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Massive Ice Shelf Breaks Free From Canada's Arctic
Thursday , December 28, 2006
TORONTO — A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada's Arctic, scientists said. The mass of ice broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 497 miles south of the North Pole, but no one was present to see it in Canada's remote north. Scientists using satellite images later noticed that it became a newly formed ice island in just an hour and left a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake.
Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, traveled to the newly formed ice island and could not believe what he saw.
"This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are loosing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead," Vincent said Thursday.
• Learn more about the science behind the world you live in FOXNews.com's Natural Science Center.
In 10 years of working in the region he has never seen such a dramatic loss of sea ice, he said.
The collapse was so powerful that earthquake monitors 155 miles away picked up tremors from it.
The Ayles Ice Shelf, roughly 41 square miles in area, was one of six major ice shelves remaining in Canada's Arctic.
Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in Canada in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor.
"It is consistent with climate change," Vincent said, adding that the remaining ice shelves are 90 percent smaller than when they were first discovered in 1906.
"We aren't able to connect all of the dots ... but unusually warm temperatures definitely played a major role."
Laurie Weir, who monitors ice conditions for the Canadian Ice Service, was poring over satellite images in 2005 when she noticed that the shelf had split and separated.
Weir notified Luke Copland, head of the new global ice lab at the University of Ottawa, who initiated an effort to find out what happened.
Using U.S. and Canadian satellite images, as well as data from seismic monitors, Copland discovered that the ice shelf collapsed in the early afternoon of Aug. 13, 2005.
"What surprised us was how quickly it happened," Copland said. "It's pretty alarming. Even 10 years ago scientists assumed that when global warming changes occur that it would happen gradually so that perhaps we expected these ice shelves just to melt away quite slowly, but the big surprise is that for one they are going, but secondly that when they do go, they just go suddenly, it's all at once, in a span of an hour."
Within days, the floating ice shelf had drifted a few miles offshore. It traveled west for 31 miles until it finally froze into the sea ice in the early winter.
The Canadian ice shelves are packed with ancient ice that dates back over 3000 years. They float on the sea but are connected to land.
Derek Mueller, a polar researcher with Vincent's team, said the ice shelves get weaker and weaker as the temperature rises. He visited Ellesmere's Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in 2002 and noticed it had cracked in half.
"We're losing our ice shelves and this a feature of the landscape that is in danger of disappearing altogether from Canada," Mueller said. "In the global perspective Antarctica has many ice shelves bigger than this one, but then there is the idea that these are indicators of climate change."
The spring thaw may bring another concern as the warming temperatures could release the ice shelf from its Arctic grip. Prevailing winds could then send the ice island southwards, deep into the Beaufort Sea.
"Over the next few years this ice island could drift into populated shipping routes," Weir said. "There's significant oil and gas development in this region as well, so we'll have to keep monitoring its location over the next few years."
Imagine a mass of ice that spanned an area a bit more than the area of Central Ave to 67th Ave and from Van Buren Rd to Bethany Home Rd....
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The earth is getting warmer, but it's not us causing it it's increased solar output et al.
Sure we add to CO2 and sure scientists worry that that's a contributer but silly scientists worry about silly things like the earth being round not flat and claiming the earth revolves around the sun, I say prove it!
How do I know you didn't fake those photos of the earth from space?
We never really went to the moon either, it's true I read that on the internets.
__________________
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
If I remember the debates correctly, there are few people disputing that the world climes are changing, but rather that mankind is the direct cause. The thrust of the opposing view is that earth has seen dramiatic changes before man was even around.
__________________ America cannot have an empire abroad and a Republic at home.
A very dear friend who really knows geology and geography and meteorology visited over Xmas, and he was saying this particular ice shelf event is incredibly disturbing, and is the signal that we are out of time -- no more cushion to work with. He thinks we'll look back in twenty or thirty years at this event as the watershed moment when our existing notions of climate, agriculture, and 'how the world is' became past history.
__________________
oderint dum metuant (Latin for 'let them hate, so long as they fear').
Well, in truth I'm actually not a total hawk, but I'm not a dove either -- I'm more like an angry pigeon flying over the political arena after a really big meal. -Abba Gav
A very dear friend who really knows geology and geography and meteorology visited over Xmas, and he was saying this particular ice shelf event is incredibly disturbing, and is the signal that we are out of time -- no more cushion to work with. He thinks we'll look back in twenty or thirty years at this event as the watershed moment when our existing notions of climate, agriculture, and 'how the world is' became past history.
Ironically, that is exactly the same moment--according to 82--history will remind us what a great President Bush was for invading Iraq! Thus making the world a safer place...well, except for that pesky "debateable"--according to Bush--global warming.
Ironically, that is exactly the same moment--according to 82--history will remind us what a great President Bush was for invading Iraq! Thus making the world a safer place...well, except for that pesky "debateable"--according to Bush--global warming.
To save mankind, W had a choice... do Iraq or save an ice-shelf. He chose Iraq... oooops!
To save mankind, W had a choice... do Iraq or save an ice-shelf. He chose Iraq... oooops!
There was nothing Bush could do. The genie is way out of the bottle, there's no putting it back. The best we could hope for is a slowing of the cascade of effects.
__________________
We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it.
The earth is getting warmer, but it's not us causing it it's increased solar output et al.
I know you are being sarcastic, but along with Global Warming is "Global Dimming". Less solar radiation is hitting the Earth due to the buildup of pollutants in the atmosphere. That means less energy to run photosynthesis, which absorbs CO2.
__________________
We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it.
I can almost assure everyone that somewhere some smart people with money are pooring over maps looking for more stable oceanview properties.
Even in disaster someone will make a buck.
I think that basically the whole thing is past stopping now and we never really had a chance at it in the first place without wrecking the economy.
I think some world leaders basically knew this all along that we had gone too far already and that it was not something we can reverse in time.
__________________
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
So the best response is: 'Why try?' Tune up the fiddle and play while Rome sinks below the ever-rising tides?
Guess what -- by not putting on the brakes, we let the corporate pirates guaranteed our kids will have the wrecked economy we don't have the discipline to face. How nice of us... Lazy morons.
Yeah, it's turning the Titanic, but if we were to make a serious -- and I mean Hostile aliens have landed / Manhattan Project type serious -- effort to stop the worsening situation, it may be possible to gradually get some of the damage to retreat.
If we could give incentives to conserve maximally, put all our science and R and D into finding truly viable alternative energy processes and hastening conversion, we would make enormous progress on the two most obvious dangers facing us -- Global Warming and Islamic Jihad. It blows my mind that not one politician is just flat-out saying this.
__________________
oderint dum metuant (Latin for 'let them hate, so long as they fear').
Well, in truth I'm actually not a total hawk, but I'm not a dove either -- I'm more like an angry pigeon flying over the political arena after a really big meal. -Abba Gav
So the best response is: 'Why try?' Tune up the fiddle and play while Rome sinks below the ever-rising tides?
Guess what -- by not putting on the brakes, we let the corporate pirates guaranteed our kids will have the wrecked economy we don't have the discipline to face. How nice of us... Lazy morons.
Yeah, it's turning the Titanic, but if we were to make a serious -- and I mean Hostile aliens have landed / Manhattan Project type serious -- effort to stop the worsening situation, it may be possible to gradually get some of the damage to retreat.
If we could give incentives to conserve maximally, put all our science and R and D into finding truly viable alternative energy processes and hastening conversion, we would make enormous progress on the two most obvious dangers facing us -- Global Warming and Islamic Jihad. It blows my mind that not one politician is just flat-out saying this.
Because it doesn't get votes. If it's going to take money out of our collective wallets, it's a tough sell. (Besides, we can see Polar Bears at Sea World!) Also, we have far more pressing issues to tackle -- like gay marriage.
__________________
We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it.
The problem is also because people don't care about tomorrow and they have been sold a myth that there is some sort of after-life that is so much better than real life.
"Who cares, we are all going to meet up again in Heaven and none of this will matter."
On the History channel's show "Last Days on Earth," global climate change was the number one threat to humanity. Various scientists talked about the causes and possible effects which will greatly harm earth and end us. However, we all know that the History Channel has a strong liberal bias and should not be trusted to present the actual facts.
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