warning of danger to the peninsula ice shelves since March 2002 when the collapse of Larsen B took away 3250 square kilometres of 220-metre thick ice in just 35 days.

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/an ... -9tvx.html

[Ben D]

Antarctic ice is growing, not melting away

By Greg RobertsThe AustralianApril 18, 2009 11:52am

Cool down ... ice is expanding in much of the Antarctic, experts say / Reuters

Ice expanding in much of Antarctica

Eastern coast getting colder

Western section remains a concern

ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap.

The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent's western coast.

Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth's ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water, The Australian reports. Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially, and ice is melting in parts of west Antarctica. The destabilisation of the Wilkins ice shelf generated international headlines this month.

However, the picture is very different in east Antarctica, which includes the territory claimed by Australia.

East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week's meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington noted the South Pole had shown "significant cooling in recent decades".

Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison said sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica.

"Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally," Dr Allison said.

The melting of sea ice - fast ice and pack ice - does not cause sea levels to rise because the ice is in the water. Sea levels may rise with losses from freshwater ice sheets on the polar caps. In Antarctica, these losses are in the form of icebergs calved from ice shelves formed by glacial movements on the mainland.

Last week, federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett said experts predicted sea level rises of up to 6m from Antarctic melting by 2100, but the worst case scenario foreshadowed by the SCAR report was a 1.25m rise.

Mr Garrett insisted global warming was causing ice losses throughout Antarctica. "I don't think there's any doubt it is contributing to what we've seen both on the Wilkins shelf and more generally in Antarctica," he said.

Dr Allison said there was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting. "The only significant calvings in Antarctica have been in the west," he said. And he cautioned that calvings of the magnitude seen recently in west Antarctica might not be unusual.

"Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off - I'm talking 100km or 200km long - every 10 or 20 or 50 years."
Ice core drilling in the fast ice off Australia's Davis Station in East Antarctica by the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-Operative Research Centre shows that last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m, its densest in 10 years. The average thickness of the ice at Davis since the 1950s is 1.67m.

A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25 ... 01,00.html

[Lord Balto]

Great polar melt-off feared

Global warming, human activity speed Antarctic thaw, experts say

By William Mullen | Tribune reporter
March 19, 2009

{snip}

By examining millions of years' worth of sediments, researchers found that the ice in West Antarctica collapsed and melted about every 40,000 years during the Pliocene epoch 3 to 5 million years ago—a time when there were warm spells "similar to those projected to occur over the next century," Powell said. When the polar ice began melting on a massive scale, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were up to around 400 parts per million, Powell said. "We are now at 386 parts per million and rising," he said, and it grows by one part per million every year. The concern, he said, is that the current rise in carbon dioxide levels—driven by human activity over the last 200 years, mostly the burning of fossil fuels—is causing unprecedented global warming and putting West Antarctica on the fast track to melting.

{snip}

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/loca ... 1508.story

As Charles Hapgood pointed out in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, there are surviving maps, redrawn at Alexandria and recentered on the longitude of the city and the latitude of the Tropic of Cancer, that show Antarctica as two islands, which they are, under the ice, implying that this has all happened before. The date of the final glaciation? About 4000 BC, well into the current Holocene Epoch.

This was a good 1000 years before the climate change in the Sahara that ended that region's last wet and fertile period. So we have to wonder if there is a silver lining to this cloud. It would be interesting to see how these scientific lemmings reacted if it started raining at Mt. Tahat in southern Algeria. Even now, when it rains a lot on the coast, every 50 years or so, Lake Triton reappears and flamingos begin breeding there. All it would take would be a little precipation in the right place.

[Cosmic Cowbell]

New York City-sized ice collapses off Antarctica



A handout satellite image taken April 27, 2009 of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica
shows icebergs covering an area of 700 sq kms that have broken o Reuters
– A handout satellite image taken April 27, 2009 of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica shows icebergs …

By Environment Correspondent Alister Doyle, – Tue Apr 28, 7:00 pm ET

TROMSOE, Norway (Reuters) – An area of an Antarctic ice shelf almost the size of New York City has broken into icebergs this month after the collapse of an ice bridge widely blamed on global warming, a scientist said Tuesday. "The northern ice front of the Wilkins Ice Shelf has become unstable and the first icebergs have been released," Angelika Humbert, glaciologist at the University of Muenster in Germany, said of European Space Agency satellite images of the shelf.

Humbert told Reuters about 700 sq km (270.3 sq mile) of ice -- bigger than Singapore or Bahrain and almost the size of New York City -- has broken off the Wilkins this month and shattered into a mass of icebergs. She said 370 sq kms of ice had cracked up in recent days from the Shelf, the latest of about 10 shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula to retreat in a trend linked by the U.N. Climate Panel to global warming.

The new icebergs added to 330 sq kms of ice that broke up earlier this month with the shattering of an ice bridge apparently pinning the Wilkins in place between Charcot island and the Antarctic Peninsula. Nine other shelves -- ice floating on the sea and linked to the coast -- 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, according to David Vaughan, a British Antarctic Survey scientist who landed by plane on the Wilkins ice bridge with two Reuters reporters in January. Humbert said by telephone her estimates were that the Wilkins could lose a total of 800 to 3,000 sq kms of area after the ice bridge shattered.

The Wilkins shelf has already shrunk by about a third from its original 16,000 sq kms when first spotted decades ago, its ice so thick would take at least hundreds of years to form. Temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula have warmed by up to 3 Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) this century, Vaughan said, a trend climate scientists blame on global warming from burning fossil fuels in cars, factories and power plants. The 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.

The Arctic Council, grouping nations with territory in the Arctic, is due to meet in Tromsoe, north Norway, Wednesday to debate the impact of melting ice in the north.

Link

[wintler2]

The incredible shrinking polar bear

Animals lose weight and size as melting ice limits hunting

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor

Sunday, 22 March 2009

Polar bears are shrinking, along with the ice on which they live – and are turning to cannibalism – as global warming increasingly stops them getting enough to eat.

Scientists say the animals are now only two-thirds as big as they were 30 years ago as melting ice makes it harder for them to catch seals, and that they have begun to hunt each other instead.

The news comes as Arctic nations agreed at a special summit in Norway last week to draw up an action plan to try to save the highly endangered species.

The bears subsist almost entirely on seals, and depend on the polar ice to hunt them. As the seals swim too fast in open water, the bears have to lie in wait for them to surface for air through holes and cracks in the ice. But the best place to do this is near land, as the seals congregate in shallow waters, and every year the ice is receding further out to sea as global warming takes hold.

Even worse, the ice is melting earlier each year – cutting down the amount of seals the bears can catch in the spring, which the bears use as a vital fattening-up time to see them through a long summer fast.

New research presented at last week's summit – the most important meeting on the fate of the polar bear for more than three decades – shows that female bears now weigh an average of 230kg, a full 65kg less than in 1980, and are 220cm long, 35cm less than before.

Their health has suffered as their weight has fallen, impairing their ability to reproduce and have cubs that survive. "The chain of events starts with a drop in body condition that subsequently leads to a drop in reproduction, which leads to a drop in survival," Dr Andrew Derocher, chair of the international Polar Bear Specialist Group, told delegates.

Other scientists report that, in their desperation, the bears are turning on each other. Dr Steven Amstrup, a specialist on the animals at the US Geological Survey, says they are "clearly deliberately hunting other bears, for example by attacking females in their denning areas".

Two years ago a giant US government study predicted that global warming would kill off two-thirds of the world's polar bears by 2050. But this is now thought to be over-optimistic: the melting is accelerating so fast that many scientists believe the Arctic Ocean will be completely ice-free in summer by 2030.
The Independant

[Cosmic Cowbell]

Another record in the making?

[Cosmic Cowbell]

While not neccesarily an "Artic Update", the following bears upon comments and evidence submitted by the more skeptical amongst us.


Center for Inquiry Reveals that 80 Percent of ‘dissenting scientists’ in report haven’t published peer-reviewed climate research

Washington, D.C. (July 17, 2009) – The Office of Public Policy, the Washington, D.C. lobbying arm of the Center for Inquiry (CFI), an organization committed to defending scientific integrity, has today dealt a body blow to global warming skeptics by releasing findings exposing the lack of credibility of dissenting scientists challenging man-made global warming. The dissenting scientists are cited in the U.S. Senate Minority Report, a document being hailed by lawmakers opposed to legislation needed to slow global climate change. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla initially released the report through the office of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, where he is the ranking minority member.

In this Senate Minority Report, almost 700 individuals with implied scientific credentials are offered as evidence that measures to address climate change are premature, and that further research is needed. Sen. Inhofe has used this report to support the claim that there is an ever-increasing international groundswell of scientific opposition to the position of approximately 2,000 scientists whose work is the basis of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Science Report (IPCC) released in 2007. The Center for Inquiry maintains that the Senate Minority report fails to make a credible case that a large number of actual climate scientists take exception to the near-universal consensus of the research community.

“It is beyond question that the work of the U.N. scientists has survived the scrutiny of their colleagues, and that they constitute a significant majority of active researches addressing this problem today. This led us to take a careful look at the broad conclusions of the Senate Minority Report,” said Dr. Stuart Jordan, science policy advisor to the CFI Office of Public Policy and retired emeritus senior staff scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

“As a result of our assessment, Inhofe and other lawmakers using this report to block proposed legislation to address the harmful effects of climate change must face an inconvenient truth: while there are indeed some well respected scientists on the list, the vast majority are neither climate scientists, nor have they published in fields that bear directly on climate science.”

After assessing 687 individuals named as “dissenting scientists” in the January 2009 version of the United States Senate Minority Report, the Center for Inquiry’s Credibility Project found that:

• Slightly fewer than 10 percent could be identified as climate scientists.
• Approximately 15 percent published in the recognizable refereed literature on subjects related to climate science.
• Approximately 80 percent clearly had no refereed publication record on climate science at all.
• Approximately 4 percent appeared to favor the current IPCC-2007 consensus and should not have been on the list.

Further examination of the backgrounds of these individuals revealed that a significant number were identified as meteorologists, and some of these people were employed to report the weather.

Dr. Ronald A. Lindsay, the Center for Inquiry’s chief executive officer, is concerned about the falsehoods and half-truths being uttered by lawmakers now arming themselves for a major fight over legislation addressing climate change. Said Lindsay, “Sen. Inhofe and others have had some success in conveying to the media the impression that the number of scientists skeptical about man-made global warming is swelling, yet this is demonstrably not true.” Lindsay points out that Inhofe’s office had misleadingly claimed in a press release that the number of dissenting scientists outnumbered by more than 13 times the number of U.N. scientists (52) who authored the 2007 IPCC. “But those 52 U.N. scientists were in fact summarizing for policymakers the work of over 2,000 active research scientists, all with substantially similar views on global warming and its causes. This is the kind of broadside against sound science and scientific integrity that we at CFI deplore,” asserted Lindsay.

Dr. Paul Kurtz, the founder of the Center for Inquiry, stressed that “It is essential that the government base its policies on the best scientific information we have and it is a preponderance of scientific judgment that global warming poses a dire threat to the future of humanity on the planet.”

After painstakingly taking the time to vet many of the scientists now serving as “consensus busters” Jordan says that it is difficult for him and his colleagues not to conclude that “this is one more effort of a contrarian community to block corrective action to address a major—in this case global—problem fraught with harmful consequences for human welfare and the environment.”

The complete Center for Inquiry Credibility Project was released to the public at a press conference held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on July 17, 2009.

The Center for Inquiry (CFI) is a nonprofit, educational, advocacy, and scientific-research think tank based in Amherst, New York. The Center for Inquiry’s research and educational projects focus on three broad areas: religion, ethics, and society; paranormal and fringe-science claims; and sound public policy. The Center’s Web site is www.centerforinquiry.net . CFI’s Office of Public Policy (OPP) is the Washington D.C. political arm of the Center for Inquiry. The OPP’s mandate is to lobby Congress and the Administration on issues related to science and secularism. Their Web site can be found at www.centerforinquiry.net/opp

Link

[Cosmic Cowbell]

Drowned Tundra Emits More Carbon

Work in Alaska looks at life in a warmer, wetter world.
Alexandra Witze


Lakes seep over the Arctic tundra

In the largest experiment of its kind to date, ecologists have found that the wetter the Arctic tundra becomes, the more carbon dioxide it gives off. If the tundra becomes increasingly warm and wet — which is anticipated as global temperatures rise — it might emit more carbon than expected, the work suggests. "It's a big deal," says Walter Oechel, an ecologist at San Diego State University in California and principal investigator on the study. "These are aspects that haven't been recognized before." His colleague Donatella Zona reported the findings in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on 3 August at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America.

The Arctic region locks up large amounts of carbon in its soil and permafrost, and researchers are working to tease out the complex relationships that might govern what happens to that carbon in a globally warmed world. So Oechel's team set out to deliberately manipulate the water table of a portion of the tundra.

The wetter it gets

Previous experiments to test the relationship between increasing water depth and carbon flux have all been on a much smaller scale, such as testing core soil samples in the laboratory or small field studies, says Zona. For the latest work, the team chose as their test site a 1.2-kilometre-long lake in the North Slope region of Alaska. It lies about 10 kilometres away from the coastal town of Barrow and is part of a long-term ecological study region called the Barrow Environmental Observatory. Using plastic dikes, the researchers divided the lake into three parts. From the centre third they pumped water into the northern third, leaving the northern part extra soggy and the centre portion dry. They left the southern part untouched, as a control. Instrument towers, one above each portion, gathered data on the emission of trace gases such as methane and CO2. The team thought that the higher water table would probably mean less CO2 entering the air. Rising water drowns both the vegetation and the 'aerobic' microbes that rely on oxygen to decompose the plant matter, giving off CO2 in the process. So the greater the depth of water above the surface, the less oxygen and light penetrates to stimulate microbes in the soil beneath, hence presumably resulting in the release of less CO2. But measurements from the partitioned lake showed the opposite: the northern, flooded portion of the lake gave off more CO2, becoming a carbon source, whereas the drained portion and the control portion remained as carbon sinks.

Apparently, Zona says, anaerobic microbes in the soil — those that don't require oxygen but can still produce CO2 — thrived under the drowned land. This, she says, suggests that hydrological changes in the Arctic could have "unexpected results — huge amounts of carbon in the soil could be released to the atmosphere even under completely anaerobic conditions". Permafrost under the flooded lake also thawed to greater depths than that under the drained lake, Zona says.

Jeffrey Welker, an ecologist at the University of Alaska in Anchorage, says that a deeper thaw means that older carbon — perhaps 1,000 years old rather than 100 years old — gets released from the soil. "We're beginning to see evidence that deeper, older carbon will be entering the atmosphere in the future," he says. The implications of that are still unclear. At the moment, ecologists are monitoring changes in the Arctic as best as they can, trying to quantify differences from year to year. Early data from the lake manipulation have also revealed trends in methane emissions — as they reported earlier this year in Global Biogeochemical Cycles1. In that paper, Zona and colleagues show that methane emissions at the lake were at a maximum when the water level was just covering the ground surface.

Together, such work underscores the complexity of interactions in the Arctic system and shows just how much researchers have left to understand. For now, Zona and her colleagues are gathering another summer's worth of data to see what they reveal about both CO2 and methane fluxes. "We think it's interesting even if it's a short-term trend," she says.

Link

[Cosmic Cowbell]

Antarctic Glacier 'thinning fast'
By David Shukman - Science and environment correspondent, BBC News


The changes to the glacier are described as "unprecedented" in this part of Antarctica

One of the largest glaciers in Antarctica is thinning four times faster than it was 10 years ago, according to research seen by the BBC. A study of satellite measurements of Pine Island glacier in west Antarctica reveals the surface of the ice is now dropping at a rate of up to 16m a year. Since 1994, the glacier has lowered by as much as 90m, which has serious implications for sea-level rise. The work by British scientists appears in Geophysical Research Letters.The team was led by Professor Duncan Wingham of University College London (UCL).

"We've known that it's been out of balance for some time, but nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier" ~ Andrew Shepherd, Leeds University

Calculations based on the rate of melting 15 years ago had suggested the glacier would last for 600 years. But the new data points to a lifespan for the vast ice stream of only another 100 years. The rate of loss is fastest in the centre of the glacier and the concern is that if the process continues, the glacier may break up and start to affect the ice sheet further inland. One of the authors, Professor Andrew Shepherd of Leeds University, said that the melting from the centre of the glacier would add about 3cm to global sea level. "But the ice trapped behind it is about 20-30cm of sea level rise and as soon as we destabilise or remove the middle of the glacier we don't know really know what's going to happen to the ice behind it," he told BBC News.

"This is unprecedented in this area of Antarctica. We've known that it's been out of balance for some time, but nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier."

Pine Island glacier has been the subject of an intense research effort in recent years amid fears that its collapse could lead to a rapid disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Five years ago, I joined a flight by the Chilean Navy and Nasa to survey Pine Island glacier with radar and laser equipment. The 11-hour round-trip from Punta Arenas included a series of low-level passes over the massive ice stream which is 20 miles wide and in places more than one mile thick. Back then, the researchers on board were concerned at the speed of change they were detecting. This latest study of the satellite data will add to the alarm among polar specialists. This comes as scientists in the Arctic are finding evidence of dramatic change. Researchers on board a Greenpeace vessel have been studying the northwestern part of Greenland.

One of those taking part, Professor Jason Box of Ohio State University, has been surprised by how little sea ice they encountered in the Nares Strait between Greenland and Canada. He has also set up time lapse cameras to monitor the massive Petermann glacier. Huge new cracks have been observed and it's expected that a major part of it could break off imminently.

Professor Box told BBC News: "The science community has been surprised by how sensitive these large glaciers are to climate warming. First it was the glaciers in south Greenland and now as we move further north in Greenland we find retreat at major glaciers. It's like removing a cork from a bottle."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8200680.stm

[Sounder]

This is how ‘new science’ is done.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/13/cru_missing/

Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.

[Penguin]

This is how ‘new science’ is done.

Hey, don't confuse the terms!
New science - http://www.alternet.org/story/31009/

Through the years Sheldrake has supported his family largely through lecture tours, which draw curious crowds around the world, and a series of books exploring various aspects of what is often called "New Science." He's written on ecological, spiritual, and philosophical themes, as well as a manifesto on how science could be democratized (Seven Experiments that Could Change the World) and a bestseller on animal behavior (Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home). His current research involves thousands of rigorously empirical tests probing the existence of telepathy. John Maddox nonetheless has continued to accuse him of "heresy," saying he should be "condemned in exactly the same language that the Pope used to condemn Galileo."

I wonder if he realized the irony in that ...
Sheldrake, I think, wrote somewhere about how reluctant scientists usually are to show their data or research notes to anyone.

[MinM]

Massive icebergs floating towards coast of New Zealand
By Dean Irvine, CNN
November 25, 2009 5:16 a.m. EST

The icebergs off the New Zealand coast in 2006 (pictured) provided a mini-boom for tourism and helicopter companies.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

* More than 100 icebergs from Antarctica heading towards New Zealand waters
* Biggest iceberg estimated to be 500 meters wide, 350 meters thick
* Current reports put icebergs around 200 miles from New Zealand's southern coast
* Last sighting of icebergs from New Zealand was 2006; only second time in 78 years
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/11 ... index.html